World's Fastest Plants

Bunchberry - World's fastest plant explodes with pollen

 Cornus
canadensis (bunchberry or Canadian dogwood) grow in dense carpets in
the tiaga or boreal forests of the northern hemisphere. Flowers bloom in
late spring and produce small, edible, red berries during the summer.
Credit: J. Edwards.

Like a medieval
catapult, the bunchberry dogwood shoots pollen grains into the air
faster than the Venus flytrap can snap its jaws shut, giving this
launcher the speed record for plants.

"Most people think of
plants as stationary and sedentary," said Joan Edwards of Williams
College. "We were even surprised how fast this flower opens."

Using high-speed video observations, Edwards and her colleagues timed the tiny explosions of Cornus Canadensis,
a species of dogwood that covers the ground of spruce-fir forests from
Virginia to Canada. The flower opens its petals and fires its pollen in
less than 0.5 milliseconds.

This discharge is quicker than other
speedy organisms: the Venus flytrap closes in 100 milliseconds; the
froghopper (an insect) leaps in 0.5 to 1.0 milliseconds; the mantis
shrimp (a tiny crustacean) kicks in 2.7 milliseconds.



Source: www.livescience.com

 This shows a flower first closed and then open. The bar is 0.04 inches (1mm). Credit: M. Laskowski.

 Bunchberry
flower opening, recorded on video at 10,000 frames per second. Time
elapsed is indicated. First frame shows a closed flower with four petals
fused at the tip, restraining the stamens. Scale bar is 1mm. Credit: D.
Whitaker, M. Laskowski, A. Acosta, J. Edwards.



Venus Flytrap's Speed Secret Revealed

 Closed cilia around the prey

The
Venus Flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is a carnivorous plant that catches
and digests animal prey—mostly insects  and arachnids. Its trapping
structure is formed by the terminal portion of each of the plant's
leaves and is triggered by tiny hairs on their inner surfaces. When an
insect or spider crawling along the leaves contacts a hair, the trap
closes if a different hair is contacted within twenty seconds of the
first strike. The requirement of redundant triggering in this mechanism
serves as a safeguard against a waste of energy in trapping objects with
no nutritional value.

The carnivorous Venus flytrap plant can snap its clamshell leaves around an insect in less than a second. But how?

Unlike
animals, plants have no muscles or brains. And plants are not known for
their ability to move quickly, as a team of scientists and engineers
point out in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal Nature.

The
secret has been revealed: The flytrap's leaves snap from convex to
concave the same way that a contact lens can flip inside out, the
scientists say.

The team cut up leaves to study their natural
curls, and also painted fluorescent dots on intact leaves to track their
insect-devouring action with high-speed cameras.

Like most
lenses, Venus flytrap leaves are doubly curved, that is, curved in two
directions, which allows the leaves to store elastic energy.

With
a contact lens, the two directions are perpendicular to one another.
With a Venus flytrap leaf, they are not. That property creates an
especially rapid elasticity that causes the leaf to snap even more
quickly from convex to concave.

Source: www.livescience.com, wikipedia.org

 Venus Flytrap leaf

Bamboo - The Fastest Growing Woody Plants in the World



Bamboo is a group of perennial evergreens in the true grass family Poaceae, subfamily Bambusoideae, tribe Bambuseae. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family.

In
bamboo, as with other grasses, the internodal regions of the plant stem
are hollow and the vascular bundles in the cross section are scattered
throughout the stem instead of in a cylindrical arrangement. The
dicotyledonous woody xylem is also absent. The absence of secondary
growth wood causes the stems of monocots, even of palms and large
bamboos, to be columnar rather than tapering.

Bamboos are also
the fastest growing woody plants in the world. They are capable of
growing up to 60 centimetres (24 in.) or more per day due to a unique
rhizome-dependent system. However, this astounding growth rate is highly
dependent on local soil and climatic conditions.

Bamboos are of
notable economic and cultural significance in East Asia and South East
Asia where the stems are used extensively in everyday life as building
materials and as a highly versatile raw product, and the shoots as a
food source.

Source: wikipedia.org