Monster Plants on Alien Planets

Mon-ster Plants on Earth & Alien Planets

Monster plants on Earth are gruesome to look at, frightening and have evolved a genome that favors a taste for flesh. A variety of these carni-vorous plants live on the Earth and are so fast moving that they can catch their prey in an instant, then proceed to digest animal bodies in their adapted tummies.

The first two photos illustrate Earthen plants that have developed a taste for meat. If these plants look like gruesome monsters, one can only imagine the development of alien plants on other planets in the galaxy that have evolved according to a different genome set, unlike life on Earth.

The plants evolved when photosynthesis no longer became a prime factor in the life cycle of plants evolving on a planet with less sunlight. The plants would most likely develop another way to survive, by capturing and eating small animals, like mice and other rodent-like creatures.

Society has long shown films with monster plants like The Day of the Triffids, a science fiction movie. 

The Day of the Triffids is one example, a 1951 post-apocalyptic novel by the English science fiction author John Wyndham.

After most people in the world are blinded by an apparent meteor shower, an aggressive species of plant starts killing people. 

The protagonist is Bill Masen, a biologist who has made his living working with triffids—tall, venomous, carnivorous plants capable of locomotion.

Due to his background, Masen suspects they were bioengineered in the U.S.S.R. and accidentally released into the wild. 

Because of the excellent industrial quality of an oil produced by and obtained from the triffids, there is heavy triffid cultivation around the world. WIKI

Left: Fiction - One can make guesses and estimates of the behavior and appearance of alien plants on other worlds. The rules of evolution and randomness may be different on alien planets, due to varying environments with gravity, radiation, atmosphere, growing soil, changes in environment, animal life, light intensity, and life genome.

It's not too difficult to imagine a massive plant living within a gravity environment several times of Earth, with strong leaves and ensnaring teeth, much like the Earth's Venus Fly Trap plant that rapidly catches and devours insects for their meat.

Monster Venus Fly Trap Flesh Eating Experiments

Venus Fly Trap grown by Humanoido for flesh eating experiments

Monster Venus Fly Trap

FLESH EATING EXPERIMENTS
What would it take for a small fly and insect eating Venus Fly Trap plant to grow to giant size and suddenly start consuming larger flesh-bearing creatures for supper like dog size animals? How did these plants develop the taste for flesh?

It takes thousands of years for genetic life to evolve, mutate and change into a form variation. If carnivorous plants lived in an environment that caused a growth spurt, the mouth leaves could grow much larger and theoretically start consuming larger and larger prey. But what other factors could contribute to a plant like the Venus Fly Trap making it grow much larger?

First of all, why bother with carnivory? Most carnivorous plants receive a lot of sunlight but grow in waterlogged soils that are extremely low in nutrients. The ancestors of today’s carnivorous plants needed to get their nutrition (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus) from another source, and the high light levels meant they could afford to be less efficient at photosynthesis by turning their leaves into traps.

Studies show carnivorous plants used dextrous genetic shuffling to evolve the ability to catch and digest protein-rich meals. Many plants have the necessary genes and the path to become meat eating is wide open. The Venus flytrap lived in nitrogen poor environments and therefore adapted to gathering additional nutrients by catching and consuming insects. They use modified leaves, or pads, wide with short stiff trigger hairs, that snap shut when an insect lands—but only after the pads sense multiple touches on their trigger hairs.

We envision genetics and DNA strands taking a hit from a random cosmic ray and turning on the growth trigger. The carnivorous plants grow larger and larger until the hunger requirement for food also increases to a situation where small insects don't provide enough meat for sustenance. It then bends open its strong large leaves to allow small animals to step in to get at the sweet nectar secretions which also serve as a sticky bond to semi capture the animal which causes it to struggle and activate the leaf closing mechanism and digestion begins. Mice, small rodents, cats and dogs beware!

Here at the Lab, we highly encourage cultivating and evolving the Venus Fly Trap plant species. Although widely cultivated for sale, the population of the Venus flytrap has been rapidly declining in its native range. The species is currently under Endangered Species Act review by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

https://humanoidolabs.blogspot.com/2021/11/monster-venus-fly-trap-flesh-eating.html

https://humanoidolabs.blogspot.com/2015/02/man-eating-plant-creatures-from-outer.html

https://humanoidolabs.blogspot.com/2021/11/stop-eating-your-friends.html