Pitcher plants do the same thing
They have these really unique looking flowers too
Another fun fact is the Yellow Trumpet pitcher plant’s (sarracenia flava) flowers smell like cat pee.
Damn, I had no idea these flowered. I could never keep them alive either.
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pitcher plant is just a generic term for a few species, including sarracenia
Yeah sorry! I had deleted it I didn’t see where you mentioned it was a pitcher and thought you meant vft!
Understanding it needed to do that is a bit of personification. The Venus fly trap that grew a slightly taller flower stem got pollinated more. That genetic mutation overtook the species as competition for pollination grew more difficult for the shorter flower stemmed. Evolution is cool an all, but let’s not confuse it for plants knowing or deciding to do anything.
It didn’t “grow to know” shit. The ones with short flowers didn’t breed as frequently. The end. Mystery solved.
I had an idea once to make a travel pack sized blanket for air travel.
Venus Flight Wraps
Always absolutely wild to me that these things are native to the Carolinas
not only native, but the ONLY place. I’ve got carnivores from every continent (accept Antarctica, obviously), and thats STILL my favorite fact.
It does make sense they’re so rare though. Most carnivory you can picture the evolutionary path: Something had a mutation that kind of made a cup, something had a mutation that kind of made the leaves sticky… etc. You can see it happening one step at a time with minor advantages (and therefore survival) at each step, until they kept compounding into more and more complex and specialized structures.
For a VFT… multiple things had to happen at once. There’s no advantage to the motion until you can also digest and adsorb the material. There’s also no advantage to a partial motion that can’t trap an organism. It’s really wild they exist!
It started as a flowering plant. As it got some early carnivorous genes, if it killed the pollinators it would not reproduce.
It slowly turned into the terrifying plant we know and love.
Before it got jaws it was a glue trap. Venus flytraps are an evolutionary offshoot of Drosera, the sundews.
