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By the late 1800s, grisly tales of killer plants began to crop up everywhere. Terrible tentacle-wielding trees grabbed and swallowed unwary travelers in distant lands. Mad professors grew monstrous sundews and pitcher plants on raw steak until their voracious creations spun and ate them, too.
Young Arthur Conan Doyle stayed closer to science in a yarn with everyone’s favorite carnivore, the Venus flytrap. Based on brand new botanical revelations, he accurately described the bilobed traps, the way they caught insects and how thoroughly they digested their prey. But even his flytraps were impossibly large, big enough to bury and digest a human. Carnivorous, man-eating plants had a moment, and you can thank Charles Darwin for that.
Until Darwin’s time, most people refused to believe that plants ate animals. It was against the natural course of things. Mobile animals did the eating; plants were food and could not move – if they killed, it had to be in self-defense or by accident. Darwin spent 16 years conducting painstaking experiments that proved otherwise. He showed that the leaves of some plants had been transformed into ingenious structures that not only trapped insects and other small creatures, but also digested them and absorbed the nutrients released from their corpses.
In 1875 Darwin published: Insectivorous plants, in which he describes everything he had discovered. In 1880, he published another myth-busting book, The power of movement in plants† The realization that plants can both move and kill inspired not only a hugely popular genre of horror stories, but generations of biologists eager to understand plants with such unlikely habits.
Today, carnivorous plants are experiencing another great moment as researchers begin to get answers to one of botany’s great unsolved riddles: How did typically gentle flowering plants evolve into murderous carnivores?
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Since Darwin’s discoveries, botanists, ecologists, entomologists, physiologists and molecular biologists have explored every aspect of these plants drowning their prey in liquid-filled pitchers, immobilizing them with adhesive “fly paper” leaves or trapping them in click traps and underwater suction traps. They’ve detailed what the plants catch and how – plus some of the benefits and costs of their quirky lifestyle.
More recently, advances in molecular science have helped researchers understand the key mechanisms underlying the carnivorous lifestyle: how, for example, a flycatcher clicks so quickly and how it turns into an insect-juicing “stomach” and then a “gut.” for the remains of its prey. But the big question remained: how did evolution equip these food misfits with the means to eat meat?
Fossils have yielded almost no clues. There are very few, and fossils can’t show molecular details that could point to an explanation, says biophysicist Rainer Hedrich of the University of Würzburg in Germany, who is investigating the origins of meat-eating in 2021. Annual overview of plant biology† Thanks to innovations in DNA sequencing technology, researchers can now approach the question in a different way, looking for genes associated with carnivore, determining when and where those genes are switched on, and identifying their origins.
There’s no evidence that carnivorous plants acquired their beastly habits by hijacking genes from their animal victims, Hedrich says, although genes sometimes pass from one type of organism to another. Instead, a slew of recent findings point to the co-option and repurposing of existing genes that have age-old functions ubiquitous in flowering plants.
“Evolution is sneaky and flexible. It takes advantage of pre-existing tools,” said Victor Albert, a plant genome biologist at the University at Buffalo. “It’s easier in evolution to reuse something than to create something new.”
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