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Newly Discovered Carnivorous Plant Devours Underground Worms
from the Christian Science Monitor
Sticky underground leaves help a Brazilian plant to capture and digest worms, a hitherto unknown way for carnivorous plants to catch victims, scientists find.
The rare plant Philcoxia minensis is found in the tropical savannas of Brazil, areas rich in biodiversity and highly in need of conservation. Although some of the plant's millimeter-wide leaves grow above ground as expected, strangely, most of its tiny, sticky leaves lie beneath the surface of the shallow white sands on which it grows.
"We usually think about leaves only as photosynthetic organs, so at first sight, it looks awkward that a plant would place its leaves underground where there is less sunlight," said researcher Rafael Silva Oliveira, a plant ecologist at the State University of Campinas in Brazil. "Why would evolution favor the persistence of this apparently unfavorable trait?"
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