Carnivorous plants can be gruesome. As a keeper of one venus flytrap, pet name Lazarus, I'm often asked about the macabre task of feeding her. Ideally, she catches her own food. But sometimes I supplement her diet with rehydrated freeze dried blood worms should the need arise.
Recently, she caught a housefly, the first sign of her return from winter dormancy this spring*! While I didn't catch the trap activating on video, I have compiled a video documenting the digestion process over the course of three weeks. View below!
You may have noticed two things. Some pictures have a purplish cast to them. No, you didn't miss a solar event in which sunlight turned purple. Due to the shorter winter daylight hours and the cold outdoor temperatures, my collection of plants wouldn't be able to get their needed sunshine to thrive based off what can filter in through the window. Instead, I have invested in an LED hydroponic light that emits red and blue light, the two major wavelengths that most plants need to survive and regulate their inner hormonal cycles. The grow light is what is responsible for the disorienting color change.
The ending also took a turn that I wasn't expecting. I had hoped to show the trap reopening, revealing the remaining exoskeleton of the fly morbidly stuck to the walls of the trap. But that's not what happened. Instead, the trap died.
This can happen for a number of reasons. One common reason with hand fed plants is that the amount of food was too much for the leaf to digest, so the leaf gluts itself but then begins to rot. However, I think this leaf died of a different cause, age. The leaf had been growth from the previous season and so was closing on a year in age. Because the activation of the trap takes such enormous amounts of energy, it can be really hard on the plant to repair and otherwise maintain an old trap. In those cases, the trap digests the prey as usual, but when finished, the nutrients stored in the trap are broken down and reallocated to other parts of the plant. This is similar to when trees reallocate nutrients from leaves to their roots in the fall, causing the leaves to die and fall off. If you reexamine the video, you'll find a number of new traps exploding on the rush of nutrients from out of the center of the rosette as the old trap withers away.
Sound off in the comments if you have any other questions about the wonderful and terrifying Dionaea muscipula!
*Fun fact: Venus flytraps are not from the tropics! They are considered temperate plants and are endemic to the bog swamps of the Carolinas, U.S.A. Because of this, they must go through a winter dormancy period to be healthy. They are also unique in that there is only one species in the entire genus and they are very distantly related from other genera, making their phylogeny quite distinct.
References
Since most of this information has accumulated over the years as I've read up on the care of carnivorous plants, it's hard to attribute any one piece of information to a source. I can recommend "Savage Garden" by Peter D'Amato (2013) to anyone looking for a detailed primer on the subject.
Recently, she caught a housefly, the first sign of her return from winter dormancy this spring*! While I didn't catch the trap activating on video, I have compiled a video documenting the digestion process over the course of three weeks. View below!
You may have noticed two things. Some pictures have a purplish cast to them. No, you didn't miss a solar event in which sunlight turned purple. Due to the shorter winter daylight hours and the cold outdoor temperatures, my collection of plants wouldn't be able to get their needed sunshine to thrive based off what can filter in through the window. Instead, I have invested in an LED hydroponic light that emits red and blue light, the two major wavelengths that most plants need to survive and regulate their inner hormonal cycles. The grow light is what is responsible for the disorienting color change.
The ending also took a turn that I wasn't expecting. I had hoped to show the trap reopening, revealing the remaining exoskeleton of the fly morbidly stuck to the walls of the trap. But that's not what happened. Instead, the trap died.
This can happen for a number of reasons. One common reason with hand fed plants is that the amount of food was too much for the leaf to digest, so the leaf gluts itself but then begins to rot. However, I think this leaf died of a different cause, age. The leaf had been growth from the previous season and so was closing on a year in age. Because the activation of the trap takes such enormous amounts of energy, it can be really hard on the plant to repair and otherwise maintain an old trap. In those cases, the trap digests the prey as usual, but when finished, the nutrients stored in the trap are broken down and reallocated to other parts of the plant. This is similar to when trees reallocate nutrients from leaves to their roots in the fall, causing the leaves to die and fall off. If you reexamine the video, you'll find a number of new traps exploding on the rush of nutrients from out of the center of the rosette as the old trap withers away.
Sound off in the comments if you have any other questions about the wonderful and terrifying Dionaea muscipula!
*Fun fact: Venus flytraps are not from the tropics! They are considered temperate plants and are endemic to the bog swamps of the Carolinas, U.S.A. Because of this, they must go through a winter dormancy period to be healthy. They are also unique in that there is only one species in the entire genus and they are very distantly related from other genera, making their phylogeny quite distinct.
References
Since most of this information has accumulated over the years as I've read up on the care of carnivorous plants, it's hard to attribute any one piece of information to a source. I can recommend "Savage Garden" by Peter D'Amato (2013) to anyone looking for a detailed primer on the subject.
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