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Article Dans Une Revue Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Année : 2011

Ultra-fast underwater suction traps

Résumé

Carnivorous aquatic Utricularia species catch small prey animals with millimeter-sized underwater suction traps, which have fascinated scientists since Darwin's early work on carnivorous plants. Suction takes place after mechanical triggering and is due to a release of stored elastic energy in the trap body, accompanied with a very fast opening and closure of a trapdoor which otherwise closes the trap entrance watertight. The exceptional trapping speed far above human visual perception impeded profound investigations up to now. Using highspeed video imaging and special microscopy techniques, we obtained fully time-resolved recordings of the door movement. We found that this unique trapping mechanism conducts suction in less than a millisecond and therefore ranks among the fastest plant movements known. Fluid acceleration reaches very high values, leaving little chances for prey animals to escape. We discovered that the door deformation is morphologically predetermined, and actually performs a buckling/un-buckling process including a complete trapdoor curvature inversion. This process, that we predict using dynamical simulations and simple theoretical models, is highly reproducible: the traps are autonomously repetitive as they fire spontaneously after 5-20 hours and reset actively to their ready-to-catch condition.
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Dates et versions

hal-00567016 , version 1 (17-02-2011)

Identifiants

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Olivier Vincent, Carmen Weisskopf, Simon Poppinga, Tom Masselter, Thomas Speck, et al.. Ultra-fast underwater suction traps. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011, doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.2292. ⟨10.1098/rspb.2010.2292⟩. ⟨hal-00567016⟩

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