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Fatal Attraction Some creature uses all their power of attraction to capture their prey. |
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The Venus
flytrap exhibit one of the fastest movements in the plant
kingdom, its one of the plant kingdom's fastest and most ferocious
movements: at the blink-of-an-eye--it can snap its v-shaped
clamshell leaves around an insect in less than one-tenth of a
second and snaring a fly. The secret has been revealed
Venus flytrap--unlike
animals--have no muscles or brains--and plants are not known for
their ability to move quickly, as a team of scientists and engineers
point out in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal Nature--The
secret revealed: The flytrap's leaves snap from convex
to concave the same way that a contact lens can flip inside out;
said the scientists.
Wild Venus flytrap plants tends to deploy their wide hart shaped leaves just like solar panels which grab energy, by making the leaves wide during the time when the plant can take more energy from less light. And when the sun is at its strongest position--it can deploy its long slim leaves to stand out from the grass and be seen by insects. When the plant gets too much nourishment from the insects that it catches, it looses a lot of the red on its new growth and when the growth of the plant slows down by the lack of nourishment--it begins to deploy redder traps in full sun or during cooler weather. The Venus flytrap plant maybe serving some sort of evolutionary process and further adaptation by evolving a mean to acquire a more attractive color in the traps which the plant uses to attract more insects. |
Venus flytrap produces delicious
sweet-smelling sap and the trap snap shut when triggered by
touch on any 2 small hairs within the plant. A close-up inside the jaws of a Venus' Fly Trap, Dionaea muscipula. These trigger hairs signal the trap to close when two hairs are touched once or one hair is touched twice.
Normally,
the trigger hairs are visible to the human eye, but the image above
here has been enhanced and enlarged for you to spot them easily. The
Venus' Fly Trap, trap design makes it one of the most
fascinating and famous carnivorous plants in the world and snap it
clamshell leaves within one-tenth of a second. |
During
certain time of its biological stage when they came out of
dormancy or during spring time, the Venus Flytrap plant losses
almost all of the red. Some Venus Flytraps may have a lot of
red in their traps regardless of seasons, it may due to influences
of soil PH
being more acidity or alkaline that cause them to loose or
increase their
reddish color.
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What do butterflies do when it rains? And why butterflies are rarely seen when it rains? Michael Raupp, professor of entomology at the University of Maryland, offers this answer... Imagine a monarch butterfly searching for nectar or a mate in a meadow on a humid afternoon in July. Suddenly, a fast moving thunderstorm approaches, bringing gusty winds and large raindrops. For the monarch and other butterflies this is not a trivial matter. An average monarch weights roughly 500 milligrams and large raindrops have a mass of 70 milligrams or more. A 70mg size raindrop striking a monarch would be equivalent to your or I being pelted by water balloons with twice the mass of bowling balls.
The Monarch is a
poisonous butterfly. Animals that eat a Monarch get very sick (generally do not die),
these animals
remember that the brightly-colored "Monarch" butterfly made them very sick and
learn to
avoid them. This proboscis uncoils to sip food, and coils up again into a spiral when not in use. Monarchs drink nectar from many flowers, including milkweed, dogbane, red clover, thistle, lantana, lilac, goldenrod, etc. A
monarch butterfly flying away after feeding. Amateur and professional lepidopterists tell tales of butterflies darting into protective vegetations and scrambling beneath leaves when dark skies, strong breezes and the first raindrops signal an imminent storm. During heavy rains and wind, butterflies are rarely seen. Not only does rain pose a direct threat of injury or death, but the cool air associated with storms may also reduce temperatures below the thermal threshold for butterfly flight. In preparation for flights, these aerial acrobats expose their wings to direct sunlight, which rapidly warms their flight muscles. Overcast skies limit their ability to gather the solar radiation needed to take wind. A butterfly knocked from the air by raindrops thus faces the double threat of crashing in an inhospitable habitat where predators lay in wait and being unable to warm its body sufficiently to regain flight. little wonder, then, that when skies darken, butterflies seek shelter in their night time homes. Butterflies are quiescent when it is dark and take refuge in protected locations called roosts within one or two hours of sunset. Roosts may be tall grasses, perennial herbaceous plants, tangle leaves or woody shrubs, undersides of large leaves, caves or, in some cases, man made objects such as fences or hanging baskets. Butterflies may also roost in the vegetation beneath overhanging trees. The leaves of t he upper canopy intercept raindrops and reduce their impact on vegetation and butterflies below.
