A carnivorous plant that lives in bogs worldwide traps its prey in less than a millisecond, more than 100 times faster than a Venus flytrap can manage, a new study finds. The study is the first to capture a high-speed recording of the plant's traps snapping shut.
Utricularia, a genus of rootless carnivorous plants, is better known by its common name, bladderwort. There are more than 200 species worldwide, living in fresh water and saturated soils. To survive without roots, bladderworts trap and digest tiny organisms, including protozoa and tiny crustaceans. They do so with small bladder-like traps that line their stems.
The super-fast motion of bladderwort traps (which are a few millimeters in size) is too quick to be seen with the naked eye. So Philippe Marmottant of the Universite Grenoble in France and his colleagues made high-speed recordings of bladderworts snapping up crustaceans just a few millimeters long.
"We wanted to know how fast the trap was," Marmottant told LiveScience. "There were several estimations, but no certitude, because high-speed recordings were not available."
Expert trappers
The cameras recorded up to 10,000 frames per second, enough to give the researchers enough resolution to slow the film down and analyze how the bladderworts trap their prey. The traps closed more quickly than the traps on any other carnivorous plant, the researchers reported Feb. 15 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. On average, the traps snapped shut in about half a millisecond. In comparison, Marmottant said, the Venus flytrap reacts to its prey in 100 milliseconds.
"Because the suction is so fast, with accelerations of up to 600 G [600 times the ***** of gravity], it is very difficult for any living ****** to escape such a trap," Marmottant said. (For comparison, an astronaut feels about3.5 Gs during a space-shuttle liftoff; and a mere 8 Gs will cause most people to black out.)
