Trap Mechanisms in Carnivorous Plants

Abstract

Plants, like all organisms, need food to live. All plants make their food from sunlight, carbon dioxide, air, water and soil minerals in a process called photosynthesis. However, carnivorous plants get their food through photosynthesis like all others, have tastes, but are something different as specie. These plants acquire nutrients by "eating" animals. So to supplement their diet, which generally has few minerals such as nitrogen, phosphorus and calcium, these minerals are removed from their victims' flesh. To be considered carnivorous plant must meet three requirements: to attract, trap and digest prey. There are some plants that make some of these things, but not all three, and therefore are not carnivorous, such as plants that have showy flowers or pleasant scents to attract insects or birds, or others that capture their prey but can not digest. Trapping Carnivorous plants have traps, which are modifications of leaves, specialized as appropriate tools for hunting. Some can be closed like a trap, others are pitcher-shaped, and the prey falls into them. Some have special hairs or sticky substances on which the dams are trapped.

Trap Mechanisms in Carnivorous Plants

Carnivorous plants are special plants that derive their energy from insects and arthropods, unlike regular plants that do not consume nutrients from insects or other living things. Carnivorous plants are present on all continents. There are about 500 species (Volkov et.al, 2008). This adaptation is very old, since we have found fossils dating from about 85 million years. There are hundreds of carnivorous plants species with fierce aggressive practices, there are fighting with chemical weapons plants, as attacking other plant species compete by airing their toxins in the soil solution leading to plant poisoning the opponent (Smith, 2011). Trap Mechanism is highly integrated interaction of function and form, involving morphological features associated with the attracting, retaining, trapping, killing, digesting animals and absorbing their nutrients. There are several classifications of carnivorous plants, according to their mechanism of trapping and the way they use to attract insects to them (Smith, 2011). Various trapping mechanisms will be discussed in this paper, including pitfalls, flypaper, and snap, bladder, and lobster-pot types. Carnivorous plants grow in the soil that is typically thin and poor in nutritional value; such as swamps and acidic rocks. These areas are also low in nitrogen, which serves as their “breeding ground”.

Charles Darwin wrote on carnivorous plants in 1875that although the evolution or acquisition of the form of carnivorous plants are not actually known to scholars, it is believed that their carnivorous habits have evolved principally from the characteristics that had no function, so that this feature is actually considered as an exaltation, or a body performing a function can carry out a new role in an immediate instinct. Carnivorous plants digest smaller insects immediately while it takes three days to eat up larger pants, along with having a smell that attracts insects to come near these plants (Slack, 1986). Carnivorous plants possess a flowery smell that helps them to emit vibes that ...