This is not alarming at all

[james_davis_nicoll]

Deficiency causes rare tropical plant to develop appetite for meat

Comments

[jhetley]

Rare. We want the emphasis on *rare*.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Medium rare is also acceptable.

[bunsen_h]

I'm guessing that the "traps" aren't strong enough to hold a large animal unless it's seriously entangled in the vines. But that exuded liquid is probably pretty nasty if it gets on one's skin.

[cyprinella]

Only if you're dead. Otherwise it's probably just sticky. Even pitcher plants that digest much larger prey aren't a big deal unless you've drown in them. Sticky traps like this usually just catch gnats and other small flies. My sundews have a very similar morphology and the biggest things they usually can hold are mosquitoes or crane flies that have managed to hit multiple leaves with their ridiculous legs.

[bunsen_h]

If it's got digestive enzymes in it all the time, rather than just in response to something getting stuck, wouldn't it tend to irritate the skin?

[cyprinella]

It's not a problem I've run into. But I am much larger than a gnat.

[bunsen_h]

Do you happen to know who might be a reliable supplier of Venus fly trap seeds to Canada? On-line reviews are not terribly reliable, and many suppliers get reviews along the lines of "none of the seeds germinated despite my following the instructions carefully".

[cyprinella]

Canada, sadly no. I've happily gotten plants from California Carnivores, Sarracenia Northwest, and Carnivorous Plant Nursery (MD), but never seed. I know there's an international carnivorous plant society and they might have a vendor list that's more helpful?

[cyprinella]

There are more than 750 known carnivorous plant species in the world. It's not that fancy.

[viktor_haag]

"Say it with flowers. Send them a triffid."

[roseembolism]

It's triggered by phosphorus deficiency, so the obvious thing to do is splice the appropriate genes into our cereal crops and fruit trees....

[jbwoodford]

I was thinking about that in the context of all the useful potential applications for the plant...someone's going to try to splice the genes responsible for the good stuff into a more easily-cultivated plant, and that's the prologue for the movie.

[armiphlage]

In the book "Greener Than You Think" by Ward Moore, an attempt to grow attractive lawns results in crabgrass that grows abnormally swiftly. Despite having no thorns or other harmful properties, it crowds out crops and habitat, shorts out power lines, sprawls over roads and railways faster than it can be cut, and causes civilization to collapse.

If someone had tried to breed grass that actively trapped insects, things would be even more dramatic.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24246

[jessie_c]

Bring along a sacrificial pack of matches. This gives you two different options for solving the problem.

While at the same time giving the possibility of causing a larger one if conditions are dry...

[ffutures]

Feed me, Seymour...

James, make sure your garden has plenty of phosphorus or you'll be first into the gaping green maw...

[(Anonymous)]

Wasn't there a story about a genetically engineered house tree -- that is, a tree with a large hollow inside living space -- which was supposed be "perfectly safe", but...

There was someone critical of the whole idea who agreed to spend some amount of time in one (a month? half a year?), but who, for some reason, maybe squeamishness, didn't use the toilet facility in the tree (or maybe just didn't use it enough?) (I think he used some building nearby, or where he worked or something). The tree was designed to take nutrients from waste in the toilet. Insufficient nutrients made the tree "hungry". So the guy was using the bed provided by the tree, and one night the tree started (and finished?) converting the bed into a "toilet" to digest the mass of nutrients that was just lying there...

I might be thinking of "Copernick's Rebellion", by Leo A. Frankowski. The cover does mention Tree Houses.

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?7984

I don't think I read the whole book, but just that scene was mentioned somewhere.

[(Anonymous)]

The OP actually is not the first example of phenotypic plasticity in such plants.

There's also a pitcher plant that produces light-gathering, non-insect-trapping leaves under one set of conditions, and insect-trapping pitchers in low-nitrogen environments.

Summarized in this figure:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8389183/figure/F3/

Which uses this (full text available) as a reference:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC123661/


And another example of phenotypic variation (also full text):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7893253/