Natures wonders: Carnivorous plant strategy (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 15, 2015, 14:52 (3598 days ago) @ David Turell

Is this a clever plan for more food, or are the researchers seeing too much?-http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/41904/title/Slippery-When-Wet/-
"Constantly wet pitchers caught more flying insects, but the untouched pitchers overall nabbed 2.5 times as many prey over the study period, mainly due to a 10 percent increase in batches of five or more ants—the primary food source of N. rafflesiana—trapped at a time. The scientists thus reasoned that alternating between ineffective and highly effective trap modes allows the plant to exploit the behavior of “scout” ants—those insects responsible for sourcing food and alerting their colonies to its location—by letting one ant escape in order to capture many more. “What looks like a disadvantage at first sight turns out to be a clever strategy to exploit the recruitment behavior of social insects,” Bauer said in a statement."