Is Venus Fly a nightmare only for insect, or for all of us?

Charles Darwin called the plant puzzle “one of the most wonderful in the world. Since his time, scientists have pondered how the flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is able to accomplish the feat without benefit of the nerves and muscles of swift animals. Now researchers have found tensile strength is behind the plant’s speedy clampdown on a hapless insect. Once trigger hairs are tripped by the prey, the plant bends its rubbery leaves into a convex shape, like a tennis ball or soft contact lens that has been flipped inside-out.

The leaves instantly turn to a concave, as if the tennis ball is popped back to normal. The edges come together, trapping the insect inside. Applied mathematics Prof. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard University and his team were able to follow the leaf action by painting dozens of fluorescent ultraviolet dots on the leaves. They then filmed the leaves using a high-speed camera sensitive to UV to watch the leaves change shape during a snap. How the plant seems to actively control the change in curvature within its leaves remains a mystery, but the study shows elastic strain plays a role in the process.

Seymour the Venus Fly trap may look scary, but he really makes a great pet. His jaws move super-fast and bite anything that falls inside them. A Venus Fly trap can eat all kinds of bugs, flies and insects, but you should be safe!

Unlike us, plants don’t have a brain or nervous system to coordinate their physiological functions and tell them that they are hungry so they should go buy a burger from the nearest fast food place. Plants also don’t have complex muscles and tendons to grab food, chew it, swallow it and process it. The Venus Flytrap completes the entire process by way of a specialized set of leaves that is both mouth and stomach in one.

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