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Fortean Plants (Carnivorous; Including Man-Eating Plants)

The long reach of the monster plant
Carnivorous plants have fascinated writers and botanists alike. 07 February 2017

A lesser-known mystery by the creator of Sherlock Holmes concerns the fate of a man called Joe ‘Alabama’ Hawkins. Hawkins has vanished and is presumed murdered; a man is set to hang for his murder before Hawkins rolls, half-digested, from the leaf of a giant Venus flytrap.

Related stories
‘The American’s Tale’ by Arthur Conan Doyle was one of a crop of monster-plant stories that started to appear towards the end of the nineteenth century — a literary genre that climaxed decades later with The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. Arguably, it started with an 1875 work of non-fiction: Insectivorous Plants by a certain Charles Darwin. Scholars of monsters in fables and literature, and there are more than you might think, point out that man-eating plants (unlike, say, vampires, werewolves, zombies and dragons) were unheard of until Darwin’s book seeded the idea in the imagination.

The flytraps of Doyle’s story were unfeasibly big, but they were also in the wrong place. Despite the name, ‘Alabama’ Hawkins met his end as flytrap mulch in the Flytrap Gulch in Montana. And, in the real world, Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) don’t grow in Montana. Native Venus flytraps, in fact, don’t grow anywhere in the wild except in boggy soil within 100 kilometres or so of Wilmington, North Carolina, on the eastern coast of the United States. That rare population is under such threat from poachers that it is now a felony to remove one of the plants: the first person to be imprisoned under the new law began his sentence last year. (The penalty used to be a US$50 fine and a slap on the wrist.)

There are many other species of carnivorous plant worldwide. And in a study released this week (K. Fukushima et al. Nature Ecol. Evol. 1, 0059; 2017), researchers describe how these meat-eating plants rely on much the same genetic recipe, even though the different groups evolved the habit of carnivory quite independently. All were after the same thing: nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that they couldn’t extract from the meagre soil. ...

http://www.nature.com/news/the-long-reach-of-the-monster-plant-1.21435
 
Shocking news.

Venus flytraps kill with chemicals like those from lightning bolts
By Richard A. Lovett Nov. 12, 2018 , 10:45 AM

PORTLAND, OREGON—Venus flytraps have a well-known way of dispatching their victims: They snare inquisitive insects that brush up against trigger hairs in their fly-trapping pods (above). But now, physicists have discovered that the triggering process may involve the release of a cascade of exotic chemicals similar to the whiff of ozone that tingles your nose after a lightning bolt.

To study this process, scientists used an electrical generator to ionize air into a “cold plasma,” which they then gently blew toward a flytrap in their lab.

Normally, the flytrap’s closure is caused by an electrical signal created when two or more trigger hairs are brushed. But highly reactive chemicals in the plasma stream such as hydrogen peroxide, nitric oxide, and ozone had the same effect, even when they were blown at the pods too gently to trigger them by motion, they reported here last week at the annual Gaseous Electronics Conference. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...ly_2018-11-12&et_rid=394299689&et_cid=2484003
 

For archival purposes ... Here's the relevant text from that webpage.

For the most part the aforementioned are mere annoyances, but there are other things in Madagascar that can make you twitch your last.

The most notorious is the so-called man-eating tree of Madagascar. The first European description of this bulbous tree, a kind of elephantine Venus flytrap, appeared in the South Australian Register of 1881. In horrifying detail, the author tells how he watched aghast as members of the Mkodo tribe offered a woman in sacrifice to the dreaded tree, whose white, transparent leaves reminded him of the quivering mouthparts of an insect:
The slender delicate palpi, with the fury of starved serpents, quivered a moment over her head, then as if instinct with demoniac intelligence fastened upon her in sudden coils round and round her neck and arms; then while her awful screams and yet more awful laughter rose wildly to be instantly strangled down again into a gurgling moan, the tendrils one after another, like great green serpents, with brutal energy and infernal rapidity, rose, retracted themselves, and wrapped her about in fold after fold, ever tightening with cruel swiftness and savage tenacity of anacondas fastening upon their prey.​
Never fear. Despite decades of speculation, which included the 1924 book Madagascar, Land of the Man-Eating Tree, no one has ever again laid eyes on this carnivorous horror, nor on the Mkodo tribe for that matter, and today most consider the story a fabrication, if a gruesomely good one.
 
