spontaneous firings of carnivorous aquatic utricularia traps temporal patterns and mechanical oscillations自发发射的肉食水生utricularia陷阱时间模式和机械振动.pdfVIP

Spontaneous Firings of Carnivorous Aquatic Utricularia Traps: Temporal Patterns and Mechanical Oscillations Olivier Vincent, Ivan Roditchev, Philippe Marmottant* ´ CNRS/Universite Grenoble 1, UMR 5588, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique, Grenoble, France Abstract Aquatic species of Utricularia are carnivorous plants living in environments poor in nutrients. Their trapping mechanism has fascinated generations of scientists and is still debated today. It was reported recently that Utricularia traps can fire spontaneously. We show here that these spontaneous firings follow an unexpected diversity of temporal patterns, from ‘‘metronomic’’ traps which fire at fixed time intervals to ‘‘random’’ patterns, displaying more scattered firing times. Some ‘‘bursting’’ traps even combine both aspects, with groups of fast regular firings separated by a variable amount of time. We propose a physical model to understand these very particular behaviors, showing that a trap of Utricularia accomplishes mechanical oscillations, based on continuous pumping and sudden opening of the trap door (buckling). We isolate the key parameters governing these oscillations and discuss the effect of their fluctuations. Citation: Vincent O, Roditchev I, Marmottant P (2011) Spontaneous Firings of Carnivorous Aquatic Utricularia Traps: Temporal Patterns and Mechanical Oscillations. PLoS ONE 6(5): e20205. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020205 Editor: Tom Waigh, University of Manchester, United Kingdom Received February 11, 2011; Accepted April 12, 2011; Published May 27, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Vincent et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and s