What turned an ordinary primate into a species capable of civilization, consciousness and mass violence?Botanists are still proving Charles Darwin right with their recent identification of a new carnivorous plant growing in China’s mountainous forests.
Saxifraga candelabrum is a small, yellow flower with a taste for flesh that may one day help protect endangered crops, and researchers have revealed their detailed analysis of the carnivorous plant, conducted both in the field and the laboratory, in a recent paper published in Nature Communications.
The carnivorous plant attracts, traps, and finally digests prey, typically consisting of fruit flies and other small insects, breaking them down with a caustic enzyme that it produces.
Although it was philosopher Herbert Spencer who actually coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” it was Charles Darwin who developed the concept behind it in his work on natural selection. With an eye towards survival in a harsh natural world, Darwin suggested in 1875 that some plants in the genus Saxifraga may be more than just beautiful flowers—they may also be very patient hunters.
Darwin’s suspicion centered on Saxifraga species other than S. candelabrum, the plant examined in the new study. However, the basis for his hypothesis holds true: the father of evolutionary biology focused on the microscopic hairs covering the plants’ surfaces, a feature shared by both the species he studied and the newly confirmed carnivorous plant.
Darwin suggested these hairs acted as a trap, capturing insects drawn to the flowers and holding them in place as the plants slowly absorbed nutrients from them. He was right.
Most carnivorous plants rely on highly specialized structures to capture prey. The iconic clamping leaves of Dionaea muscipula, better known as the Venus flytrap, are one example. Another is Low’s pitcher plant, which lures insects into its pitcher-shaped trap before digesting them.
S. candelabrum, however, employs a far subtler strategy. Rather than relying on elaborate trapping structures, it uses innocuous-looking hairs covering its flowers and stems. Once insects land on them, they discover the bristles are exceptionally sticky, trapping them until the plant can digest them.
“The discovery of Saxifraga candelabrum reminds us that many inconspicuous carnivorous plants, or plants with partial carnivorous traits, may still exist in nature,” said lead author Hang Sun, a botanist at the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The team’s research involved a great deal of fieldwork, observing S. candelabrum consuming insects in the mountain forests of China. However, it was their detailed genetic analysis in the lab that later showed how similar the plant was to other carnivorous species, despite its unusually benign appearance.
As part of their laboratory experiments, the researchers fed the plants fruit flies while closely monitoring their behavior. These observations allowed the team to identify digestive enzymes secreted by the plant to break down nitrogen-rich nutrients from its prey.
Identifying a new carnivorous plant species is an uncommon achievement for botanists, with the last such discovery occurring only five years ago. Even more remarkable is that the finding so closely aligns with Charles Darwin’s century-old prediction.
The researchers say the discovery is more than a botanical curiosity. A better understanding of how carnivorous plants digest insects could eventually aid the development of natural pesticides and other agricultural tools, potentially transforming these tiny predators into allies for protecting the world’s food supply.
The paper, “Identification of Carnivory in the Flowering Plant Saxifraga Via Multidisciplinary Evidence,” appeared in Nature Communications on August 4, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org.
An unusual phenomenon that has been recognized around the world for more than a century has finally been resolved: what are the origins of the distinctive, stair-like ridges that form on steep hillsides?
These features, known as “terracettes,” have long puzzled scientists, and the question of how they form has attracted some of history’s greatest minds, including Charles Darwin.
The famous naturalist described these features as “Little horizontal ledges, one above another,” which he said had been “observed on steep grassy slopes in many parts of the world.”
According to Darwin, the formation of terracettes had “been attributed to animals traveling repeatedly along the slope in the same horizontal lines while grazing,” although he adds that “Professor Henslow (a most careful observer) told Sir J. Hooker that he was convinced that this was not the sole cause of their formation,” with the implication that these curious, structured features on steep hills might have geological origins, rather than those attributable solely to biology.
Now, researchers may finally have an answer to this pastoral riddle that baffled the likes of Darwin more than a century ago, settling the scientific debate over their origins.
Benjamin Seleb, the lead author of a new study detailing the findings, said the mystery of terracettes first attracted his attention in 2024 after he observed them firsthand during a hike in the Alps.
“I suspected the numerous grazing cows—hard to miss with their clanking bells—had something to do with it, and was already sketching out how I would model their movement before the hike was over,” Seleb says.
“It wasn’t until I got back to my hotel and started digging into the topic that I learned about the contested origins of these terracettes,” Seleb adds. “With my curiosity piqued, I got to work building a simple model to ask whether grazing animals really could reshape mountains.”
According to Seleb and a team of collaborators from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, computer modeling was employed to reshape hillsides into these distinctive “stepped” formations. The findings reveal that the most likely explanation is that repetitive pathways followed by grazing animals such as sheep and cattle produce remarkably ordered landscape patterns over time.
To test their hypothesis, the research team simulated the movement of individual animals across steep slopes. For their analysis, they also introduced a few rules, which revealed that the “virtual grazers” preferred traversing hillsides in long, horizontal pathways that form gradual inclines. This makes sense, since it is a method of ascent that requires less energy, and humans have also traditionally employed similar approaches (think of mountain trails, which, rather than ascending straight uphill, follow longer sloping inclines and switchbacks where directional changes are necessary).