The earliest description of the ya-te-veo I can find is an 1887 compendium of natural wonders by a J. W. Buel. Here's the text of the relevant section, along with an illustration of the accompanying graphic plate and a link to the entire book (online; PDF).

A MAN-EATING PLANT

Travelers have told us of a plant, which they assert grows in Central Africa and also in South America, that is not contented with the myriad of large insects which it catches and consumes, but its voracity extends to making even humans its prey. This marvelous vegetable Minotaur is represented as having a short, thick trunk, from the top of which radiate giant spines, narrow and flexible, but of extraordinary tenaciousness, the edges of which are armed with barbs, or dagger-like teeth. Instead of growing upright, or at an inclined angle from the trunk, these spines lay their outer ends upon the ground, and so gracefully are they distributed that the trunk resembles an easy couch with green drapery around it. The unfortunate traveler, ignorant of the monstrous creation which lies in his way, and curious to examine the strange plant, or to rest himself upon its inviting stalk approaches without a suspicion of his certain doom. The moment his feet are set within the circle of the horrid spines, they rise up, like gigantic serpents, and entwine themselves about him until he is drawn upon the stump, when they speedily drive their daggers into his body and thus complete the massacre. The body is crushed until every drop of blood is squeezed out of it and becomes absorbed by the gore-loving plant, when the dry carcass is thrown out and the horrid trap set again.

A gentleman of my acquaintance, who, for a long time, resided in Central America, affirms the existence of such a plant as I have here briefly described, except that instead of the filaments, or spines, resting on the ground he says they move themselves constantly in the air, like so many huge serpents in an angry discussion, occasionally darting from side to side as if striking at an imaginary foe. When their prey comes within reach the spines reach out with wonderful sagacity (if I may be allowed to apply the expression to a vegetable creature), and grasp it in an unyielding embrace, from whence it issues only when all the substance of its body is yielded up. In its action of ex- erting pressure upon its prey, this dreadful plant resembles the instrument used in the dark ages for inflicting a torturous death. It was made of two long iron cylinders, on the inside of which were sharp, projecting pikes. The victim was placed inside, and the two cylinders then brought forcibly together, thus driving a hundred or more of the pointed pikes into all parts of his body and producing a frightful death. Generally this inquisitorial instrument was made, somewhat crudely, to represent a woman, hence the name applied to it was " The Maiden," by which it is still known.

Dr. Antonio Jose Marquez, a distinguished gentleman of the city of Barranguilla, in the United States of Colombia, in describing this wonderful plant to the author, affirms that when excited it violently agitates its long, tentacle-like stems, the edges of which., rasping upon each other, produce a hissing noise which resembles the Spanish expression, ya-te-veo, the literal translation of which is " I see you." The plant is therefore known, in South America, by the name Yateveo. He further asserts that so poisonous are the stems that if the flesh of any animal be punctured by the sharp barbs, a rapidly-eating ulcer immediately forms, for which there is no known antidote, and death speedily ensues.

It is a singular thing, and much to be deplored, if such a voracious plant exists, that we can find no description of it in the most elaborate works on botany ; and yet hundreds of responsible travelers declare they have frequently seen it, and not only watched it when in a nor- mal condition, but one African explorer declares he once witnessed the destruction of a native who was accidentally caught by one. It has also been asserted that in the Fan country of Africa, criminals and those convicted of practicing witchcraft, are sometimes fed alive to this man-eating plant. All of which, however, I am inclined to doubt ; not that there is no foundation for such statements as travelers sometimes make about this astonishing growth, but that the facts are greatly exaggerated.

661px-The_ya-te-veo.jpg

SOURCE: Buel, James William (1887). Sea and Land: An Illustrated History of the Wonderful and Curious Things of Nature existing before and since the Deluge. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Historical Publishing Company. pp. 475–477.

BOOK AVAILABLE ONLINE AT:
https://ia801409.us.archive.org/14/items/sealandillustrat00buel/sealandillustrat00buel.pdf
 
I found this further description by Carle Liche on a similar thread to this on another website. ...

