Foraminifera: The one-celled predators that shaped our planet (and kept the receipts)

I'm going to be telling you about carnivorous plants.

Oh, wow.

So we're going to have a

little bit of a mood

shift there.

I don't know what their moods are like, but I think it's hungry.

Hungry for blood.

Yeah.

The reason why I love this story is because it actually kind of goes all the way back to Darwin, because apparently Darwin was obsessed with carnivorous plants.

So in 1875, he like published a whole thing about the plant species he thought might be carnivorous.

And one of them was a species called the European saxifraga, saxifraga genus.

He would even try to feed it insects, but he could like never get them to eat it.

So he never really got confirmation that this plant was carnivorous, but he believed in it.

He really believed in it.

And now finally, you know, more than a century later, scientists in China looking at a native saxifraga species there have found that they do in fact digest and get nutrition from trapped prey.

So this actually also expands the number of plant families that we know who can do this.

So what we've known now is that carnivory has evolved in 14 families of flowering plants.

And like one of the things that I hadn't really thought about, like why they would do this, like it's like, great, that seems like a good strategy, I guess.

But it's especially helpful for plants that are living in harsh environments like mountaintops, which is where you'll find flowers.

This particular species, Saxifraga candelabrum, has yellow flowers.

It grows in rock crevices in the Tibetan Plateau.

And their stems and branches have these like reddish hairs that produce sticky stuff that insects can get trapped on.

So the researchers found that like on average, there were like 70 insects stuck to these hairs.

And they wanted to figure out like, you know, that seems like a... a wild coincidence that this potentially carnivorous plant has insects completely stuck to it.

Yeah, this feels like it couldn't just be a

I'm going to be telling you about carnivorous plants.

Oh, wow.

So we're going to have a

little bit of a mood

shift there.

I don't know what their moods are like, but I think it's hungry.

Hungry for blood.

Yeah.

The reason why I love this story is because it actually kind of goes all the way back to Darwin, because apparently Darwin was obsessed with carnivorous plants.

So in 1875, he like published a whole thing about the plant species he thought might be carnivorous.

And one of them was a species called the European saxifraga, saxifraga genus.

He would even try to feed it insects, but he could like never get them to eat it.

So he never really got confirmation that this plant was carnivorous, but he believed in it.

He really believed in it.

And now finally, you know, more than a century later, scientists in China looking at a native saxifraga species there have found that they do in fact digest and get nutrition from trapped prey.

So this actually also expands the number of plant families that we know who can do this.

So what we've known now is that carnivory has evolved in 14 families of flowering plants.

And like one of the things that I hadn't really thought about, like why they would do this, like it's like, great, that seems like a good strategy, I guess.

But it's especially helpful for plants that are living in harsh environments like mountaintops, which is where you'll find flowers.

This particular species, Saxifraga candelabrum, has yellow flowers.

It grows in rock crevices in the Tibetan Plateau.

And their stems and branches have these like reddish hairs that produce sticky stuff that insects can get trapped on.

So the researchers found that like on average, there were like 70 insects stuck to these hairs.

And they wanted to figure out like, you know, that seems like a... a wild coincidence that this potentially carnivorous plant has insects completely stuck to it.

Yeah, this feels like it couldn't just be a