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The Venus Flytrap - Videos of a Plant That Catches Its Food

Updated on June 24, 2016

The Venus Flytrap is a fascinating plant, named after the Roman Goddess of love and beauty ... Venus. It is able to catch, trap and digest small creatures, such as insects and spiders.

You can see it in action in the videos below.

It has sensitive hinged leaves with tiny hairs on the inner surface. When it senses something touch a hair, and then touch another hair within twenty seconds, the two sides of the leaf snap shut, trapping whatever was on the leaf inside. This amazing sensory system means that the plant doesn't waste energy closing unless something alive is really on it. The edges of the leaf form a kind of cage to stop its prey from escaping.

The leaf eventually closes completely and enzymes are released which digest the animal. This takes ten days, and then the leaf reopens.

It is still not known for sure how the leaf closes so quickly.

Videos of the Venus Flytrap in Action

This collection of videos demonstrates how quickly the Venus Flytrap can move. It is able to close its leaf in as fast a time as one tenth of a second!

The last two videos are filmed using a process called time lapse photography, where a photo is taken every so often from the same position, and then those photos are put together to create a video that appears to speed up time.

Wild Venus Flytraps

All plants survive by absorbing nutrients from the soil they are planted in and from the air.

Where Venus Flytraps differ is that they grow in poor. waterlogged soil, so insects provide additional nutrients to help them to thrive.

They are native to North America from the areas of North and South Carolina, close to the Cape Fear River. Unfortunately, because of its popularity as an unusual house plant, it is now endangered in the wild.

The Venus Flytraps you see for sale are especially grown in greenhouses, and can be found all over the world.

Venus Flytrap Reproduction

The Venus Flytrap has two ways of reproducting.

Some plants will flower once mature. The flowers grow on a tall stalk high above the rest of the plant, and produce tiny seeds.

The other way of reproducing is through its root system. It has a main underground stem called a rhizome that puts out lateral shoots and forms new plants.

working

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