The description by a Karl Leche (spelled various ways) appeared in the newspaper New York World in 1874. This account has been republished time and again, even though no trace of Leche (under any spelling) has ever been found.

The article was reprinted around the world. Some publications cited The World; others did not. Some of them called the story a fabrication; many did not.

In August 1888, a new periodical in New York, Current Literature, blew the whistle on the man-eating-tree story. “It was written years ago by Mr. Edmund Spencer for the N.Y. World,” the magazine said, adding that he had died about 1886. “Mr. Spencer was a master of the horrible, some of his stories approaching closely to those of Poe in this regard,” it said.
That should have been that. But a curious thing happened. Nobody cared about Current Literature’s exposé, which was soon forgotten. The World’s article continued to be reprinted. Soon, even its origin in The World was forgotten; Crinoida dajeeana had taken on a life of its own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/...bout-a-tale-of-human-sacrifice-to-a-tree.html
 
There exist some pitcher plants which rarely eat small vertebrates (mice, frogs, etc.), although they take in primarily insects. This is the largest known carnivorous plant. Some are quite sizable growing to 6 meters in height and holding up to 2 liters of digestive fluids. I've read a bit on cyrtid maneating plants and unfortunately (or fortunately the evidence seems lacking.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150420-the-giant-plants-that-eat-meat
 
At the weekend I bought some old books, including a couple of lovely bound editions of magazines. One has an account of a ceremonial sacrifice of a woman to a carnivorous tree in Madagascar. If anyone's interested I'll scan and post it. Sadly there's no illustration.

Ahem! *looks hopeful*
 
"Science Jottings," from the Illustrated London News, August 27, 1892:

SCIENCE JOTTINGS​

BY DR. ANDREW WILSON​

I have lately met with the description of a very singular plant, given originally, I believe, in a provincial newspaper. As one is always interested in the strange and weird as represented in nature, I give the account for what it is worth. It may be nothing more than a piece of fiction, of course (I have learned caution from more than one instance of a joke being stated in the gravest of terms); but if, on the contrary, the incident described was a real one, I shall expect to hear something more about this wonderful plant. Perhaps some of my readers may be able to inform me whether or not the matter is a "plant," vulgarly speaking, in another sense.

It appears that a naturalist, a Mr. Dunstan by name, was botanising in one of the swamps surrounding the Nicaragua Lake. The account goes on to relate that "while hunting for specimens he heard his dog cry out, as if in agony, from a distance. Running to the spot whence the animal's cries came, Mr. Dunstan found him enveloped in a perfect network of what seemed to be a fine, rope-like tissue of roots and fibres. The plant or vine seemed composed entirely of bare, interlacing stems, resembling more than anything else the branches of a weeping willow denuded of its foliage, but of a dark, nearly black hue, and covered with a thick, viscid gum that exuded from the pores. Drawing his knife, Mr. Dunstan attempted to cut the poor beast free, but it was with the very greatest difficulty that he managed to sever the fleshy muscular fibres (sic) of the plant. When the dog was extricated from the coils of the plant, Mr. Dunstan saw to his horror that the body was bloodstained, while the skin appeared to be actually sucked or puckered in spots, and the animal staggered as if from exhaustion. In cutting the vine the twigs curled like living, sinuous fingers about Mr. Dunstan's hand, and it required no slight force to free the member from their clinging grasp, which left the flesh red and blistered. The tree, it seems, is well known to the natives, who relate many stories of its death-dealing powers. Its appetite is voracious and insatiable, and in five minutes it will suck the nourishment from a large lump of meat, rejecting the carcass (sic) as a spider does that of a used-up fly." This is a very circumstantial account of the incident, but in such tales it is, of course, absurd "to leave such a matter to a doubt." If correct, it is very clear we have yet to add a very notable example to the list of plants which demand an animal dietary as a condition to their existence; and our sundews, Venus flytraps, and pitcher plants will then have to "pale their ineffectual fires" before the big devourer of the Nicaragua swamps.
 
Man eating plants: great fun in stories, but clearly not a real thing, for several practical reasons.

All known carnivorous plants have evolved in areas where the growing conditions are poor, such as bad soil or acidic marshland. The stories tend to put the man eating plants in fertile areas of jungle where ("primitive savage") people live.

