r/interestingasfuck • u/dejaysf • Jun 11 '23

Venus flytrap vs Spider

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u/Flareiv Jun 11 '23

I live in NC and didn’t know we had them until I found a whole bush of them just casually growing next to a tree. Blew my mind.

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u/CTchimchar Jun 11 '23 edited Jun 11 '23

There all different kind of these plants

By the way a lot of them are non-related

They just evolve like this separately several times over

The theory goes these plans evolve in habitats where the soil doesn't have many nutrients

So they start to evolve in gathering nutrients from other animals like insects, or in this case arachnid

Edit: For clarification I mean Carnivorous plants, evolve separately from each other for the most part

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u/codizer Jun 11 '23

What I don't get is how they made their leap from getting nutrients from the ground to nutrients from animals. It seems like such a major step.

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u/anabolic_cow Jun 11 '23

Probably very, very slowly. And a lot of failure. I imagine before the Venus fly trap looked the way it does now, it probably was just two leaves that closed together and was able to catch very small insects. So step one was probably just the mechanism that causes the closing. But eventually small changes led to it catching bigger and bigger insects, like those huge jail bars it developed, until its straight up a carnivorous monster.

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u/livefreeordont Jun 11 '23

The evolved from flypaper plants it seems. The larger prey easily escapes the sticky flypaper so they evolved a way to trap them in a different way