How to feed Venus flytraps

hi everybody its devin here at predatory plants people ask often ask us about feeding their venus flytraps they want to know how often do they need to be fed can they be fed stuff like hamburgers that they have to be bugs all that sort of stuff in short they don't really need to be fed they'll catch their own food and the food services basically fertilizer they get their energy like every other plant from a lot of bright sunlight and they need a lot of water but foods just a bit extra for them if you're growing them outdoors which is their best way the way they both best like to be grown they'll catch plenty of stuff all in their own but sometimes it is fun to feed them and when you do so it's best to feed them live insects insects because they have the appropriate kind of proteins that the plant can break down they've got a lot of chitin which which is what the venus flytraps are able to digest with their chitin as enzymes and live because of the way the trap needs to be stimulated for it to fully digest so the way that I trap closes is on these little hairs here you can see on the inside of leaf there if those get triggered a couple of times in sequence then the trap will snap closed which I'll demonstrate right now a little toothbrush here so it snaps closed but now you can see it's not all the way closed and part of the reason for that is that if anything can escape from those in between those teeth there if it's small enough to squeeze through then it's too small to be worth digesting and so the plant will we'll just choose to not actually digest it it'll reopen in about a half an hour or so in order for it to do the whole digestive process it needs to have those hairs stimulated again now I've caught a centipede here and I'm gonna see if this works because it's kind of a quick little critter this is probably not the ideal bug to use because they are very skittery but it's what I was able to find on short notice in the greenhouse so pardon the jittery camera as I try to get it with my forceps oh boy okay got it we got a centipede here I'm gonna feed it to this big trap right there you can see snap closed there and so now the centipede is gonna be moving around a bit and as it does so it'll trigger those hairs some more and I will check back in just a moment and you'll be able to see that it's gone into a fully digestive system so this one will not have closed all the way because there's no prey in it so that the hairs aren't being triggered any longer where's this one which has that big centipede in there it's gonna have the in there trigger hairs being a brushed around a bit and we'll go into a full digestive mode so let me check back on that in a few minutes once it's done this whole seal thing so it's been about 15 minutes since I fed this trap the centipede and you can see that the edges the margins of the the leaves are sealing together to make that digestive stomach the one that didn't get any prey that I just triggered with the paintbrush still has those gaps so that won't won't progress any further and in a little while it'll open back up and be ready to trap something else that comes along this one will spend about a week digesting the insect it'll fully seal over the course of the next hour or so and actually kind of like press down and start compressing the the prey which is very cool to see and then the chitin Aizaz will go to work and dissolve some of the tissues and extract nitrogen and stuff from it and after about a week it'll open back up and you'll see the exoskeleton it's kind of cool on the plants gets a nice boost of nitrogen and energy that will put in to putting out new growth for the season so that's the best way to feed a Venus flytrap is with live prey like that of course that's a little bit difficult one thing you can do if you have like a swatted fly or something is when when you've got the trap triggered like this this one that's not doesn have any prey in it that'll what that's what will happen if you give it like a dead fly or something you can kind of squeeze the lobes of the trap once it's closed and that'll trigger the hairs and can all actually stimulate the digestive process so it looks like we got that one there oops so yeah if it closes partial partway like this with with like a swatted fly or some some other dead bug that you found and you want to go through the whole digestive process just take your fingers and just sort of squeeze the lobes lightly and that will brush those trigger hairs and can continue the digestive process but it's easiest if you do it with live prey like this again don't use hamburger cheese or anything like that - it won't adjust it very well there those those animal proteins are different than the arthropod proteins that that are digested by the chitin aces so that's uh that's how you feed a Venus flytrap this is actually a Venus flytrap b-52 it's a nice big beefy one let me know if you have any questions in the comments I'm happy to answer anything about feeding or care of these plants and remember to like and subscribe to see more videos like this one

Channel: Predatory Plants

Views: 92,065

Rating: 4.917985 out of 5

Keywords: Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, carnivorous plants, Predatory Plants, greenhouse, feeding, centipede

Id: f9JBiWq68lg

Length: 5min 25sec (325 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2019