FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hypothetically speaking, if my flytraps dont eat at all, will the sun and water be enough to flourish still? I hate how they look closed

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Carnivorous plants were meant to survive on little amounts of "food".


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All living organisms need two types of fuel. They need fuel that they use to keep themselves alive, i.e. breathing and water exchange, and they need fuel that they turn into the building blocks needed to grow.
Carnivorous plants use sunlight for breathing fuel, bugs are just building blocks. If you don't feed your plants, they'll grow very slowly, but they won't die.

There are cultivars such as Wacky Traps, Werewolf, and if I'm not mistaken, Angel Wings, which do not properly close and seal their traps, so they go their entire lives without ever eating a bug.
Werewolf and Werewolf Spawn have no trigger hairs, so they can't even be triggered to close.
Flytraps, like all plants, use photosynthesis to grow, the nutrients that they get through the bugs instead of the soil act more as a fertilizer that boosts growth, but is not vital to survival.
So, if you prefer not to feed them, and let them color up, it will slow growth, but not be lethal.

They'll be absolutely fine without food, however if they get fed they'll grow faster.

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sbrooks wrote:So, if you prefer not to feed them, and let them color up, it will slow growth, but not be lethal.

This is what I'm getting at, I want the red of my cultivars to show. And closed traps all the time is boring and not "scary" for guest . So non feeding will promote the color?


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Individual traps that have remained open and not been fed tend to color up with age. The hue/ amount of coloration depends upon genetics.

If you do feed the traps, you wouldn't have them all closed at once. You'd just have one trap at a time closed.

You wanna freak your guest out, feed the plant in front of them. It's really cool.

I keep mine outdoors and would love for some of my nicer traps to stay open for more than a few days so they can redden up but the bugs have different plans.