I bought one of these at world-famous Longwood Gardens when I was kid. I've long thought these plants were neat. I still find them to be fascinating.
Posted on 01/27/2005 2:04:28 PM PST by Pyro7480
How the Venus flytrap snaps up its prey
PARIS (AFP) - American and French scientists believed they have explained how one of nature's marvels, the Venus flytrap, snaps shut to snare its victims.
The plant -- described by Charles Darwin as "one of the most wonderful in the world" -- is able to enclose a fly within its clamshell-shaped leaves in just 100 milliseconds, faster than the eye can blink.
Scientists have long wondered how the flytrap (Latin name Dionaea muscipula) is able to do this spectacular feat, given that it does not have the nerves and muscles of fast-moving animals.
The answer, according to a study published on Thursday, is tensile strength.
The plant first bends back its rubbery leaves so that they are convex-shaped, rather like half a tennis ball that has been flipped inside-out.
To close the trap, the plant releases the tensed-up energy.
The leaves instantly flip from convex to concave -- as if the half tennis ball has suddenly popped back to its normal shape. Their edges snap together and the insect is trapped within.
"Closure is characterized by the slow storage of elastic energy followed by its release," say the authors, led by Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, an Indian-born professor of applied mathematics and evolutionary biology at Harvard University.
The researchers were able to model the change in geometry by putting microscopic dots of ultraviolet fluorescent paint on the external surface of the leaves.
They then filmed the closure under ultraviolet light, using a high-speed video at 400 frames per second, which showed the leaves' sudden shift from convex to concave when the trap closed.
Previous work has already established that the flytrap lures the insect with a smell exuded from the inner surface of the leaf. When the fly walks on the surface, this activates a hair trigger and causes closure.
Still to be explained is the phase in between -- exactly how the signal is transmitted from the hair trigger to the closure mechanism in such an astonishingly fast time.
The study appears in Nature, the weekly British science journal.
For some reason, I'm reminded of my ex-wife.
Indoors, assuming that you're not a slob, you feed them hamburger, right?
Nah, dead flies from the shed.
Aw, you beat me to it.
But only because Google seems to have changed their code to prevent linking to cached images.
Viking2002, meet StoneGiant. ;-)
Oh man, I grew up about a mile from Longwood Gardens, and here I went and sent to a radio station in Boston that was selling them on a late-night talk show. (Dick Summer on WBZ). Hey Pyro, did you go to Unionville High?
Yes, a bimetal strip. Everyone knows that.
Any meat will do, I was fond of giving mine diced ham. Can be handy when you do get he odd fly in the house though.
what about wintertime?
mmmmmm Bailey...
No, I grew up "south of the border" in Delaware.
Oh...a plant...hmmm I was thinking L. A. Law...nother venus.
Thanks.. I may get one..BTW..in my earlier post..I was NOT calling "you" personally a slob..it waan't meant that way...
Yeah, we bought everything except our Venus Flytraps in Delaware. That wonderful no sales tax policy. Hard to believe there was a time when lots of Conservative Pubs used to get elected in Delaware.
Remined me of Hillary.
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