Dont Feed the Plants! - StumbleUpon. Everyone should be familiar with the genus Dionea or "Venus Fly Trap" above, but the vegetative world is home to plenty stranger, and while perhaps not as adrenaline-pumping as Crustaceans or as gruesome as Amphibians, plants provide food, shelter and oxygen for the entire kingdom Animalia, so they certainly deserve the spotlight once in a while, and their weirdness does not disappoint. Rather unremarkable in appearance from above, these tiny aquatic plants are actually carnivorous, and display one of the most sophisticated mechanisms (carnivorous or otherwise) in the entire known plant kingdom. The "bladders" of the plant's namesake are thousands of tiny, sac-like pods which hang from submerged branches, each equipped with a hinged "door" and membranous seal held shut by a delicate equilibrium of pressure.
At the slightest touch by some tiny insect, crustacean or even protozoa, the seal is broken and the bladder floods with water, sucking in the prey for digestion. Plants Use Body Clocks to Prepare for Battle. By Olivia Solon, Wired UK Biologists at Rice University have discovered that while plants might look fairly inactive in the day, they are surreptitiously preparing for battle with hungry insects.
[partner id="wireduk"]“When you walk past plants, they don’t look like they’re doing anything,” said Janet Braam, one of the investigators on a new study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s intriguing to see all of this activity down at the genetic level. It’s like watching a besieged fortress go on full alert.” Biologists have long known that plants have an internal clock that lets them measure the passing of time regardless of the light conditions.
In order to test this theory, graduate biochemistry and cell biology student Danielle Goodspeed designed an experiment. The findings could help inform new strategies for insect resistance. You can read the full paper here. Video: RiceUniversity/YouTube. Driftwood at La Push, Washington. 10 Creepy Plants That Shouldnt Exist. We spend a lot of time here at Cracked pointing out horrors of nature that slither on the land and lurch through the sea.
But staying under the radar in nature's landscape of nightmares is the twisted carnival of things that grow out of the ground. Like ... Bleeding Tooth Fungus The bleeding tooth fungus looks kind of like a wad of chewing gum that leaks blood like a rejected prop from The Shining. They're also called the strawberries and cream, the red-juice tooth, and the devil's tooth. Oh, and they are listed as "inedible," which implies that someone attempted to eat one at some point. Chinese Black Batflowers There's a good reason that Batman uses bat imagery to strike terror into the hearts of Gotham's criminals, rather than, say, some kind of shrew. It is kept as an ornamental plant by gardeners who prefer to cultivate nightmares, and have the balls to live in the presence of a plant that looks like it crawled out of a Bosch painting and wants to plant its young in their head.