The Venus flytrap is one of the few plants capable of quick movements, so necessary in hunting for insects. And an important tool is the account.
A small herbaceous plant Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is found in marshy soils with a lack of nitrogen. Insects, which are caught in trap leaves, become a source of nitrogen necessary for the synthesis of proteins. In the open state, parts of the sheet are bent outward. When an insect lands on it, it curls up, covering the exit with hairs or thorns.
Trying to escape, the victim makes random movements that stimulate the inner surface of the leaf and cause cell growth. In the end, the edges of the leaf are completely closed, the trap turns into a "stomach", where the digestion process takes place. After about 10 days, only an empty chitinous shell remains from the prey, and the trap opens in anticipation of the next food source.
Biologists from the University of Würzburg (Germany), studying the Venus flytrap, discovered that she had a peculiar ability for arithmetic. The plant cannot waste its energy, so the trap triggering mechanism is activated only after the hunter is convinced of the presence of a victim.
The first touch of the insect is considered as accidental, and the second signal activates the trap: it proves that the victim has really settled on the surface of the leaf. The enzymes necessary for digestion begin to be released after the insect touches the hairs for the third and fourth time. And the process of absorption of nutrients starts from the fifth touch.
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In a final article published in the journal eLife, biologists explain that a trapped insect certainly creates much more than five movements.
In particular, a cricket, dying within an hour, knocks on a leaf on average 63 times. For its part, the hunter plant, which has already started the digestion mechanism, correlates the number of hits with the production of the required amount of digestive enzymes.