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Snap! How can the Venus flytrap indulge its taste for insect flesh? The secret is the cunning construction of its leaves
Natural History, June, 2005 by Adam Summers
Earlier botanists had proposed that the flytrap, lacking muscles, relied on cellular water pumps called vacuoles to drive the leaf closure. That hypothesis had been met with some skepticism, because the change in leaf shape seemed to require that a large volume of fluid move rapidly from one place to another. Water-powered movement can drive slow motions, such as that of a sunflower tracking the Sun. But no one could see how cells could gain volume fast enough to close the flytrap.
Forterre and his colleagues however, have demonstrated that Fast pumping isn't needed. Just a small change in the shape of the leaf cells--which needn't be powered by a flow rate any higher than that of the water in and out of sunflower cells--can cause the trap to snap quickly. Pushed to the point of instability, the leaf halves are forced to buckle into a new shape. The continuing slow rotation of the leaf halves in the third phase is also consistent with a slow flow rate of water into the leaf cells.
The pretty yet creepy Venus flytrap illustrates a principle applicable to a variety of self-assembling structures. Take my self-erecting shelter for the beach. In its storage configuration it looks like several flat discs of nylon Fabric. But when I grab one layer and shake it, the fiberglass supports suddenly reconfigure, and a two-person but stands ready for use. The Venus flytrap makes me wonder how hard it would be to add low-force actuators to my sunshade--for rapid repacking or, with all unsuspecting person sitting inside, simply for entertainment.
ADAM SUMMERS (asummers@uci.edu) is an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and bioengineering at the University of California, Irvine.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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