Uncovering the Mechanical Tricks of Plants

Plants have the same basic needs as animals: energy, nutrients, water, and an ability to reproduce. Yet unlike animals, they must achieve these needs without muscles, the contractile machinery that drives most animal motion. This fundamental constraint makes plant motion rare, slow, and seemingly limited. And yet, in some form all plants do move, and sometimes with startling ingenuity, a manipulation of geometry, mechanical forces, and/or material properties. In seed dispersal, plants can generate in some instances incredibly rapid motion by storing energy over hours or days only to release it in milliseconds. Other plants capture prey, a phenomenon that almost always requires a clever mechanical or geometric trap.

In this talk, I will discuss work in our group to understand some of the wonderful tricks of plants. Through a combination of mathematical modeling, experiments, and physical analogues, we seek to uncover how plants turn passive materials into active solutions. Focusing on specific examples of explosive seed dispersal, carnivorous traps, and tropic responses to environmental stimuli, I will show how mechanical and geometric analyses reveal the engineering logic of these systems.