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Example of a sunstressed plant! (Sarracenia) (lemmy.zip)

submitted 4 days ago by howler@lemmy.zip to c/houseplants@mander.xyz

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Some plants react to the sun much like humans do, "getting a tan". It's called sun stressing!

For this picture I kept one of Scylla's "mouths" in the shadow (indirect light), so it shows its natural green colour, but I made sure that the other "mouth" enjoyed as much (direct) sun as possible.

The plant is not upset about this experiment at all. It keeps pushing "mouths" like crazy.

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[-] sirimeow@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago

That's really cool! I didn't know that, thanks for sharing and explaining

[-] HeadyBroccoli@lemmy.zip 6 points 4 days ago

For some more info on it, the purple you see is from pigments called anthocyanins (the same stuff that makes blueberries blue!). They’ve shown to have antioxidant properties in vitro. In plants they can act similar to melanin, acting as a solar protectant as you can see in OPs photo, basically it’s the plant “tanning”. Pretty cool stuff! Theres tons more to learn about anthocyanins but I’ll leave that up to you to discover.

[-] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 4 points 4 days ago

The proof of this theorem is left as an exercise for the reader.

Yours is a lot more upbeat, though. Thanks for the encouragement!

this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025

105 points (99.1% liked)

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