Plants Eat Animals in Brazil

There are many stories surrounding plants  that tell us many believable and some unbelievable facts about them. There are people  who talk to plants as they would with their pets. One has heard about a whistling plant. A 6 feet tall plant that whistles just like the humans.  One has also heard strange mysteries of plants eating humans and animals. But what has come to light with the corroborated findings by a few researchers just a few days back is that a carnivorous plant that can eat tiny worms –And thanks to its unusual underground leaves has been discovered in Brazil.

The Philcoxia minensis plant has flowering leaves above the ground too, but it’s what’s beneath the soil that has allured scientists.

The subterranean leaves, each about the size of a pinhead, are able to absorb some light through the white soil of the Cerrado,  The scientists working on such plants who elaborated their findings in journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suspected the mysterious subterranean leaves of Philcoxia minensis were used to capture animals, as they share a number of traits with known carnivorous plants, such as Venus flytraps.

To see if Philcoxia minensis is carnivorous, the team probed whether it could digest and absorb nutrients from the many nematodes, also called roundworms, which end up trapped on its sticky underground leaves.

 
They fed the plant nematodes laden with the isotope nitrogen-15, atoms of which have one more neutron than regular nitrogen-14. Then, they placed these Caenorhabditis elegans worms on top of underground leaves of plants kept in a lab setting.

Chemical analysis of the leaves that had been covered in nematodes revealed significant amounts of nitrogen-15, suggesting the plant broke down and absorbed the worms. Now what interests me is that the people who eat plants, vegetables and fruits are called vegetarians. What do you call a person who eats a plant that eat the worms.

Image by exfordy via Flickr