this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
653 points (97.1% liked)

Science Memes

11189 readers
3200 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Always absolutely wild to me that these things are native to the Carolinas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_flytrap

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

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!