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Carnivorous Pitcher Plant "Out-Thinks" Insects

Posted by samzenpus on from the follow-the-leader dept.

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.

23 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Pitcher of sweet nectar? by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 4, Funny

    The plant kingdom's equivalent of a honey pot!

    --
    Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
  2. So that's how Voyager escaped by l0ungeb0y · · Score: 2

    Knowing that the Federation would would send a veritable Armada of Science vessels to feast upon

  3. smarter than many people I know by raymorris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    >. 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.

    1. Re:smarter than many people I know by Kokuyo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You are not wrong, but this can be taken to extremes also. I mean, you probably could retire at 40 if you worked two jobs and lived in a one room apartment where you went only to sleep.

      There is a point where working for that early retirement takes so much out of you, that you'll be broken by the time you manage it. Lead management is an important factor in your life: Sure, it makes sense to procrastinate as little as possible and quit the habits that give you little but cost much, however you cannot just do without all amenities of life. You don't know whether you will survive to your retirement goal. If you don't, you'll have lived only for work and a dream you didn't get to enjoy. At all.

    2. Re:smarter than many people I know by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Give up the girl offering easy sex now, have a self-respecting partner for the rest of your life.

      Why are these exclusive? You can have both.

      Also, I don't like the moralizing tone of your post, it smacks of dog whistle racism.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    3. Re:smarter than many people I know by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apart from the dog-whistle racism issue raised by a fellow poster, there are a few more problems in your post:

      Regarding free time, school work, gadgets: I was given the exact same advice by my parents and I severely regret it. I feel I lost my youth. What's the point of being able to possibly retire earlier if the requirement is that you can never be really happy for first thirty years or so, and your prioritisation of study and work has left you with such a small social circle that early retirement would be pointless? My advice to my children would be to aim for sevens rather than tens and live a little. Besides, I think that the effects that has on your personality might be even better for your career than high grades.

      And how in heaven's name are you supposed to get that self-respecting life partner if you reject her first?

      Delaying gratification is (mostly) bullshit. Where I live, life expectancy is only about 80 years. Your ability to achieve happiness falls over time; in addition, achieving happiness now often improves your ability or opportunity to be happier later. The only thing delaying gratification achieves is that you get less years and less opportunity to be happy.

      There are a few traps of course, but they're pretty obvious. Don't smoke, don't run big debts, go easy on the alcohol, and so on, but these tend to be pretty obvious.

    4. Re:smarter than many people I know by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:smarter than many people I know by raymorris · · Score: 2

      I'll address this one as an example since it can be shown objectively, with just a little arithmetic:

      >> "Give up the Starbuck's and iPhone 6 today, retire 10 years earlier."

      > ten years earlier huh? for one thing the smartphone is part of modern culture how can a person who gets their data on dead trees compare to someone who has always on access to all the information in the world?

      I have an LG Volt with 1.2 Ghz quad-core processor. It's just as productive as the new iphone. I paid $120. The guy down the hall paid $620 for a new iphone. So I paid $500 less. Suppose we make decisions like that once every three months. I put the $500 in an index mutual fund, he puts it into shiny toys. We do that from age 25 to age 50. At 50, I'll have $183,909 in my fund, he'll have some broken antique phones. At 60, I'll have $468,368 more than him, just from buying the newest shiny electronics or "settling for" last year's smartphone model.

      Combine that with me choosing a cash car instead of the lease he choose and I end up over a million dollars ahead. Once I have $2 million, then I can do and buy pretty much whatever I want, and have no stress about my financial situation.

    6. Re:smarter than many people I know by disposable60 · · Score: 2

      Easy, sloppy, careless sex, while admittedly fun, can have some long-term disadvantages, you know.

      A baby is a commitment pushing past 2 decades - longer if special needs - with a babymama who may not be a suitable parent (though not legally unfit). Contraceptives fail and are also subject to sabotage - and there are women whose entire career plan consists of having at least one child by at least one man.

      A virus is forever - so far - and tends to limit one's future prospect pool to the easy, sloppy and careless.

      --
      You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
    7. Re:smarter than many people I know by tompaulco · · Score: 2

      This.
      I'm set pretty good for retirement. However, I am working my butt off. I am now 44 years old. I am already starting to realize that some of the things I enjoy doing: hiking, skiing for example, are beginning to be a challenge for me even now. I don't know if I will be capable of enjoying them at all in 25 years or so when I retire. However, I don't have the time to do them now. I think we have this whole work thing backwards. We should get out there and enjoy life while we are young, and then sit our old, tired butts in front of a computer screen at some desk when we no longer have the energy to enjoy life. Unfortunately, getting the money up front is a bit of a challenge. Some people have figured out how to come out of the right vagina, but I was not one of the clever ones.

