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. 2015 Nov 24;8:plv140. doi: 10.1093/aobpla/plv140

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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Annals of Botany Company.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Figure 4. — The trapping mechanism of aquatic Utricularia. (A) Top view of a trap which depicts the repeatable ‘active slow deflation/passive fast suction’ sequence. Note the deformation of the lateral trap walls (which store elastic energy) in the ready-to-catch condition (upper image). The species shown is U. inflata. (B) When traps fire in air, they aspirate air bubbles. Too large a bubble can short-circuit the deflation process. The species shown is U. vulgaris; note the trap entrance (te), the stalk (st), the ‘antennae’ (an) and numerous filamentous algae growing on the trap body (fa). (C) Digital tracking of prey that becomes sucked into a bladder of U. inflata. The animal rotates and loops inside the trap. (D) A fully deflated trap of U. australis in the ready-to-catch condition; note the leaf (le) and ‘bristles’ (br) on the trap. The trap diameter (d1) between the lateral trap walls is indicated. (E) The same trap after firing (by manual triggering with a fine nylon thread). The trap diameter (now d2) has increased owing to the more or less relaxed trap walls. (F) After piercing the trap with a fine needle (hole not visible), the trap diameter (now d3) has further increased, which indicates that in (E), the pressure difference between the inside and outside of the trap was not yet completely levelled. (D–F) have identical scale bars. (G) High-speed video frames (recording speed: 10 000 fps) of a prey (p) capture event in U. vulgaris. The first image, which shows a fully deflated trap in the ready-to-catch state seen in an inclined frontal view, correlates with (D). The prey animal, presumably Chydorus spec., triggers the trapdoor (td), which opens (note also the threshold (th)). After 1.1 ms, the prey begins to swirl into the trap. After 3.3 ms, the door starts moving back until at 6.4 ms it is fully reclosed. At this time, the trap state corresponds to (E) and the lateral trap walls (tw) are still concave. This indicates that there is still a pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the trap and that the door has closed during the influx of water. (A and C) Modified from Vincent et al. (2011b).