Eating meat

This is not a thread to make you feel guilty. It is to introduce some lesser-known carnivores

Lifeform of the week: Carnivorous plants | Earth | EarthSky

is a nice earth and sky story about carnivorous plants. Details the 5 kinds, and the reason why plants would do such a thing. Basically that their rooting environment does not supply adequate nutrition.

This situation reminds me of fungi that decompose wood. That food provides plenty of carbon, but not much of anything else. So these fungi face a similar nutritional challenges. They solve them in similar ways!

More than a few fungi we think of as decomposers also kill animals. Very small animals, including nematodes, paramecia and bacteria (note: bacteria are not animals per biology, but no appropriate collective term comes to mind. Mobile nutritional units?).

These sneaky fungi use only 2 of the plants' 5 ways, AFAIK. Those are snap traps and flypaper. The former work best on nematodes. Nematodes look something like (earth)worms but are not closely related. They are also really small. The fungi make a ring of cells with a nematode-sized hole. The victim slithers in and the ring quickly constricts. Then come the digestive enzymes, etc. Such fungi are actually sold as organic pest control, since many nematodes feed on crop-plant roots.

The flypaper approach is pretty much as you'd expect. Fungi create a patch of sticky cells. They may also release some alluring chemicals, although this is difficult to measure at the scale of tiny. All 3 snacks mentioned above can get stuck, then digested.

Why not the other 3 trap types. Fungi stoopid? Maybe not. I guess it is a matter of size. A large number of fungal cells would be required to make such traps. Not saying that fungi cannot make large multicellular structures (example is mushrooms that can contain oh about a zillion cells). But, like all evolutionary changes, the organism needs to somehow stumble upon it. Then it needs to confer more fitness than not doing it. So maybe fungi never tried, or it didn't profit them.

So all you rampant carnivores have some perhaps unexpec.ted company.

I wished to suggest to author Reshanov to consider writing another carnivory story, but the email address does not readily appear. She lives in Austin though, and may not be hard for a local to track down.

That's it - just some fun facts about your environment, while waiting for something interesting to happen in climate or whatnot.

 

McD = meat???

 

On offer is at least as meatlike as nematodes, paramecia and bacteria. It would certainly supply the needs of pitcher plants and fungi. I have to say that burger ads seem more compelling to me than other ads. They know how to push buttons,

 

Your emoticon needs droplets spraying out. Dentists call that 'gleeking' (little-known fact) as they are often in the line of fire.

 

I am not vegetarian, but a few says w/o is fine. There are clearly advantages in terms of ecological efficiency, but the global human diet appears to be moving in the opposite direction for now.

Highest protein yield per unit area usta be potatoes, but there may be something else now. Can't imagine it involving an animal intermediary though. But circumstances are not always about arable soil area. For example if you have pigs, chickens etc. and the waste runs downhill to some water body, can't do much better than algae -> X -> Y -> Tilapia.

Really just wanted to say, up top, that predation is not only done by animals with teeth. There are plenty of parasitic plants (example mistletoe) that get all their nutrition from other plants. Not called predators though. Perhaps the classification system is in need of an overhaul.