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Red trap colour of the carnivorous plant Drosera rotundifolia does not serve a prey attraction or camouflage function

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posted on 2015-05-12, 12:53 authored by G.W. Foot, Stephen Rice, Jonathan MillettJonathan Millett
The traps of many carnivorous plants are red in colour. This has been widely hypothesized to serve a prey attraction function; colour has also been hypothesized to function as camouflage, preventing prey avoidance. We tested these two hypotheses in situ for the carnivorous plant Drosera rotundifolia. We conducted three separate studies: (i) prey attraction to artificial traps to isolate the influence of colour; (ii) prey attraction to artificial traps on artificial backgrounds to control the degree of contrast and (iii) observation of prey capture by D. rotundifolia to determine the effects of colour on prey capture. Prey were not attracted to green traps and were deterred from red traps. There was no evidence that camouflaged traps caught more prey. For D. rotundifolia, there was a relationship between trap colour and prey capture. However, trap colour may be confounded with other leaf traits. Thus, we conclude that for D. rotundifolia, red trap colour does not serve a prey attraction or camouflage function

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

BIOLOGY LETTERS

Volume

10

Issue

4

Pages

? - ? (5)

Citation

FOOT, G.W., RICE, S.P. and MILLETT, J., 2014. Red trap colour of the carnivorous plant Drosera rotundifolia does not serve a prey attraction or camouflage function. Biology Letters, 10 (4), DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.1024.

Publisher

The Royal Society / © The Authors

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This article was published in the journal, Biology Letters [The Royal Society /© The Authors]. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2013.1024

ISSN

1744-9561

Language

  • en

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