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Man-eating Plants; an evolutionary possibility?
Topic Started: Aug 10 2010, 08:06 PM (2,175 Views)
MitchBeard
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proud gondwanan
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No there is actually stuff like this. One of the honours projects being done at the moment at my uni that I heard about was looking at how much this plant benefits from the nutrients it gains from the insect herbivores it kills by producing a mild toxin in its leaves.
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Scrublord
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Father Pellegrini
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What plant?
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MitchBeard
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proud gondwanan
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I can't remember. I was only ever told about it in passing.
Must have been a little herbaceous thing though, cos they had about 300 in half a greenhouse.
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Holben
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How about a cage-like plant which has lots of sap and tasty-looking fruits inside? As soon as the creature walks in, tendrils grab it or something (it happens to nematodes, thanks to fungi. Also, if you jab some plants with pencils, tendrils come out.) and then the acid needles on the tendrils inject into the struggling prey. It dies standing up, and rots inside the plant.

This is a work in progress.
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colddigger
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I know that there is a plant that is similar to the sundew, insects stick to it, die and fall off to fertilize the ground.
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Scrublord
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I've heard of that. It's called the Roridula. But I'm not sure that it could be scaled up to kill vertebrates.
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Pando
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Obey or I'll send you to the moon
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Wikipedia says that a bug eats the dead-insects and the plant feeds on the bugs droppings.

I too doubt it can kill vertebrates.
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colddigger
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Well I suppose another bug eating it and leaving its droppings is a form of fertilizing the ground by killing bugs.
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Dory
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colddigger
Aug 11 2010, 11:08 PM
To be honest I don't see why a carnivorous plant would bother with large prey when it's probably easier to just take in hundreds of small prey.
Yea, but with lots of plants like these around insects could easily become scarce, and then new plants would emerge that would evolve to consume larger and larger prey, and they will slowly become larger and larger and be more specialized.
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sam999
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How about something with trip-wire like snares, that cause it to simply drop a huge branch on the animal's head?
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Iowanic
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It's been mentioned that big critters would simply avoid such plants, but what if it grew along migration 'choke-points'; where animals simply couldn't avoid running some gauntlet of hungry trees and hedges.

Also; the chowing down may only be part of a plant's life-cycle: It fattens up on critters, right before winter sets in. Come spring, it 'recharges' by the returning prey-critters...inbetween it may simply behave as a typical plant.

To further expound:
A) come fall/early winter, it picks off north-heading critters, mostly fattening up for the coming winter.
Come spring, it may be less of a case of fattening up but using the returning critters to somehow 'jump-start' it's reproduction-cycle, just as the weather starts to get warmer.

Thus; it may prey only on certain creatures each time of year.



Edited by Iowanic, Dec 19 2010, 11:09 AM.
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Iowanic
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Follow up thoughts:

Due to it depending on certain creatures, these plants will have to be part of a eco-system in which the prey-critters are numerous and to evolve such a realationship between predator/prey, such eco-systems will have to be long-term and dependable: one disrupted migration and the plants could be in trouble..
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Nimor
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Strange consensus, but it's possible of course. Man-eating plants - I wonder why they're called so?
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Iowanic
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Because they might eat people?
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Nimor
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Pteranodon
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Well that's logic, isn't it? I need to check this up...
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