Don’t feed your Venus flytrap a burger
Don’t try to feed a piece of your cheeseburger to a Venus flytrap.
You can’t give them meat the way you feed a dog. But they make good pets, according to lifelong enthusiast Josh Brown.
“They’re a pet that produces very little waste or noise. They have little personalities and they’re happy to do their own thing.”
Venus flytraps have leaves that sense when an insect lands on them and then close around the bug to digest it. Bugs serve as fertilizer, not nutrients, which comes from photosynthesis like other plants, Brown said in a phone interview.
“It won’t be the best plant that it can be, but as long as it has the right conditions with a lot of sunlight and the right kind of water, the fertilizing is secondary.”
Brown runs a mail- order nursery in San Mateo, Calif., called Predatory Plants that offers “killer deals” such as a $ 29.99 variety bundle with different varieties of flytraps cultivated by growers. Differences include color and “spikier teeth.”
People have a lot of misconceptions about Venus flytraps, Brown said, beginning with where they’re from.
“People imagine they’re from some sweltering jungle in South America,” he said.
They’re actually native to North Carolina and South Carolina, where he said they thrive on bright sunlight and pure water.
The biggest misconception is that Venus flytraps are house plants, or house pets, if you will.
Brown said they are better off living outside, and they need cold as well as sunlight.
Venus flytraps are what he called temperate perennial plants that grow from bulbs. In winter they are supposed to go dormant.
“People should be anticipating that the plants should die back and look bad in the winter and there’s nothing wrong.
“The impulse is to bring them inside. That’s the worst thing you can do.”
The traps, which are leaves, are supposed to die and grow back.
Traps can only close to
digest insects a few times before they die.
“Venus flytraps have multiple closing triggers. They have little hairs on the inside of their leaves. If you touch any of the hairs more than twice in about 10 seconds, the trap will close, but it will only partially close. If it gets triggered again while partially closed, that tells the plant there is actually something there that is moving and therefore can be digested.
“Then it fully seals watertight, floods itself with digestive fluid, breaks down whatever that is, dissolves it, and then reopens.”
If people put insects on the leaves, the leaves will curl around them. If they just play with the leaves and the leaves don’t sense food, they will only partially close. That can be done more frequently, he said.
Don’t try to feed the plants meat that humans eat, such as hamburger, the New York Botanical Garden cautions. It’s not in their nature to digest it, and they prefer live insects.
Other carnivorous plants can live indoors. Brown said tropical pitcher plants from Southeast Asia are his biggest sellers, and Cape Sundews from South Africa are also popular.
Sundews have a sticky substance that traps insects before its leaves curl around them.
Brown discovered they are flexitarian after feeding them tofu for a junior high school science fair project.
“They love tofu. It’s pure protein so they can digest it.”