Where are the intermediate sizes? If you look at any other broad group of living things, you will see intermediate sizes. Cetaceans range from small porpoises up to the blue whale. Herbivorous land mammals range from small rodents up to elephants. Snakes range from a few inches right up to anacondas and pythons. It would be extraordinary if the only carnivorous plants were either tiny enough to live on a diet of insects or big enough to overcome a struggling human, with no sizes in between.

Breeding populations. Plants cannot wander a wide territory in search of a mate. The offspring cannot leave the herd to find their own territory. If a large carnivorous plant species existed, it would necessarily be found in colonies or clusters, rather than isolated examples worshipped by primitive tribes.

A cluster of plants large enough to live on a diet of large animals would struggle to get sufficient large animals to go near to it. Presumably the plants near the centre of the colony would starve because the plants near the edge got all the food. A predator that sits in one place for its whole life relies on its prey coming to it. This is fine for a sea anemone sitting on a rock in the current, or a marsh plant waiting for flies to land on it, but it is a poor strategy for something that intends to eat pigs, monkeys or humans.

As others have said, sharks did not evolve to subsist on a diet of humans, and the same could be said of predators such as the tiger. Similarly, a plant could not evolve simply to eat people. Humans are social animals and plants are static. Once the species was identified as dangerous, humans would either avoid it or destroy it.

Any large carnivorous plant would have to evolve to eat other large animals, and perhaps very occasionally catch an unwary human — or receive a sacrifice. Therefore, the plant would need to subsist on species roughly human in size. That might include monkeys, wild pigs, and the like. However, most of these species are intelligent enough to avoid obvious hazards, and physically strong enough to fight back successfully and escape. Even active and mobile predators such as lions or wolves achieve considerably less than a 100% success rate when hunting.

The various mechanisms described in the stories (writhing tendrils, or impaling spikes) are not found in any of the known types of carnivorous plant. In particular, impaling the prey on an external spike is not the best way of then absorbing the prey's nutrients.

Known carnivorous plants use various mechanisms. Most use only one, but some use two in combination.
  • Pitcher plants are passive. They sit there and wait for prey to land and slip into the trap. They then slowly digest it. It is hard to imagine many occasions in which a sizeable animal, such as a pig, would be in the right position to fall into an enormous pitcher plant.
  • Bladder plants produce a partial vacuum. When the prey triggers the trap, an opening allows an inrush of air or water that pulls it in. Clearly this mechanism would not be powerful enough to suck in a human.
  • Flypaper traps are basically plants with very sticky leaves. Plants exist that are sticky enough for an insect to become trapped. I doubt that a plant could produce leaves so sticky that a wild pig, monkey, or human could not escape. Certainly, this mechanism does not feature in the lurid stories.
  • Lobster pot traps have some similarities to the pitcher plant. The mechanism is that the prey finds it easy to get in, but is faced with one-way barriers that make it difficult to escape. In the known species, the trapping mechanism works with fine hairs which point inwards and act like a ratchet. This is fine for catching small insects and the like, However, if you scale it up so that the hairs are strong enough to ensnare a human sized animal, the trap would be quite conspicuous, and also it would take some strength to force your way in.
  • Snap traps such as the Venus fly trap. There are only two known species of snap trap. The Venus fly trap is a wetland plant from the east coast of North America. The waterwheel plant is more widespread, and lives in standing water. These plants actively trap their prey. They have moving parts. The moving traps are two modified leaves which snap together like jaws. They do not have snake like tendrils or tentacles. The movement is caused by changes of hydrostatic pressure in the cells. Although on the small scale of an insectivorous plant, it is fast enough and strong enough to do the job, it is obvious that if it were scaled up to a size suitable to trap humans, it would be neither fast enough nor strong enough.
The man eating plants in the stories I read as a kid were basically very large sea anemones, painted green and transplanted into a jungle setting. Great in a thrilling story, but they could not exist in real life.
 
I wonder if the stories have been fed (!) by people seeing plants flourishing through the remains of an animal or human.
 
