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Collective Prey Capture By Juvenile Venus Flytraps (Dionaea Muscipula), Steven Rosen
Collective Prey Capture By Juvenile Venus Flytraps (Dionaea Muscipula), Steven Rosen
Honors Theses
The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), first described by Charles Darwin, is a unique carnivorous plant which acquires prey using leaf blades modified into snap-traps. A recent study showed that prey capture by flytraps was not selective. With this study we examined prey capture rates further by analyzing D. muscipula traps less than 1 em in length to determine if juvenile flytraps differ from adults. Similar to the earlier findings, trap size appeared to play no role in prey capture success. This was likely due to the fact that 88% of all prey items recovered were smaller than the smallest collected …
Functional Response Of Venus Flytraps (Dionaea Muscipula), Amber D. Martin
Functional Response Of Venus Flytraps (Dionaea Muscipula), Amber D. Martin
Honors Theses
The feeding response of Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) is widely studied, and many studies have considered the selectivity of prey capture in D. muscipula (Lichtner and Williams, 1977; Hutchens and Luken, 2009). The consumption rate of an organism relative to the abundance or availability of its food is known as that organism's functional response (Jeschke et al., 2004). In this study, a functional response curve will be constructed for D. muscipula based on its response to increasing availability of small prey in the laboratory. Knowledge of functional responses is important for various fields of biology including population biology, evolutionary biology, …
Prey Capture In Response To Removing Cilia From Venus Flytraps, Emily Marchini
Prey Capture In Response To Removing Cilia From Venus Flytraps, Emily Marchini
Honors Theses
Carnivorous plants are able to attract, trap, and digest insects. Different types of traps target different prey. There are sticky traps, pitfall traps, and active steel traps (Gibson, 1991). Although this may seem to be a rare modification it appears that there are six origins of carnivorous plants in different groups of angiosperms (Albert et al., 1992). These results indicate that not only were there multiple origins of carnivorous plants, there were also multiple origins of the same trapping mechanism; for example, the flypaper trap has five origins and the pitcher trap has three (Albert et al., 1992). Multiple origins …
Selectivity Of Prey Capture Based On Prey Size In The Venus Fly Trap (Dionaea Muscipula Ellis), Jessica Humenik
Selectivity Of Prey Capture Based On Prey Size In The Venus Fly Trap (Dionaea Muscipula Ellis), Jessica Humenik
Honors Theses
Venus fly traps (Dionaea muscipula Ellis) are carnivorous plants that live in nutrient poor soils and must digest insects to supplement their diets. When a Venus fly trap captures an insect, the plant's traps do not fully close for several minutes, which may allow small prey to escape. It would be beneficial for the plant to consume a large, nutrient-rich prey item as opposed to a small prey item. We tested the hypothesis that Venus fly traps select larger prey by offering plants small and large crickets. A Kruskal-Wallis test and Wilcoxon signed rank test were used to test significance …