Venus Fly Trap

 
 

 Dionaea muscipula, the famous Venus' Fly Trap.
small venus fly trap icon VENUS flytrap snaps shut faster than you can blink. And now we know why. Whereas our sluggish movements are the result of muscles contracting, the plant snaps shut in the way that a torn tennis ball flips inside out.

When Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard University and his colleagues used a high-speed camera to film the leaves closing, they noticed that the curvature of the leaves flipped from convex to concave as the trap closes. The transformation takes just one-tenth of a second. They reasoned that the leaves were snapping from one stable shape to another - a movement that can occur much faster than muscle contraction.

grow your own venus flytrap!Although they do not yet know what happens at the cellular level, they have devised equations that describe the mechanical action. From the shape of the leaves, these predict whether the trap is able to shut, how soon after an insect lands it will start to close, and how fast the leaves will move. "Our model makes simple predictions based on experiments, and then further experiments bear these out," Mahadevan says.

Darwin was fascinated by the plant. "Our study still leaves us baffled about one question that motivated him - how did this mechanism evolve?" Mahadevan says.
This amazing plant is native to a small region in the Carolinas. Insects are trapped and digested by the plant to obtain nutrients; they are carnivorous plants. There are six small trigger hairs inside each trap. One hair touched twice, or two hairs touched once, signals the trap to snap shut. Empty traps reopen in a day or so.

Traps with prey remain closed for a week or two. Then, the trap will reopen exposing the dry shell of the victim. Flytraps do not need regular feeding and can go long periods without insects. If you are growing them in a condition where no insects can get caught, such as a cool greenhouse, feeding one trap a small insect every couple months is probably beneficial.

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A Venus FlyTrap Eating
 

What is the correct common name, anyway?

While there are many ways to spell "Venus's", we have now, after much study, chosen to drop the extra "s" for simplicity. Other plants named after Venus (the Goddess) include:

Venus' Looking-glass (Specularia)

Venus' Comb (Scandix)

Venus'-Hair Fern (Adiantum)

"Venus Fly Trap" is not really correct as it is not possessive and incorrectly implies (grammatically) that the plant is from Venus. This spelling is common, even in books.