An ingenious carnivorous plant that can be found in Borneo provides proof that formulating effective strategies does not need a brain at all times.
A group of researchers, whose study on insect-eating pitcher plants that that uses a remarkable prey-trapping technique in order to catch the most number of bugs for food, has found evidence that evolved strategies are sometimes as effective as using thinking skills to respond to certain challenges.
For their study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Wednesday, Ulrike Bauer, a biologist from Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences, and his team conducted an experiment with Asian pitcher plants that use their slippery rim in order to catch preys.
Bauer pointed out that when it is wet, the trapping surface of the plant is very slippery but not when it is dry. During hot and sunny days, the trap is, in essence, switched off for up to eight hours daily during which the carnivorous plant does not capture any insect.
Based on the team’s survey of these wild insect-trapping pitcher plants in Borneo, the traps sporadically capture batches of ants that belong to the same species.
To further their investigation, Bauer and colleagues conducted experiments that involved artificially keeping the trapping surface wet at all times. They found that the pitchers plants, which are no longer switched off for a length of time during the day, were no longer able to capture large ant batches.
As to why this happens, the researchers explained that this has something to do with ants being social insects. Bauer explained that when individual scout ants find a pitcher trap brimming with sweet nectar, what they do is go back to their colony and call for more ant workers.
The problem when the trap is extremely slippery all the time is that the plant captures these scout ants and thus, they could no longer recruit other ants from the colony. When the pitcher plants switch off their traps some time during the day, they allow for the scout ants to return safely to their nest and call for other ants to go to the trap. This batch of ants, however, gets caught in one sweep once the pitcher becomes wet.
"Of course a plant is not clever in the human sense - it cannot plot,” Bauer said. “However, natural selection is very relentless and will only reward the most successful strategies."
