Seth Weinheimer
Biology 1010 11:00 MWF
Journal 2
The Venus flytrap or Dionaea muscipula is a leaf plant that eats insects and spiders that
step on its pad. It has a structure that is designed to trap insects in its inner surfaces. The trap
closes if two of the plants hairs are disturbed within twenty seconds of each other. This twostep system insures that the plant doesn’t waste any energy closing its massive jaws around an
object as simple as a dust speck.
Biologically speaking, the Venus flytrap is in the Plantae Kingdom because it is a green
living plant. It is in the Angiosperms Phylum with other flowering plants. The Venus fly trap
next falls into the Eudicot class. Because it is a carnivorous plant it is member of the order of
the Caryophyllales. The family of carnivorous flowering plants is called the Droseraceae family.
Most flytraps are in this category. Finally the Venus flytrap is of the Dionaea genus making the
species name Dionaea muscipula.
Throughout the centuries, Dionaea muscipula has evolved and adapted to become a
great predator. In the beginning the Venus flytrap grew in harsh conditions. Their soil was
barren and inadequate. The soil could not provide the nutrients necessary to sustain life. In
order to survive the flytrap adapted to become a foliar feeder. This means that the plant can
apply a fertilizer to its own leaves. The plant can then absorb these nutrients through its
leaves. This allows the plant to get more nutrients than it would normally be able to get.
With this adaptation it became necessary to find an alternate source of nutrients. This
is where the organism developed the ability to eat other organisms. In order to catch the other
organisms the fly trap started to develop the snap trap mechanism. The snap trap mechanism
allows the fly trap to snap closed when it senses there is an organism to be absorbed.
The snap trap originally started as a sticky paper sort of trap. Insects would either walk
or fly over the snapping pad and they would get stuck in a really sticky substance. This worked
really well for smaller insects, but the plant was missing out on lots of larger, more nutrient rich
prey.
As time went on the trap started to develop away from the sticky-paper like trap to a
true snap trap. The fast closing trap was able to get larger prey and there was less chance of
the prey escaping. One problem with the new snapping trap was that it required a lot more
energy than the sticky paper system. Lots of this energy was being wasted snatching things like
drops of rain.
So the fly trap went on to develop a trigger system for detecting prey. The plant
developed trigger hairs. The trigger hairs had to be triggered in two’s. If an insect brushes by
two hairs within twenty seconds the trap triggers and snaps shut. This made it a lot more
effective at catching some of the bigger spiders that would lumber across the plant.
Now that the plant was catching large prey it seemed like life was good. The Venus fly
trap only had to evolve one more thing. A more efficient way of digesting this food it was
catching. At first the fly trap would digest the food with the dew stalks like other plants, but
somewhere along the evolutionary process the Venus fly trap actually developed digestive
glands inside the trap. This is something that is very rare for a plant, but it’s also rare to hear of
a plant that eats flies! The evolutionary process is an ongoing process. Right now the Venus fly
trap doesn’t survive very well in the wild and is mostly sold and studied because people think
it’s cool.