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Biting back

Vegetarian Times, May, 2005

Here's one plant that's fighting back. The mysterious Venus flytrap is a killing machine, able to close its leaves around its insect prey in less than one-tenth of a second. Now a Harvard scientist has figured out how the plant manages to achieve such deadly efficiency. The flytrap's water-filled leaves have a complex curvature that creates powerful tension, says Harvard's Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, PhD, whose research appears in the January 27, 2005 issue of the journal Nature.

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When the plant is hungry, its leaves bow outward, opening the trap. When an insect touches the hair-like triggers inside the trap, the plant moves the water within its leaves. The sudden change in curvature enables it to snap shut. "It's a relatively simple mechanism, but the plant is actively controlling it," explains Mahadevan, who foresees no practical application of his discovery. "I just thought it would be fun to know," he says. "Besides, as a vegetarian, it's nice to think about plants that eat animals rather than the other way around."

Biting back

Vegetarian Times, May, 2005

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