Insects stuck in sundew plants’ sticky secretions suffocate and die before being subjected to a medley of digestive enzymes.
Insects have plenty to beware when it comes to carnivorous plants. Add an acid-loving fungus to that list of dangers.). As stuck prey suffocate in mucilage or die from exhaustion, the plant produces enzymes that dissolve the bodies into nutrients later absorbed by the leaves.produces additional digestive enzymes and makes the leaf’s environment more acidic, which helps both plant and fungal enzymes mixed into the mucilage work more efficiently.
“Ultimately this creates a synergistic effect,” says Isheng Jason Tsai, an evolutionary biologist at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. Prey decomposition speeds up and the plant gets more nutrients. Previous studies hinted that bacteria living in the mucilage of other carnivorous plants including pitcher plants and bladderworts could aid in digestion.
Confirming that a specific microbe can support digestion “reshapes our understanding of plant carnivory,” Tsai says. “This opens up new avenues to explore other carnivorous plants and their potential microbial helpers.”) — a species found in temperate and tropical regions including Taiwan — and found a diverse assortment of both bacteria and fungi.topped the list as the most abundant, making up roughly an average 40 percent of the microbial genetic material found in leaf mucilage.
Inoculating sundew plants with helpful fungus in a lab decreased the time it took them to break down insect matter from 92 hours to 73 hours.dwells on sundew plants across three continents suggests an ancient relationship between the two, Tsai says. Finding the fungus on other carnivorous plants as well hints that “the relationship is a more widespread evolutionary strategy in botanical carnivory” — a match made in insect-gobbling heaven.
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