FlyTrapCare Forums

While watching my VFT "do its thing" today, I came up with a (in my opinion) fantastic idea. This idea is based on two principles:

1 spiders have a high nitrogen content, due to their predacious nature
2 VFTs need nitrogen to grow

Therefore, can you take a bunch of spiders, kill them, (leave them in a sealed zip-lock bag) and once they are dried out, crush
crush them up into a powder , and feed them to your VFT as (in theory) a purified, source of nitrogen?

I'm probably a little crazy, but does this make sense to anyone else?

It makes sense, but the traps need movement from a live or dying insect to fully seal up. Though I've fed my traps crickets that I've smashed and they sealed up fine, freshly killed though.

Flytraps evolved to capture live insects. That's why the traps won't stay shut unless there's continued movement against the trigger hairs inside the trap once it has closed to let the plant know it's worthwhile to continue on with the sealing and digestive phases. You can massage the traps manually to try to simulate the same thing, but in my experience it doesn't seem to work very often and you run the risk of damaging or breaking the trigger hairs which lessen the chances of the trap closing properly next time. Mother Nature always knows best!