Plants fall in love with eating meat or the "heavy taste" forced out by the environment.

in the plant "friends circle", pig cage grass, fly grass, etc. as the representative of insect-eating plants, for hundreds of years has attracted much attention, lasting.
In today, searching for "worm-eating plants" on an online shopping platform in China, hundreds of results will appear;
with the arrival of summer, the popular science activities of primary and secondary school students ushered in a new peak. How many insect-eating plants are there in the world? How have plants evolved insect-eating (i.e., meat-eating) "hobbies" over a long history? How do they prey on animals? What new research and debates are there about insect-eating plants in the academic world? It has also become a concern for children and parents.understand insect-eating plants, "nitrogen" is the absolute protagonist who can't get around. All insect-eating plants, the reason why in the plant world appears very "tough", is to strive for more nitrogen elements.
know that plants absorb inorganic elements as nutrients, they come from the weathering of rock minerals and the decay of organic matter and animals. Nitrogen is the most abundant element in plant relay after carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Without it, most plants will not be able to complete their life cycle, and other elements will not be able to replace it.
discovered in 1772, it accounts for 78% of the Earth's atmosphere, four times as much as oxygen, and is an important component of amino acids, proteins and nucleic acids. "Michael J. Smith, a professor at the University of Connecticut, said that the university' In the Book of Biology, C. Gerald writes that the nitrogen contained in degraded plant and animal matter is absorbed through a series of mutually beneficial relationships, which in turn transform into gases and return to the atmosphere.
was widely believed in the scientific community that plants absorbed nitrogen directly from the atmosphere, but in 1837 Jean-Bapsdit Busengo, a French agricultural chemist, proved this wrong and showed how plants absorb nitrogen from the soil. The assification of nitrogen from inorganic raw materials to organic compounds is a major metabolic activity of many plant cells.
generally speaking, herbs assinate nitrates mainly in their leaves, while many woody and shrubs assin these nitrates in their roots. In a single species, the location of nitrate assination usually depends on the supply of nitrates: when nitrates are abundant, leaves are the primary assaturization site, but when nitrate supply is limited, roots become the primary assaturization site. Through a series of complex operations in the plant nitrogen assination process, the availability of inorganic nitrogen on soil and leaf surfaces is linked to the plant's need to synthesize various nitrogen-containing compounds.
" in the vast land, not every inch is fertile soil, many places are sand and stone wasteland, high cold slopes and nutrients long-term lack of water, such as a variety of harsh barren environment for the survival of plants set up a lot of obstacles. "Plant science expert Qiu Xi told reporters, under the pressure of survival, insect-eating plants in their own way, but also embarked on the path of predatory attacks.
At the same time, it should be pointed out that insect-eating plants are not a single species, but refers to the ability to hunt and digest and absorb some insects and arthropods of the plant groups, although generally known as "insect-eating plants", all have the common skills of insect-hunting, but in kinship is very far apart, from 17 genus of 10 departments, a total of 600 to 750 species.the origin of insect-eating plants has always been one of the most controversial issues in related research.
The star of insect-eating plants, fly-catchers, was first described in 1760 by a landowsman in North Carolina named Arthur Dobbs, who wrote to Peter Corinthian, a botanist and member of the Royal Society, that "this is a very novel and unknown sensitive plant in the plant world". Corinthian gave his sample to British botanist John Ellis, who named it flygrass. In a letter to Linnay, then a well-famous plant taxonomist, Ellis described the plant in detail, "with tiny red glands on the inner surface of the leaves that secrete sweet juices that attract poor animals to come for food." When these soft glands touch the animal's limbs, the leaves on both sides will immediately stand up, grasp the insects, and lock the prey firmly through the thorns of the leaves on both sides until it dies."
fact, more precisely, there are three stiff hairs on each of the two blades that make up the fly-catcher's death trap, which are triggers. If you want to trigger blade closure, insects must touch more than one hair, more than once, and the interval between two touches is not more than 20 seconds, the blades in less than a second quickly closed, forming a small "cage", the more the animal struggles, constantly touch the fresh hair, "cage" close tighter, so when the fly grass opens the blade again, the surface can often see "fighting" traces and insect debris.
