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I mean if you kill your pollinators you’re not going to reproduce, so that makes sense the genes survived.
Get that randomized “trial and error” crap out of here. Everyone knows nobody and nothing ever uses trial and error, because it can’t deliver results.
Genetic mutation is always occurring. It’s not trial and error, there is no intent to do anything. You make it sound like a function but it seems like more of a failure to me.
Evolution works like a tree’s structure branches over time. That’s why it’s always animated like that. It is NOT that everything gets expressed and then gets tested. It is that the current thing “alive” is changing. It seems crazy now only because you’re seeing the veeeeerry complicated leaves at the ends of very complicated branches. Branches that have mostly ended by now.
You know what happens to animals with unsurvivable mutations? They die. All the time. Even humans with unsurvivable mutations happen ALL THE TIME.
That’s why it’s ridiculous to outlaw abortion: Bad things randomly happen all the time, because it’s a complicated process with LOTS of areas that can go wrong. It goes wrong all the time. The body has mechanisms to fix a lot of “wrongness”, but macro-level bad stuff still happens all the time.
The same thing happens on a species level over many survivable generations.
It IS basically “trial and error”, but trial and error in a VERY complicated and dynamic system after a very, very long time, currently stemming from the complicated results of that system.
You cannot dismiss the system just because one aspect confuses you when removed from context…
By any chance did you drop an /s?
It’s cute that homeboy thinks it’s learning.
Someone should tell them the ones who didn’t do this fucking died.
That would break his heart
Also, the energy to make that flower is an enormous strain on the plant. Usually, growing that flower causes most or all of the carnivorous leaves to die, and therefore often growing that flower spells the death of the plant.
Understanding it needed to do that is a bit of personification. The Venus fly trap that grew a slightly taller flower stem got pollinated more. That genetic mutation overtook the species as competition for pollination grew more difficult for the shorter flower stemmed. Evolution is cool an all, but let’s not confuse it for plants knowing or deciding to do anything.
I had an idea once to make a travel pack sized blanket for air travel.
Venus Flight Wraps
Always absolutely wild to me that these things are native to the Carolinas
not only native, but the ONLY place. I’ve got carnivores from every continent (accept Antarctica, obviously), and thats STILL my favorite fact.
It does make sense they’re so rare though. Most carnivory you can picture the evolutionary path: Something had a mutation that kind of made a cup, something had a mutation that kind of made the leaves sticky… etc. You can see it happening one step at a time with minor advantages (and therefore survival) at each step, until they kept compounding into more and more complex and specialized structures.
For a VFT… multiple things had to happen at once. There’s no advantage to the motion until you can also digest and adsorb the material. There’s also no advantage to a partial motion that can’t trap an organism. It’s really wild they exist!
It didn’t “grow to know” shit. The ones with short flowers didn’t breed as frequently. The end. Mystery solved.
It started as a flowering plant. As it got some early carnivorous genes, if it killed the pollinators it would not reproduce.
It slowly turned into the terrifying plant we know and love.
Before it got jaws it was a glue trap. Venus flytraps are an evolutionary offshoot of Drosera, the sundews.
