Honduran white bats! They make a tent by chewing the leaf to cause it to
collapse downward like that, and then huddle up together inside to
roost.
Tag: leaf
This Never Before Seen Spider Looks Like a Leaf
For Matjaz Kuntner, it was just another evening trek through southwestern China’s Yunnan rain forest—until his headlamp illuminated a strand of spider silk.
That’s not so surprising on its own. But what attracted the
arachnologist’s attention is the silk appeared to attach a leaf to a
tree branch. After looking closer, Kuntner realized one of these leaves
was actually a spider.
“If there’s a web, there’s a spider,” says Kuntner, of the
Smithsonian Institution and the Evolutionary Zoology Laboratory in
Slovenia.
The arachnid uses its silk to attach leaves to tree branches, and then hides among the branches, according to a new study in the Journal of Arachnology.
The researchers still aren’t sure why the spider does this, but they
believe it’s likely to hide from predators or sneak up on prey…
Drosera Venusta has stalked glands that secrete sweet mucilage to attract and
ensnare insects and enzymes to digest them, and sessile glands that absorb the resulting nutrient soup. Insects and small prey are attracted by the sweet
secretions of the peduncular glands. Upon touching these, the prey
become entrapped by sticky mucilage which prevents their progress or
escape. Eventually, the prey either succumb to death through exhaustion
or through asphyxiation as the mucilage envelops them and clogs their spiracles.
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen
if you crossed a slug with a leaf, friends, we have your answer right
here. This strange creature that appears to be part leaf, part slug and
part tongue is a Leaf-vein slug (Athoracophorus bitentaculatus),
a species of land slug native to New Zealand. They’re nocturnal and
thought to feed primarily on algae and fungi found on the surface of
plants, which means they don’t damage plants like plenty of other slug
species do.
This particular specimen was photographed by Redditor Aaronlolwtf while they were out trimming some flax last year. To view more examples of this fascinating little creature, click here. (via Reddit)
Could plants move in connection with the moon?
There is a possibility in the correlation between the moon and the movement of leaves.
Peter
Barlow of the University of Bristol made the discovery while attempting
to determine why the leaves of some plants seemed to move up and down
during the night despite the lack of sunlight.
After gathering as much data as he could on
the subject Barlow hypothesized that water motion within the joints
of the leaves may be responsible for this peculiar form of movement. The phenomenon has since come to be referred to as “leaftide”.
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