FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hey guys! This is gonna be my lat post today, it's getting laaateee...

But anyways! I heard something about the digesting of the Venus Flytrap, i'm not sure where, but it was about somehow rubbing it to make it digest.
if that's so, how can it digest in the wild?
Well, i'm still a newbie...

Haha, best wishes!
-Joxi

In the wild (or pot grown) the plant would catch live prey, the movement of the still living insect produces the closing up of the trap.
The rubbing you mention is done if a dead insect is put in the trap, the rubbing makes the trap think the insect is alive.

Yes, it's all about stimulation of the trigger hairs. When a VFT catches a live insect, the movements of the bug inside the trap continue to stimulate the trigger hairs as it squirms around trying to escape. This tells the plant that it actually has caught something so it can proceed with the sealing and digestion phases. If you drop a dead bug into a trap though, there will be no further movement, so the plant thinks it hasn't caught anything and will reopen again by the next day. If you manually massage the sides of the trap for a minute or two afterwards though, it's supposed to provide the same kind of stimulation as the struggling insect would. I've tried it a few times. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.