Heliconius exhibits curious fidelity to roosts, often returning to the same location or individual plant for several nights. When rain threatens, zebra butterflies enter their nocturnal roosts much earlier that they would on clear days. And, like us humans, they demonstrate considerable lethargy on rainy mornings, delaying their usual early departure by as much as several hours. Usually long stretches of rainy weather may even reduce the population of butterflies in a roosting group, because cool temperatures hinder the mobility and therefore their ability to escape from predators. Ultimately, what butterflies do in the rain is avoid a shower, they often resume patrolling and courting within minutes. So the next time the sky darkens and thundr rumbles, take a cue from the butterflies. Find a safe roost out of the rain, but as soon as the sun returns, go out and enjoy - (c) 2006 Scientific American.
The monarch butterfly
Adult female monarchs lay their eggs on the underside of milkweed leaves. These eggs hatch, depending on temperature, in three to twelve days. The larvae feed on the plant leaves for about two weeks and develop into caterpillars about 2 inches long. |
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Life
Cycle of a MONARCH butterfly Egg - The Monarch starts its life as a ridged, spherical egg only l/8th of an inch long. The eggs are always laid singly, on the underside of milkweed leaves. The female attaches the egg to the leaf with a quick-drying glue which she secretes along with the egg. The egg hatches in about 3 to 5 days. A tiny wormlike larva emerges. Larva - The larva (caterpillar) hatches from its egg and eats it. Then it eats milkweed leaves almost constantly. The caterpillar molts (loses its old skin) four times as it grows; after each molt it eats its old skin. When the larva is about 2 inches (5 cm) long, it will stop eating and find a place (like a protected branch) on which to pupate. The caterpillar's first meal is its own eggshell. After that, Monarch caterpillars eat the poisonous milkweed leaves to incorporate the milkweed toxins into their bodies in order to poison their predators. Milkweed (genus Asclepius) is a common plant that contains toxins. There are more than 100 species of this perennial herb, containing varying concentrations of toxic chemicals (glycosides). The Monarch is considered a beneficial insect because its caterpillar eats the noxious milkweed plant which invades some farms
Monarchs are found all around the world in sub-tropical to tropical areas. They are found in open habitats including meadows, fields, marshes, and cleared roadsides. The life span of the adult Monarch varies, depending on the season in which it emerged from the pupa and whether or not it belongs to a migratory group of Monarchs. Migratory Monarchs, which emerge from the pupa in late summer and then migrate south, live a much longer life, about 8-9 months. Adults that emerged in early summer have the shortest life spans and live for about two to five weeks. Those that emerged in late summer survive over the winter months.
It is a delicate process but for Gayle Hall, "It's a labor of love: tagging monarch butterflies as part of a programmed to monitor the movements of one of nature's most celebrated migrants", she said. Hall's tagged 80,000 to 100,000 butterflies yearly and they are released at an annual festival in the Texas city of Grapevine that honors the monarchs, famed for their overland migrations from Canada to Mexico and back again.
"Some monarchs travel up to 5,000KM in a journey which Each tag is pressed onto the monarch wing and have a unique identification number and a toll-free phone number and email for contact. Most Monarchs are caught in the wild for tagging (some farmed by breeders), even reared ones instinctively join the migration which have hundreds of millions of butterflies heading south to their Mexican wintering grounds. Taylor said; "The program in place since 1992 enable scientists to gather data and one certainty to emerge from the 14-year database was that monarch populations varied widely from year to year from weather-related factors. The populations which winter at several sites west of Mexico City are benchmark and counted by the 6.5 to 21 hectares they covered, each hectare is estimated to hold between 25 and 75 million monarchs". The monarch butterflies have plenty of natural hazards en route including predatory birds. The autumn migration is the highlight of the cycle. The spring and summer migrations span generations in a gradual re-colonization of the northern territory before the last batch makes the long trek back to Mexico. A
monarch butterfly flying away after feeding.
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Acknowledgment, source of information for Tracking Monarchs butterfly, ED Stoddard--Reuters, 31st Oct 2006 The Star, Environment T9
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