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

Pitcher of sweet nectar?

[LynnwoodRooster]

The plant kingdom's equivalent of a honey pot!

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

[Kokuyo]

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.

Re:smarter than many people I know

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:smarter than many people I know

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:smarter than many people I know

[myrdos2]

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.

Why the lame title?

[Dahamma]

"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?

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".

I've scrubbed toilets, been CEO.

[raymorris]

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

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.