are found with a wide diversity of bacteria to aid in phosphorus digestion. Enhanced respiration Utricularia have significantly greater respiration rates than most vegetative tissue, primarily due to their complex energy-dependent traps. Upon triggering, prey is captured through a two-step ATP-driven ion-pumping process where organisms are sucked in by internal negative pressure achieved by pumping water out of the trap and into the external environment. Recent research suggests that COX subunit I (COX1), a rate limiting enzyme in the cellular respiration pathway associated with the synthesis of ATP, has evolved under positive Darwinian selection in the Utricularia–Genlisea clade. There appear to be adaptive substitutions of two contiguous cysteines (C-C motif) at the docking point of COX1 helix 3 and cytochrome c. This C-C motif, absent in ~99.9% of databased Eukaryota, Archaea, and Bacteria, suggests a conformational change that might decouple electron transport from proton pumping. By doing so, the intermembrane space could sequester protons are store them until the ATP is needed. Such decoupling would allow Utricularia to optimize power output (energy × rate) during times of need, albeit with a 20% cost in energy efficiency. According to the ROS mutation hypothesis, the sequestration of these protons has cellular consequences, which could lead to nucleotide substitutions. Oxidative phosphorylation is an imperfect process, which allows electrons to leak into the lumen, and only partially reduce oxygen. This partially reduced oxygen is a reactive oxygen species (ROS) which can be very harmful, unlike its fully reduced counterpart, the water molecule. When there is greater potential change between the lumen and intermembrane space, the leakiness of the electron transport chain also increases, therefore creating a higher production of ROS in the mitochondria of Utricularia. ROS is harmful to cells, as it produces damage to nucleotides and helical DNA. Therefore, the increased cellular respiration of Utricularia bladders combined with the unique sequestration of protons could lead to its high nucleotide substitution rates, and therefore its wide diversity. This structural evolution seems highly unlikely to have arisen by chance alone; therefore, many researchers suggest this key adaption in Utricularia allowed for radical morphological evolution of relatively simple trap structures to highly complex and efficient snares. This adaptation may have enhanced the genus' fitness by increasing its range of prey, rate of capture, and retention of nutrients during prey decomposition. Lloyd's experiments In the 1940s, Francis Ernest Lloyd conducted extensive experiments with carnivorous plants, including Utricularia,