But here in the Super-Sargasso Sea, just because something is impossible doesn't mean it doesn't exist! (But the thought of sea anemones makes me wonder: what if there was something that resembled a plant that started such stories? Like:

In the September 24, 1892, Illustrated London News, Dr. Wilson reports further:

"The 'snake-tree' is described in a newspaper paragraph as found on an outlying spur of the Sierra Madre, in Mexico. It has movable branches (by which I suppose, is meant sensitive branches), of a 'slimy, snaky appearance,' which seized a bird that incautiously alighted on them, the bird being drawn down till the traveller lost sight of it. Where did the bird go to? Latterly it fell to the ground, flattened out, the earth being covered with bones and feathers, the debris, no doubt, of former captures. The adventurous traveller touched one of the branches of the tree. It closed upon his hand with such force as to tear the skin when he wrenched it away. He then fed the tree with chickens, and the tree absorbed their blood by means of the suckers (like those of the octopus) with which its branches were covered.

“I confess this is a very ‘tall’ story indeed. A tree which is not only highly sensitive, but has branches which suck the blood out of the birds it captures, is an anomaly in botany. Mexico is surely not quite such an unexplored territory that a tale like this should go unverified. I give the story simply for what it is worth. A lady correspondent, however, reminds me that in Charles Kingsley’s West Indian papers he describes a similar tree to the Nicaraguan plant of Mr. Dunstan."
 
From Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits, and Plants by Charles M. Skinner (1911):

We may dismiss as mythical the travelled tale of a Venus fly-trap which was magnified into quite another matter before Captain Arkright was through with it, for such tales grow larger the farther they go from their beginning. It was in 1581 that the valiant explorer learned of an atoll in the South Pacific that one might not visit, save on peril of his life, for this coral ring inclosed a group of islets on one of which the Death Flower grew; hence it was named El Banoor, or Island of Death. This flower was so large that a man might enter it -- a cave of color and perfume -- but if he did so it was the last of him, for, lulled by its strange fragrance, he reclined on its lower petals and fell into the sleep from which there is no waking. Then, as if to guard his slumber, the flower slowly folded its petals around him. The fragrance increased and burning acid was distilled from its calyx, but of all hurt the victim was unconscious, and so passing into death through splendid dreams, he gave his body to the plant for food.
 
Perhaps identical to the Snake-Tree is the hideous Rattle-snake Bush of Mexico, mentioned in Charles M. Skinner's book, which was "a tree of serpents that wound its arms about men and animals that tried to pass, and stung and strangled them to death."

From the Field Museum of Natural History's Botany Leaflet 23, Carnivorous Plants and "The Man-Eating Tree" (1939), by Sophia Pryor, comes the story of the "Monkey-Trap Tree" (reprinted in Schartz, p. 123):

"A recent report is credited to a Brazilian explorer named Mariano da Silva who returned from an expedition that led him into a district of Brazil that borders on Guyana. He had there sought out the settlement of Yatapu Indians. During his journey he saw a tree which nourishes itself on animals. The tree itself exudes a peculiar sharp odor which attracts its victims, especially monkeys. As soon as they climb the trunk, all is up with them, for very quickly they are completely closed in by the leaves, and one neither hears nor sees them again. After about three days the leaves open and let drop to the earth the bones, completely stripped."
 
Given that fictional influences have been cited, I'll add "Prima Belladonna" a 1956 short story from J.G. Ballard's Vermilion Sands collection (1971).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermilion_Sands

Singing plants feature.

Download/Buy and consume this collection with relish. You may as well get accustomed to the Ballardian vision of the future as we're fast on the way there as a society.

Ballard is the best of the 20th Century sci-fi visionaries I have read; his complete short stories are simply stunning in depth, scope and variety.
 
Killer plant 'eats' great tit at Somerset nursery
A plant has killed and "eaten" a great tit at a garden nursery in Somerset.
Nurseryman Nigel Hewitt-Cooper, from West Pennard, was inspecting his tropical garden when he discovered one of his pitcher plants had trapped the bird. ...
"The larger ones frequently take frogs, lizards and mice, and the biggest ones have been found with rats in them, but to find a bird in one is pretty unusual."

This Science Daily article describes the trapping (and presumed digestion) of a vertebrate (salamander) as a newly discovered occurrence in the North America context. The 2018 survey results cited herein represent the first report I'd ever seen confirming multiple vertebrate 'kills' in a single area.

