1 September 2026
The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is famous for being an actively carnivorous plant. Rather than wait passively for an insect to drop into digestive fluid, the trap lures insects to its specialized leaves that look like flowers with teeth. And then it snaps shut.
Hungry Venus flytraps attract insects by turning red, emitting a flowery scent and producing sweet nectar around the rim of the trap. When prey lands, it sets in motion a sequence of events that provide the plant with nutrients lacking in its boggy habitat.
— Description of the flytrap red leaf photo on Wikimedia
After the trap snaps shut, the insect is slowly digested.
The process is well known but until recently the trap’s speed remained a mystery.
The trap is a specialized leaf curved outward (convex) from its middle seam. Each half is plump and red as the trap waits for an insect to touch a trigger hair. When touched twice in close succession the plant sends an electrical pulse across the leaf that makes it switch rapidly from convex to concave, buckling inward in a 10th of a second.
How does it flip its shape so fast? Is it moving fluid inside the leaf? No. Scientists at Aix-Marseille University in France discovered the answer.
Just after a trap was triggered, its outer surface turned visibly bumpier, a wrinkling that can only appear if the material there has gone slack.
Stiffness in the outer layer dropped sharply within about a second, loosening by roughly 30 to 40 percent.
The walls never broke. They were not torn or crushed. Instead, they simply became more flexible for an instant, and that was all it took to trigger the snap. …
Cells loosen their walls all the time to grow, but that process takes hours or days, not a single second, making this the fastest such change recorded in a plant by a wide margin.
— Earth.com: Venus flytrap snaps shut using a mechanism nobody expected
p.s. Did you know that Venus flytrap has a tiny native range? It is native to bogs in eastern North and South Carolina, south of 35th latitude.
