Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) are carnivorous plants that eat insects that land between their blushing leaves. A new study from Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz (JGU), published in Scientific Reports, revealed that these insect-hungry plants generate a measurable magnetic field when they snap-down their prey.
When insects land on the leaves of a Venus flytrap, the carnivorous plant uses electrical signals known as potential triggers to close their leaves to trap their prey. Physicists have shown using atomic magnetism that the electrical activity in this process generates biomagnetism.
"You could say the investigation is a little like performing an MRI scan in humans," physicist Anne Fabricant said. "The problem is that the magnetic signals in plants are very weak, which explains why it was extremely difficult to measure them with the help of older technologies."
Electrical Activity in Venus Flytraps
Fabricant told Live Science that under the laws of electromagnetism, wherever electrical activity is present there is also a magnetic activity, that includes humans, animals, and plants.
The magnetic field generated by Venus flytraps' is more than a million times weaker than the Earth's magnetic field, the researchers said. It is a byproduct of the electrical activity from when the carnivorous plant snaps its leaves to trap its prey, rather than serving any purpose at all.
Biomagnetism is a common phenomenon among living organisms and studies have found it on animals and humans, although not much is known about it in the plant world.
The team used atomic magnetometers that contain vapor of atoms sensitive to magnetic fields. Then they triggered the plants using heat to create electrical energy, in the form of an action potential that is similar to the electrical flow in humans that allow cells to communicate.
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Very Weak Biomagnetism
The problem with detecting the biomagnetism in Venus flytraps is that it is very weak, making it harder for the researchers to measure it. Gizmodo reported that the researchers had to conduct the experiment in a magnetic silent room to properly detect the magnetic field generated by the carnivorous plant.
"If [the field were] too small, then we wouldn't be able to measure it with our sensors," Fabricant said. She added that there is a possibility that they would measure zero when multiple fields are created in opposite directions that could cancel their efforts of measuring the plant's biomagnetism.
But in the end, they are fortunate enough to find that the Venus flytrap generated a magnetic field of up to 0.5 picotesla, similar to the amount generated by nerve impulses in animals.
According to Science Daily, the physicists from JGU aim to measure smaller biomagnetic signals from other plants in the future.
They hope that such noninvasive technologies could be used someday to detect the biomagnetic responses of the plants to sudden temperature changes, chemicals, and pests without having to damage the plants using electrodes.
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