Meeting Abstract
Carnivorous plants have evolved a myriad of highly elaborate structures in order to attract, trap, and retain their prey. Notable among these are the main trapping surfaces of tropical pitcher plants (Nepenthes and Heliamphora), which exhibit highly ordered, hierarchical microstructures that confer a suite of interesting properties, including (super)hydrophilicity, water film stabilisation, and directional water spreading. These surfaces are unusual in that they are highly wettable yet lack the discontinuities in the waxy cuticle that characterise most hydrophilic plant surfaces. We explored how a glabrous, non-glandular, non-porous, primary plant surface can nonetheless exhibit these wetting properties, investigating the influence of both topography and surface chemistry in order to disentangle their relative contributions. Understanding how the form and chemistry of these structures renders them well-wettable and capable of rapid directional water transport has the potential to open new avenues for research into bioinspired technologies.