Linnay, however, a well-famous Swedish biologist, not only refutes Ellis's conclusions, but also sees them as "sensitive plants" similar to shy grasses, and even after Long Study by Ellis, citing irrefutable evidence, Linnay refuses to acknowledge the carnivorous properties of plants. At that time, there were still many people echoing, the focus of the problem is still how plants can eat meat.
until Darwin, more people observed that more plants could trap and digest small animals. In 1875, Darwin gave a reasonable explanation in his new book, Insect-Eating Plants. "Millions of years ago, these plants, which grow in damp swamps, faced a lack of nitrogen, the protein-producing element." Stefano Mancuso, who chairs the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology at the University of Florence in Italy, said.
' and 'poor thinking' is not a truth that only humans understand. After a long period of evolution, the plant changed the shape of the leaves, turning them into insect traps and using small animals such as protein-rich insects as a new source of nutrition. Tyusi said.
because there are only a small number of fossil records, there are still many mysteries about the evolution of insect-eating plants, especially the young structure of their insect traps, which may be missing in fossils for various reasons. Nevertheless, the structure of modern insect traps can be used to infer most of the structure of ancient insect traps. These insect traps come in different forms, but they are wonderful, and they fascinate countless scientists and plant lovers and explore them more than once. the "animal killers" of these plants, they seem ferocious, but they can only prey on insects, most of which are small frogs, lizards and so on.
Bolton-Sanderson, a professor of applied physiology at the University of London in his time with Darwin, studied electrical impulses found in frogs and mammals. After communicating with Darwin, he found electrical signals that put pressure on the two hairs of fly-catchers that could cause the trap to close, the first example of electrical activity regulating plant development.
more than a hundred years later, Alexander Volkov of Oakwood University in Alabama and his colleagues have shown that electrical stimulation itself is indeed a trigger for insect traps to shut down.
, and for fly-catchers, each closing abnormally consumes energy, and each clamped trap can be used three to four times, eventually losing the ability to close. Therefore, in the botanical gardens, fly-catchers are hidden only in places that are not easily accessible to tourists.
Up to now, botanists have found that insect-eating plants have five basic insect-trapping mechanisms - caged or bottle-like traps with digestive enzymes or bacterial digestive fluids; mucus traps with mucus drips around them; fast-closing clamp traps; cystic traps that produce vacuums and inhale prey, and lobster cages with inward-extending caterpillars that force prey into digestive organs. "Insect-eating plants come from very different sources in evolutionary trees. Coupled with differences in insect predation mechanisms, different insect-eating plants differ greatly in 'tactile' and digestion. Tyusi said.
it is generally believed that the complete insect-eating nature of plants must include three processes of attracting, capturing and digesting, and that prey must also be digested into amino acids and ammonium ions that are easy for plants to absorb. Therefore, the ability of a plant to produce digestive enzymes is used as a criterion to determine whether it is insect-eating.
study of carnivores has always been a hot topic of interest to scientists. Not long ago, more than
research institutes in China, in collaboration with
University, used metabolomic methods to analyze the tissue-specific metabolite components in carnivorous plant leaves and traps such as bottle grass and fly grass mucus, and published a paper in Molecular Science under Science, revealing that they contain a large number of nanoparticles, which deepens people's understanding of natural hydrogel mucus secreted by insect-eating plants.
addition, there are new discoveries in the study that plants use tentacles, visuals, or odor signals to act on insects between insect-eating plants and insects.
", however, due to the small number of research materials, high experimental difficulty reasons, the relevant results in recent years has been not much, the research focus on insect-eating plants is still on some classic issues. In addition to origin and evolution, there are many unsolt mysteries about how insect-eating plants coordinate their relationship with pollinators, Tyusi said.