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First published online August 13, 2009; doi:10.3732/ajb.0900054 American Journal of Botany 96: 1612-1619 (2009) © 2009 Botanical Society of America, Inc.

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Construction costs, payback times, and the leaf economics of carnivorous plants¹

Harvard University, Harvard Forest, 324 North Main Street, Petersham, Massachusetts 01366 USA

ABSTRACT

Understanding how different plant species and functional types "invest" carbon and nutrients is a major goal of plant ecologists. Two measures of such investments are "construction costs" (carbon needed to produce each gram of tissue) and associated "payback times" for photosynthesis to recover construction costs. These measurements integrate among traits used to assess leaf-trait scaling relationships. Carnivorous plants are model systems for examining mechanisms of leaf-trait coordination, but no studies have measured simultaneously construction costs of carnivorous traps and their photosynthetic rates to determine payback times of traps. We measured mass-based construction costs (CC_mass) and photosynthesis (A_mass) for traps, leaves, roots, and rhizomes of 15 carnivorous plant species grown under greenhouse conditions. There were highly significant differences among species in CC_mass for each structure. Mean CC_mass of carnivorous traps (1.14 ± 0.24 g glucose/g dry mass) was significantly lower than CC_mass of leaves of 267 noncarnivorous plant species (1.47 ± 0.17), but all carnivorous plants examined had very low A_mass and thus, long payback times (495–1551 h). Our results provide the first clear estimates of the marginal benefits of botanical carnivory and place carnivorous plants at the "slow and tough" end of the universal spectrum of leaf traits.

Key Words: carnivorous plants • construction costs • cost–benefit analysis of botanical carnivory • photosynthesis • plant economics • payback time • universal spectrum of leaf economics

Received for publication 19 February 2009. Accepted for publication 21 April 2009.

FOOTNOTES

¹ The authors thank R. Sage for use of his microbomb calorimeter; K. Griffin, L. Patrick, and N. M. Holbrook for assistance with the heat-of-combustion method; P. Kuzeja, K. Savage, and J. Butler for technical assistance; and H. Poorter, W. Carlson, and S. Stark, two anonymous reviewers, and an Associate Editor for comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. This research was supported by NSERC of Canada postdoctoral fellowship to J.D.K. and NSF grants 02-35128, 04-00759, 04-52254, and 05-46180 to A.M.E.

² Author for correspondence (e-mail: aellison{at}fas.harvard.edu)

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