Carnivorous Pitcher Plant "Out-Thinks" Insects

schwit1 writes A carnivorous pitcher plant is changing its behavior in response to natural weather fluctuations, allowing it to give up its prey in order to capture more. The pitcher plant, which has liquid-filled leaves shaped like funnels, has the ability to allow some of its prey, such as ants, to escape by "switching off" its trap." The first ant reports back to the other ants that it found a large batch of sweet nectar, causing a large contingent of ants to descend upon it. If the trap captures the first ant, it won't be able to capture many more ants later.

Comments

smarter than many people I know

[raymorris]

>. If the trap captures the first ant, it won't be able to capture many more ants later.

I wish all people were as smart as this plant.
Give up some free time now to do your school work, get paid $800,000 more later.
Give up the opportunity to cuss your boss out today, end up with a raise next month, after discussing the issue calmly and professionally.
Give up the girl offering easy sex now, have a self-respecting partner for the rest of your life.
Give up the Starbuck's and iPhone 6 today, retire 10 years earlier.

SO much of wisdom, and of success, comes down to this one thing, to delayed gratification.

Re:smarter than many people I know

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm spending about $5,000 on a vacation now. Because my kids are only kids for a very short period of time.

My father gave up a lot to ensure that he had a solid plan for retirement. 15 years in the company raided the pension and now he is still working with no plans for retirement.

Delayed gratification is important, but there is a reason that the saying "Take time to stop and smell the roses" exists, and it's only partially because your sense of smell degrades as you age.

Re:Don't underestimate drift.

[Xest]

Yes exactly. Chemical production in plants doing things based on time of day such as opening flowers or generating nectar is typically based on levels of light of particular wavelengths that will change throughout the day as the sun rises and sets.

So the mechanism here is almost certainly simply that some members of this species weren't producing nectar until they got more light in a particular wavelength (probably red) than others. Those plants just happened to get more nutrients as a result and simply grew stronger, bloomed better and spread their seed more successfully as a result of that increased nutrient intake from the ants making this the increasingly dominant trait in the population.

The mutation will likely therefore have been one that simply requires an increased (or decreased) amount of light of a certain wavelength required to trigger nectar production delaying the time at which production typically began to a point in the day where the required wavelength was more (or less) prevalent and nothing more than that. As you suggest, it's likely this wasn't a single mutation, but simply the genetic drift of the population as random variation led those that produced nectar ever later to be more successful than those that produced earlier.

Re:Why the lame title?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Assigning motives, thinking abilities to inanimate objects, even when it is patently obvious that it can't think, is useful. Daniel Dennett calls is "design stance". In coding parlance, it is hiding all the intricate details of a complex functions and explaining it what it is designed to do. "The stream buffer expects the input strings to be null terminated", "This excel macro wants the data to be in comma separated fields format". I hear people shouting, "Do not anthropomorphize programs. They hate it" ;-)

Saying pitcher plant allows a few ants to escape communicates the idea, even when everyone knows there is no brain, no thinking, and it actually means, "over the last few thousand generations the plants that did not produce the sticky protein for parts of the day had better survival rates".

But you need to draw an even more important lesson from this, very very applicable today. Without any thinking, purely by chance, some people will find enormous success. So we need to discard the current political thinking based on, "ALL the rich people got rich by being smart and working hard. ALL the poor people are poor because they are dumb and lazy".