Leaves That Lunch

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Leaves That Lunch
by Jonathan Shaw
Harvard Magazine

The most famous carnivore of the plant kingdom, the Venus flytrap, lures insects to its leafy green lips with a sweet-smelling scent, then snaps its mouth-like leaves shut in just 0.1 second to ensnare its prey. Scientists have long sought an explanation for how a plant, which has no muscles, can move fast enough to catch a fly. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, Gordon McKay professor of applied mathematics and mechanics, leading a cross-disciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, and biologists, recently found the answer, which appears in the January 27 issue of Nature. The plant uses elastic energy stored in the curvature of its leaves, which buckle shut when an insect brushes a hair trigger on the inner leaf surface.

The researchers observed, as did Charles Darwin, that the curvature of the plants’ leaves flipped from convex to concave when they closed. They hypothesized that the plant might be exploiting a dynamic instability in the leaf’s structure, flipping from one mode to the other in much the same way one can invert a soft contact lens.

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