Are flying plants possible?
Is it possible for a plant to have the ability to fly?
More exactly, the plant would either need to live without having any roots (and it would never need to touch the ground), or with the ability to re-root itself in another location from time to time, or maybe a plant that has a permanent pedestal/base that it could detach itself from to avoid a predator or to hunt like a carnivorous plant. The plant would also need to ability to control its altitude, and keep it from floating higher and higher (or if it needs to re-root, to be able to come back down from the air).
The setting does not have to be on Earth but it must be able to support life. Bonus point if it's possible on an Earth-like planet.
Examples:
- Deku scrubs The Business scrub is a plant that can fly with the propeller on its head.
- Peahat Has a base it can return to after hunting. The propeller is under the plant. I suspect that neither of these two plants can fly for very long.
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1 answer
You could have plants that fly instead of float. Something like a biological spring that winds up, and when the plant has produced enough seeds and such the root releases and the spring unwinds spinning some kind of propeller like a Deku. The flight would be short, but one interesting use would be as a kind of land mine. While it's flying and spinning it's also spraying seeds like bullets in all directions.
There are earth plants that can move rapidly, but if you want something that can hunt it has to have some amount of intelligence. Things like venus fly traps move quickly when their trigger hairs are twitched, but they react to outward stimuli, not intelligently.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0526_050526_extremeplants.html
You could have some kind of plant/animal hybrid with different life cycles. Grows from a seed, stays rooted until it's animal level intelligence matures, then flies for short bursts looking for prey. when it makes a kill it takes nourishment from the fluids and plants seeds in the corpse to grow new plants. It could even hunt with the seeds, firing the seeds at prey. The mistletoe plant does something similar to spread it's seeds from tree to tree. Other plants have similar mechinisms:
http://www.virtualherbarium.org/GardenViews/GoingBallistic.html
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