VENUS FLYTRAP

THE PLANT WITH BITE

Imagine a plant that eats living things. Do you picture a plant that looks as if it came from another planet? Think again! The United States is home to a fascinating plant that eats live food, and the plant is not as strange as you might think.

You may have seen or heard of this carnivorous, or meat-eating plant. It is called the Venus flytrap. It grows in bogs, or wetlands, near the coasts of North Carolina and South Carolina.

The Venus flytrap grows to be only about a foot tall. The plant has white flowers in the spring, but it is the plant’s leaves that make it interesting. The leaves have hinged parts with stiff hairs. These are the plant’s “traps”.

The Venus flytrap eats flies, ants, spiders, caterpillars, crickets, and slugs. Like other plants, the Venus flytrap makes most of its food using sunshine, air, and water through the process of photosynthesis. Live food gives it the extra nutrition it needs to grow well in damp soil.

The Venus flytrap uses a sweet liquid called nectar to attract bugs. When a bug lands on one of the open traps, trigger hairs on the surface make the trap shut. After the trap closes, the bug is dinner.

The bristles along the edges of the trap come together like a shoelace so the bug cannot get out. Then the trap acts like a tiny stomach and digests the bug. Each trap catches and digests a few bugs. Then the plant replaces the used traps with fresh, new traps.

If you want to have your own Venus flytrap at home, you have to buy a plant from a nursery. You are not allowed to take Venus flytrap from its natural habitat. There are strict laws about taking plants out of the wild. They cannot be removed from public land with out permission.

If you are ever near the coast of North Carolina or South Carolina, you might spot a Venus flytrap. Maybe you will even see it catch a tasty bug. YUM!

VENUS FLYTRAP