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Ecophysiological Look at Plant Carnivory

Why Are Plants Carnivorous?

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Book cover All Flesh Is Grass

Part of the book series: Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology ((COLE,volume 16))

Abstract

About 650 species of vascular carnivorous (Latin: carnis – flesh, vorare – to swallow) plants occur throughout the world (e.g., Rice, 2006) out of the total of about 300,000 species of vascular plants. Carnivorous plants belong to 15–18 genera of 8–9 botanical families and five orders (Givnish, 1989; Juniper et al., 1989; Müller et al., 2004; Heubl et al., 2006; Porembski and Barthlott, 2006; Studnička, 2006). Owing to many remarkable and striking morphological, anatomical, physiological, and ecological features, carnivorous plants have always attracted considerable interest of both researchers and gardeners. Nevertheless, the degree and extent of knowledge of the main disciplines studying this particular ecological functional plant group have always considerably lagged behind the study of noncarnivorous plants. However, similar to the dynamically growing knowledge of noncarnivorous plants, the study of carnivorous plants has developed very rapidly and progressively within the last decade, mainly due to the use of modern molecular taxonomic approaches. Also, modern ecophysiological research of carnivorous plants has progressed considerably within the last decade and has elucidated most of the particulars of carnivorous plants.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to Dr. Miloslav Studnička on the occasion of his 60th birthday, for his great merits on studying carnivorous plants and their popularization in the Czech Republic. This study was partly funded by the Research Programme of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic # AV0Z 60050516. Thanks are due to Dr. Barry Rice for critically reading the manuscript and linguistic correction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Ecology, Institute of Botany, Dukelská 135, CZ-379 82, Třeboň, Czech Republic

    LubomÍr Adamec

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  1. LubomÍr Adamec
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Correspondence to LubomÍr Adamec .

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  1. , The Mina & Everard Goodman Fac. of Life, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel

    Zvy Dubinsky

  2. University of Jerusalem, Mevo Hadas 20, Efrat, 90435, Israel

    Joseph Seckbach

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Adamec, L. (2010). Ecophysiological Look at Plant Carnivory. In: Dubinsky, Z., Seckbach, J. (eds) All Flesh Is Grass. Cellular Origin, Life in Extreme Habitats and Astrobiology, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9316-5_21

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