      --
      If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
    8. Re:smarter than many people I know by myrdos2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Delayed gratification is not about increasing the amount of work you do, it's about being able to plan ahead. I saved up my dollars from a summer job working on my Dad's farm, and bought a computer for $1400 at the end of it. My brother spent his money as soon as he got it, but when I got a computer he wanted one too. So he got some kind of 'lease to own' deal, which he was still paying back years later, long after that thing was an obsolete piece of shit. Ended up costing him almost three grand.

      Who ended up working more? This is not a trick question.

      The only thing delaying gratification achieves is that you get less years and less opportunity to be happy.

      The opposite is true. The ability to save money, to be financially responsible, and to study for an education all reduce the amount of work you need to do over your lifetime. And it will tend to be more enjoyable, satisfying work.

  4. Why the lame title? by Dahamma · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Out-thinks"? Basically it evolved not to produce a protein for part of the day because that resulted in better survival rates from more nutrients. Cool, but why call it thinking, even with quotes when we are big boys and girls and can understand evolutionary processes. Does Slashdot really have to resort to Buzzfeed fringy-worthy headlines these days?

    1. Re:Why the lame title? by DiamondGeezer · · Score: 2

      This is how evolution by natural selection actually works. Yes 'out-thinking' is too strong a word.

      --
      Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
    2. Re:Why the lame title? by Xest · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Because it's all part of the fundamental question of what thinking really is.

      You might equally argue that when someone "thinks" they're hungry it's actually just a natural chemical change in the brain to a change in chemicals in the body so they're not actually thinking at all.

      It's all just chemistry at the end of the day, when does chemistry change from just chemistry to thinking? The only difference is complexity of the system and where does level of complexity cross the line from being simple chemical reaction to being "thought"?

      There's actually a deeper point to the use of the word thinking here, and it's something professional biologists through to neuroscientists through to AI researchers will sometimes equally use given the unsolved nature of the question of when we deem something to be thought as opposed to merely chemical reaction.

    3. Re:Why the lame title? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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".

      --
      sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  5. I've scrubbed toilets, been CEO. by raymorris · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've worked in a lot of fields. The examples listed were all things I've done both ways - making the short-term, impatient decision the first time, than when I had another chance I tried the long term option. I've scrubbed toilets, I've flipped burgers, I've been a programmer at the bottom of the totem pole, I've been the CEO of several different companies. I've been hired, I've been fired, and for 20 years I've been hiring and occasionally firing other people.

    Most of my big mistakes through all of it were when I was thinking about what I want now, rather than the results I want five years bfrom nowm

  6. Re:ps - I dumb, impatient things often by TrollstonButterbeans · · Score: 2

    Add to you list: Give up explaining your first post, trust in others to correctly determine your point knowing the noisier, less bright ones respond the most.

    --
    Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
  7. Don't underestimate drift. by mmell · · Score: 2

    It may not have been a radical mutation or even a series of minor ones, but rather the long-term weeding out of less successful genetic combinations.

    1. Re:Don't underestimate drift. by Xest · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  8. Respect! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The plant is obviously outperforming our politicians in terms of foresight.

  9. Re:ps - I dumb, impatient things often by lisaparratt · · Score: 2

    What if the mistake you make is dying tomorrow, having put off a pleasurable life until the far flung future?

  10. This will blow your mind. $733,637 coffee by raymorris · · Score: 2

    > Cite, please. Even a $5 cup of coffee a day and a $600 iWhatever per year only add up to ~$2000 per year. Over 40 years, that's $80,000. Can YOU live on $8,000 a year??

    Check this out. This is going to blow your mind, and if you're smart, change your life. It comes out to not $80,000, but $733,637.22! Here's the thing:

    The first year, you sock away $2,000 in your low-risk index mutual fund. At the end of the year, the money has earned you $180, so at the end of the first year you have $2,180 from that first year. You add $2,000 more from not buying coffee, which is $4,180. Over the next year, that earns $376 of dividends or interest, for $4556 total. Your money expands exponentially!

    Even if you just put away $2,000 ONCE, then never add to it, in 40 years that $2,000 turns into $62,819.10. This is how most millionaires became millionaires - by putting away about $200-$500 per month.

    Here's a calculator that makes it easy to compute the results of saving different amounts for different periods of time:
    http://www.daveramsey.com/arti...

    Since you mentioned a 40-year time horizon, you can safely use 9% as your interest rate. The market has good years and bad years, but over any 10-20 year period it's rather consistent - you'll get an annualized return of 9% over any long period.

  11. Any bachelor's degree: $900,000+ lifetime salary by raymorris · · Score: 2

    The census bureau reports that:

    over an adult's working life, high school graduates can expect, on average, to earn $1.2 million; those with a bachelor's degree, $2.1 million; and people with a master's degree, $2.5 million
    http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/...

    And that includes people who got degrees in African-American Art History! People who chose degrees with a thought toward doing productive work earn even more.