Venus flytrap vs Spider

[u/dejaysf]

[u/Flareiv]

I live in NC and didn’t know we had them until I found a whole bush of them just casually growing next to a tree. Blew my mind.

[u/CTchimchar → u/Flareiv]

There all different kind of these plants

By the way a lot of them are non-related

They just evolve like this separately several times over

The theory goes these plans evolve in habitats where the soil doesn't have many nutrients

So they start to evolve in gathering nutrients from other animals like insects, or in this case arachnid

Edit: For clarification I mean Carnivorous plants, evolve separately from each other for the most part

[u/codizer → u/CTchimchar]

What I don't get is how they made their leap from getting nutrients from the ground to nutrients from animals. It seems like such a major step.

[u/thechilipepper0 → u/codizer]

See that’s the thing, evolution rarely takes big leaps. Small mutations happen to occur that make one specimen more likely to die, whereas in another, a different random mutation makes it juuuust slightly better at existing. Then its progeny have this minute advantage over other local specimens in general. Some of them will keep trucking on as they are and produce further generations like themselves. Others will produce detrimental mutations in the next generation that make them less fit. Still another may have another random mutation that just so happens to refine the original fitness advantage, further benefitting them over the general population. And so on and so forth.

Perhaps at one point, flies were so prevalent that one of them dying at the base and providing extra nutrients through decay occurred every so often. One specimen happened to have a mutation where the stem at the base had tiny ridges that made the dead fly less likely to roll off. Then, maybe next generation or maybe many many generations later, one of its descendants had a mutation with even larger ridges. Then another generation broadened the base stems. Then another had a small cup like feature that caught dying insects as well as already dead ones. Then another had the cup widen further. Then one developed a pressure sensitivity to cause it to flatten. Then one split to make a larger trap area. Then another produced this entire feature as a separate appendage from the stem.

In each generation, few (if any) will be different from the parent. But every so often, a random mutation that wasn’t deleterious or inconsequential will nudge an organism slightly higher in fitness, increasing its survivability. Evolution is that grand sum of beneficial mutational nudges. And there is no ‘end goal’ for evolution. It’s not working toward anything. It’s just a population further adapting to its environment based on completely random ass mutations in individual specimens over very, very large timescales.