BOYS' OWN COLUMN

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 88, 15 April 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

BOYS' OWN COLUMN

ANIMAL OR VEGETABLE KINGDOM ?

THE WEIRD CATERPILLAR PLANT.

Dear Boys,— Some long lime ago I was in Wanganui and in the library there I saw for the first time the weird grub plant. For a very long time laymen speculated at length whether the grub plant belonged to the animal or vegetable kingdom, i.e., whether it was a form of animal life or whether it was of the tree family. Some went so far as to say it belonged to both, starting life as a grub and ending as a plant. Of course this latter is quite impossible, and the truth of the matter is that it is a fungus—the lowest form of plant life. However, animal life does enter into its story, which makes most interesting reading. Known to botanists as Cordifceps, the vegetable caterpillar is a fungus and, like all fungus, lacks the green colouring matter which, in the presence of sunlight, enables a green plant to manufacture its food from the carbon dioxide in the air and the water obtained from the soil. Unable to obtain i(& own food, the grub plant has to devise some other means of having it served-all ready prepared. Animal food is as good to fungi as anything else, so if the microscopical spore, which is the seed of the plant ready to begiii' life, succeeds in coming to rest upon a caterpillar, he promptly, pierces the outer skin of his "host" with a hair-like tube. This tube branches and rebranches until it has extended the total length and breadth of the unfortunate victim. When one of these branches penetrates into the blood stream it produces long tubular bodies that divide into cells and develop to such an extent that the "host™ is killed. The cells feed greedily upon the body of the grub and soon nothing is left but its skin. Soon a small club-shaped shoot emerges from the head of the unfortunate host, and this may be best described as the seed pod, from which in due time countless thousands of spores will emerge to float about in the air to find a new host, or themselves to die of starvation because no caterpillar was thoughtful , enough to come their way and offer ** itself for sacrifise. f 1/ f y Truly Dame Nature holds some great surprises for those who delve into her workshop, y.-'