With each simulated footstep, soil and vegetation become compacted, producing subtle alterations to the terrain over time. As these pathways form, animals over successive future generations are thereby encouraged to follow similar routes, and with time, the familiar terraced patterns emerge.
“People have argued about terracettes for over a century,” says Professor Saad Bhamla, one of the study’s co-authors and leader of the Bhamla Lab of Extraordinary Organisms, which describes its efforts as work that “seeks to understand how organisms do amazing things.”
“Some say [terracettes] are purely geological, just slow soil creep and slumping,” Bhamla recently said. “Others say animals create them, and the standard criticism for the animal-origin camp is that the animals wander around randomly, so how could they ever carve something this regular?”
“What we show is that they can and that this regularity emerges out of that chaotic, random movement, not in spite of it, through the back-and-forth between the animals and the ground they’re chewing up with their mouths and packing down with their feet,” Bhamla adds.
Bhamla and his team say their research offers another example demonstrating how complex natural landscapes can emerge from simple, uncoordinated behavior, involving a process known as stigmergic feedback. This involves organisms that gradually reshape their shared environment over time.
The result of their work is an answer to a mystery that has persisted for many generations, and not only that, but also a pathway toward understanding the various ways animals influence landscapes more broadly.
The team’s findings were detailed in a new paper, “Moo-ving mountains: grazing agents drive terracette formation on steep hillslopes,” which appeared in Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
One of nature’s most mysterious predators isn’t a mammal stalking remote forests or jungles, nor any large, finned creature lurking in the ocean depths: it is a bizarre little plant that grows only in certain wetland areas along the East Coast of the United States.
With the distinctive hinged leaves that it uses to capture insects, the Venus flytrap is one of nature’s most curious offerings. The small bog-dwelling plant owes its success to the way it can generate an inviting aroma with the nectar it produces, which lures insects. Then, with the help of tiny follicles that act as triggers, the insects become trapped within the flytrap’s leaves as they close like jaws around its prey.
Scientists have long been perplexed by exactly how these plants can react quickly enough to capture even some of the fastest flying insects. Even Charles Darwin seemed baffled by these curious examples of carnivorous flora, describing them as “a plant [that] should secrete, when properly excited, a fluid containing an acid and ferment, closely analogous to the digestive fluid of an animal.”
While the exact mechanism that allows the mysterious Venus flytrap to carry out its distinctive method of feeding has long remained unknown, new research is finally shedding light on the mystery.
According to recent experiments detailed in a new study, when the hair-trigger mechanism is activated on these plants, cells on the jaw-like leaves soften, which initiates the closing movement within fractions of a second, trapping any insects unlucky enough to have landed searching for nectar.
Dr Yoël Forterre, a physicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille University, says that this movement had been so mysterious to Darwin that “he was convinced that the plant had a muscle inside, but plants do not have muscles and they do not have nerves.”
“For more than a century there have been many hypotheses,” Forterre, senior author of the recent study, said. “It’s very surprising that plant cell walls can tune their mechanical properties so fast.”
One of the primary issues with resolving the plant’s curious mechanism involved overcoming challenges associated with measuring such a remarkably fast system of movement, let alone one in a plant, which possesses none of the usual mechanisms nature relies on for such activities.
Equally perplexing is that the Venus flytrap seemingly recognizes when an accidental trigger has been initiated, rather than a successful capture of an insect.
“If you close it accidentally with a drop of water, it will close and then reopen the next day,” Forterre says. “If it catches an insect, it has to digest it and dissolve the skeleton, which will take several weeks.”
In experiments Forterre and his colleagues performed, dental glue was used to secure the plant’s leaves, which allowed for the normal trigger mechanisms to be engaged, but left the plant’s leaves open throughout the process.
Past research had already shown that electrical signals had been detected coinciding with the manipulation of the trigger hairs present on the plant’s leaves, in which this sudden surge of electricity “activates” the plant’s closing mechanism within a fraction of a second.
Applying a new approach, Forterre and colleagues used the metallic tip of a nanoindenter, devices used to make very small mechanical measurements. Applying the device to the outer leaves revealed that its normal stiffness appeared to soften significantly once the hair mechanisms were triggered.
The reason this occurs, according to Forterre, is that the cells themselves temporarily become more flexible. Past theories suggested that the movement was initiated by the movement of water contained within the leaf.
The newly-identified mechanism reveals a process very similar to the function of a plunger, which, if inverted, will flip back to its normal position when pressure is applied.
Forterre says he is unaware of any similar plant in nature that displays such unusual mechanical properties, which he says allows the Venus flytrap to initiate a “very rapid change of mechanical properties of the cells.”
“I’ve been obsessed by this for 20 years,” Forterre recently told The Guardian, noting that “as a physicist, I thought we should understand the motor, the forces.”
Now, thanks to his team’s findings, one of the plant kingdom’s strangest inhabitants has finally revealed its secrets.
The team’s new study, “Fast cell wall softening causes Venus flytrap closure,” appeared in Science on June 11, 2026.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
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