Bug-eating pitcher plants found to consume young salamanders, too
Date:June 7, 2019 Source: University of Guelph Summary: Pitcher plants growing in wetlands across Canada have long been known to eat creatures -- mostly insects and spiders -- that fall into their bell-shaped leaves and decompose in rainwater collected there. But researchers have discovered that vertebrates -- specifically, salamanders -- are also part of their diet.

... In what is believed to be a first for North America, biologists at the University of Guelph have discovered that meat-eating pitcher plants in Ontario's Algonquin Park wetlands consume not just bugs but also young salamanders. ...

Pitcher plants growing in wetlands across Canada have long been known to eat creatures -- mostly insects and spiders -- that fall into their bell-shaped leaves and decompose in rainwater collected there.

But until now, no one had reported this salamander species caught by a pitcher plant in North America, ...

Monitoring pitcher plants around a single pond in the park in fall 2018, the team found almost one in five contained the juvenile amphibians, each about as long as a human finger. Several plants contained more than one captured salamander. ...

Meat-eating pitcher plants have been known since the eighteenth century. One species discovered a decade ago in Asia consumes mostly insects and spiders but also captures small birds and mice. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190607193657.htm
 
Newly published research provides a hypothesis for how it was that plants became carnivorous. These researchers claim the radical change was caused by an unusual genomic anomaly back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.
Here's how plants became meat eaters

About 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a genetic anomaly allowed some plants to turn into meat eaters. This was done in part, with a stealthy trick: repurposing genes meant for their roots and leaves and using them instead to catch prey, a new study finds.

This step is one of three that some non-carnivorous plants took over tens of millions of years to allow them to turn into hungry carnivores, the researchers said.

The meat-eating shift gave these plants a number of advantages. In effect, "carnivorous plants have turned the tables by capturing and consuming nutrient-rich animal prey, enabling them to thrive in nutrient-poor soil," the researchers wrote in the study, published online May 14 in the journal Current Biology. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/how-carnivorous-plants-evolved.html
 
Here are the bibliographic particulars and summary for the cited research article. The full article can be accessed at the link.

Genomes of the Venus Flytrap and Close Relatives Unveil the Roots of Plant Carnivory
Gergo Palfalvi, Thomas Hackl, Niklas Terhoeven, Jörg Schultz, Mitsuyasu Hasebe, Rainer Hedrich, ...
Current Biology
Published:May 14, 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.04.051
Summary
Most plants grow and develop by taking up nutrients from the soil while continuously under threat from foraging animals. Carnivorous plants have turned the tables by capturing and consuming nutrient-rich animal prey, enabling them to thrive in nutrient-poor soil. To better understand the evolution of botanical carnivory, we compared the draft genome of the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) with that of its aquatic sister, the waterwheel plant Aldrovanda vesiculosa, and the sundew Drosera spatulata. We identified an early whole-genome duplication in the family as source for carnivory-associated genes. Recruitment of genes to the trap from the root especially was a major mechanism in the evolution of carnivory, supported by family-specific duplications. Still, these genomes belong to the gene poorest land plants sequenced thus far, suggesting reduction of selective pressure on different processes, including non-carnivorous nutrient acquisition. Our results show how non-carnivorous plants evolved into the most skillful green hunters on the planet.

FULL ARTICLE: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)30567-4
 
These are incipient Triffids, all they have to do is become motile.

A Venus flytrap’s short-term “memory” can last about 30 seconds.

If an insect taps the plant’s sensitive hairs only once, the trap remains still. But if the insect taps again within about half a minute, the carnivorous plant’s leaves snap shut, ensnaring its prey.

How Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) remember that initial touch has been a mystery. A new study reveals that the plants do so using calcium, researchers report online October 5 in Nature Plants.

Scientists know that some plants have a type of long-term memory, says study coauthor Mitsuyasu Hasebe, a biologist at the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki, Japan. One example is vernalization, whereby plants remember long periods of winter cold as a signal to flower in the spring. But short-term memory is more enigmatic, and “this is the first direct evidence of the involvement of calcium,” Hasebe says. ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-venus-flytraps-store-short-term-memories-prey
 
A new carnivorous plan has been discovered in western North America. Its sticky trapping parts seem to be "tuned" to only trap small midges and gnats while not posing a problem for the larger insects upon whom the plants rely for pollination.
New Carnivorous Plant Discovered in North America – Balances Trapping Prey and Being Pollinated

Botanists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of British Columbia have discovered a new carnivorous plant in western North America.

