Home GRASP GRASP/Japan Meat-Eating Plant Found Stealing Bugs From Its Neighbors

Meat-Eating Plant Found Stealing Bugs From Its Neighbors

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Sundews growing in a Japanese bog turned out to be far more devious than imagined.
Finding a sundew plant with a healthy supply of insect food may not seem suspicious. After all, carnivorous plants are famed for supplementing their diet with meat to compensate for nutrient-poor soil.
But there may be devious behavior going on behind the scenes. Some sundews growing in bogs in Japan steal insects lured by the flowers of neighboring plants, according to Kazuki Tagawa from Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, and his colleagues.
It seems to be a case of kleptoparasitism, which has only previously been witnessed in animals, where food is acquired from another species with nothing offered in return. For instance, frigatebirds steal their meals from red-footed boobies.
“As far as we know, this phenomenon has not been observed before,” says Tagawa, whose team reports their findings in Ecological Research .
The researchers investigated how two sundew species, Drosera makinoi and Drosera toyoakensis, attract prey. They looked at the role of the sundews’ own flowers, as well as those of plants close by, and compared the number of insects trapped when flowers from one or both types of plants were removed.
Surprisingly, the number of insects they caught depended on whether the surrounding non-carnivorous plants had blooms. That’s odd, since the non-carnivorous plants don’t benefit from associating with sundews, and instead are investing resources in their own flowers only to see potential pollinators become prey. (Find out how sundews also compete with spiders for prey .)
Meat-eating plants rely on insects for reproduction, too, so it’s not always an advantage to eat them.

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