Blogs

An overflow to the Venus flytrap page

Introduction

My Venus flytrap page has gotten a bit monolithic, so I created this one to show some other aspects of the plant, captured in photographs.

A good harvest

This pic shows how efficient one of the plants was at catching bugs.

On the upper left is a trap with the remains of a jumping spider. On the lower right, is a trap with the remains of a fly. The trap immediately to the left of the one with the fly is busy feeding.

(10 November 2025)

It almost got away

While at Sondela, the plant caught a fly which almost got away. The head was outside the cilia (cage hairs) of a trap, but it still failed to escape. On another occasion, I did try feeding a Christmas Beetle (Camenta innocua - thanks to James Harrison for the scientific name) to a plant. That beetle simply walked straight out of a trap which had closed on it.

On the occasion shown here, one of the plants caught a wasp-like insect which also almost got away...

As you can see from the pic, this insect was not happy. It had already bitten off several of the cage hairs and was actively attacking another.

In this pic, taken three hours after the previous one, you can see the insect had managed to free its wings. It was still extremely aggressive towards the trap it was caught in.

Amazingly, after almost 40 hours the insect was still alive. It wasn't fighting the trap anymore, but if I touched it, everything still moved.

Even more amazing, later in the day, the insect had actually escaped (unless a bird took it). There was no carcass under the plant, so it had gone. Whether the trap had begun releasing it, allowing it to fly off with a half-digested gut, we will never know.

In the pic below, you can see how the insect had damaged the trap.

(11 November 2025)

A pretty trap

One of the plants in the B-pot has really pretty traps.

(7 February 2026)

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