Triantha occidentalis makes its home in wetlands and bogs from Alaska to California and inland to Montana. In the summer, it shoots up tall flowering stems coated with sticky hairs that trap small insects like gnats and midges. The scientists discovered that the plant acquires more than half of its nitrogen by digesting these ensnared insects, a welcome treat in its nutrient-poor habitat.

This is the 12th known independent evolution of carnivory in the plant kingdom, and the first time the trait has been discovered in the Alismatales order, a group of largely aquatic flowering plants. It is also just the fourth established instance of carnivory in the monocots, one of the major groups of flowering plants.

“What’s particularly unique about this carnivorous plant is that it traps insects near its insect-pollinated flowers,” says lead author Qianshi Lin ... “On the surface, this seems like a conflict between carnivory and pollination because you don’t want to kill the insects that are helping you reproduce.”

However, the plant appears to be capable of sorting out friend from food.

“We believe that Triantha occidentalis is able to do this because its glandular hairs are not very sticky, and can only entrap midges and other small insects, so that the much larger and stronger bees and butterflies that act as its pollinators are not captured,” says Tom Givnish, a UW–Madison professor of botany and co-author of the report. ...
FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/new-carniv...-balances-trapping-prey-and-being-pollinated/
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published research report.

A new carnivorous plant lineage (Triantha) with a unique sticky-inflorescence trap
Qianshi Lin, Cécile Ané, Thomas J. Givnish, Sean W. Graham
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Aug 2021, 118 (33) e2022724118
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2022724118

Abstract
Carnivorous plants consume animals for mineral nutrients that enhance growth and reproduction in nutrient-poor environments. Here, we report that Triantha occidentalis (Tofieldiaceae) represents a previously overlooked carnivorous lineage that captures insects on sticky inflorescences. Field experiments, isotopic data, and mixing models demonstrate significant N transfer from prey to Triantha, with an estimated 64% of leaf N obtained from prey capture in previous years, comparable to levels inferred for the cooccurring round-leaved sundew, a recognized carnivore. N obtained via carnivory is exported from the inflorescence and developing fruits and may ultimately be transferred to next year’s leaves. Glandular hairs on flowering stems secrete phosphatase, as seen in all carnivorous plants that directly digest prey. Triantha is unique among carnivorous plants in capturing prey solely with sticky traps adjacent to its flowers, contrary to theory. However, its glandular hairs capture only small insects, unlike the large bees and butterflies that act as pollinators, which may minimize the conflict between carnivory and pollination.

SOURCE: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/33/e2022724118
 
Nice little write up from Mysterious Universe including two accounts I was unfamiliar with.

"...Sometimes there are plants or trees that have managed to stay hidden from our view, and some of the most spectacular of these are those that seem to move about and seek out prey."

Some Bizarre Tales of Man-Eating Vampire Vines and Snake Trees

 
New type of carnivorous pitcher plant found

Scientists have discovered a carnivorous plant that grows prey-trapping contraptions underground, feeding off subterranean creatures such as worms, larvae and beetles.

The newly found species of pitcher plant was unearthed in the Indonesian province of North Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. Like other pitcher plants, Nepenthes pudica has modified leaves, known as pitfall traps or pitchers, that its prey fall into before being consumed. (One species is so large it can trap rats.)

The plant forms specialized underground shoots with small, white, chlorophyll-free leaves, the researchers said. The pitchers are much larger than the leaves and have a reddish color.

"This species places its up-to-11-cm-long (4.3-inch-long) pitchers underground, where they are formed in cavities or directly in the soil and trap animals living underground, usually ants, mites and beetles," said lead study author Martin Dančák of Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic, in a news release.

Only three other groups of carnivorous plants are known to trap underground prey, but they all use very different trapping mechanisms and, unlike Nepenthes pudica, can catch only minuscule organisms, the researchers said.

"Interestingly, we found numerous organisms living inside the pitchers, including mosquito larvae, nematodes and a species of worm, which was also described as a new species," said Václav Čermák of Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic, who was also part of the research team.
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