Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Bristol in the UK have discovered that a carnivorous plant - the insectivorous pitcher Nepēnthes - can temporarily turn off its traps, allowing it to trick victims and attract more prey.
Dr. Ulrike Bauer of the University of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences and her colleagues studied a tropical plant of the species Nepenthes rafflesiana, which uses slippery traps to capture insects.
“The surface of the plant trap is very slippery when the jug is wet, but during the hottest hours of the day they tend to be dry and appear to be off,” says Bauer. - At such moments, they do not catch insects. At first glance, this is puzzling, because natural selection should have favored traps that devour as many insects as possible.
Observations of wild plants in Borneo have shown that water lilies, despite temporary dryness, capture large parties of ants.
The researchers decided to figure out what the secret was, and conducted experiments in which the plant's trap was constantly kept wet (it was moistened with a sugar solution). It turned out that the plants attracted 36% less prey.
“Ants are social insects,” explains Dr. Bauer. - At first, one scout looks for good sources of food in the vicinity of the nest. So he finds a pitcher whose trap is full of sweet nectar. As long as it is dry, he can safely drink its contents.
However, the scout ant then travels back to the colony and brings many more individuals with it. If the trap is always slippery, it will swallow up these scout ants and will not get a lot of prey."
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By "turning off" traps for part of the day, the pitcher ensures that the scout ant will calmly return to the colony and lead his comrades into the trap. So this seemingly shortcoming is actually a clever strategy to exploit the behavior of social insects for their own purposes, the scientists write.
Bauer's research paper was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.