Snap! How can the Venus flytrap indulge its taste for insect flesh? The secret is the cunning construction of its leaves.(BIOMECHANICS)

Publication: Natural History

Publication Date: 01-JUN-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Natural History Magazine, Inc.

Although plants are firmly rooted in the ground, they do move: sunflowers track the Sun across the sky; daffodils turn their floral faces away from the wind as it blows. Most plant motion is either quite slow (the sunflower), or driven by external factors (the wind on the daffodil). Herbal hustle caused by internal forces is uncommon. That's no surprise, really: plants have neither nerves nor muscles, nor do they have other obvious mechanisms for generating force rapidly.

Yet despite the lack of muscle, several plant lineages have independently evolved some capacity for rapid movement. The trigger plants of Australia, for instance, slap a dab of pollen on visiting bees. More morbidly, the Venus flytrap slams two halves of a leaf shut on nutritious insects. Recently, investigators discovered that the flytrap owes its quick grasp to a "bistable configuration" of its leaves, whereby small movements can trigger much larger ones.

The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is native to verdant, boggy coastal plains of North and South Carolina. Bogs are more acidic and have...

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