FlyTrapCare Forums

Hi,

Thanks for the very informative post! Now I know why some of my trap dies when they ate some bugs. Yea, I have some traps that looks "burnt". Was wondering why.

Fortunately, my area has a LOT OF FLIES. So my traps are very well fed. Problem are all the "bodies" lying around all over my plants. They look disgusting and seemed to hinder the plant from their next meal. (Some of traps have 2 flies in them) Should I remove them manually?

Klick.

klick wrote:Hi,

Thanks for the very informative post! Now I know why some of my trap dies when they ate some bugs. Yea, I have some traps that looks "burnt". Was wondering why.

Fortunately, my area has a LOT OF FLIES. So my traps are very well fed. Problem are all the "bodies" lying around all over my plants. They look disgusting and seemed to hinder the plant from their next meal. (Some of traps have 2 flies in them) Should I remove them manually?

Klick.

Not necessary. Removing the exoskeleton may trigger the traps, and there is no harm leaving them on.

TS 1989 wrote:

klick wrote:Hi,

Thanks for the very informative post! Now I know why some of my trap dies when they ate some bugs. Yea, I have some traps that looks "burnt". Was wondering why.

Fortunately, my area has a LOT OF FLIES. So my traps are very well fed. Problem are all the "bodies" lying around all over my plants. They look disgusting and seemed to hinder the plant from their next meal. (Some of traps have 2 flies in them) Should I remove them manually?

Klick.

Not necessary. Removing the exoskeleton may trigger the traps, and there is no harm leaving them on.

When it's dry enough, you can blow the exoskeleton away.

Is feeding dried bloodworms a good source of food to vft's?

I've been feeding mine a steady diet of earwigs, and sometimes spiders. They have caught a few flies on their own, but I try to keep all, but 1 or 2 traps fed in order to keep them growing optimally. My traps have gone from looking dormant, to starting to finally make longer traps with the 400 watt metal halide, only 1-2ft away, and bigger traps.

Here's my DCXLs, All but 1 of mine from before ended up dying because someone watered them with tap water, but now they have been sent from my parent's house to my place, and that solo survivor, looks like it is doing well here. It went from 4 traps, to working on getting up 7 now in 12 days. I ended up purchasing a new DCXL because I wanted to fill out my pot quicker. All these pictures were taken July 4th, and July 16th respectively showing the increase in number of traps and trap size.

Before: This was my original DXCL

After: This is looking much more healthy now, progressively making bigger and bigger traps each time.




I just purchased this one a couple of weeks ago. This DXCL looks quite a bit different than my original in that it was lighter, and had an overall different shape, but it's traps are pretty big, and progressively getting bigger.
Before

After: They look darker too, now that they are exposed to strong light.





Here's the G16 which doesn't look quite as impressive, but it should come along after the initial shock. I have split it apart from the parts which appeared to be wilting away to hopefully see if the old stuff recovers, and the new stuff keeps growing uninterrupted.
Before

After

My G16 fly trap was wilting away in it's old medium so I moved it to some new peat moss, and I'm hoping it will come back. I think it may have had soil in the nutrients in the container that it came from.

My DCXLs are have made more growth than ever in the past 2 weeks, and there's a strike on the original rhizome that produced the trap on the left which I removed a couple weeks ago. It should grow very quickly once it gets going. Are they accelerating their growth simply because they are coming out of dormancy? The one on the left has it's largest trap at 1.4 inches and the one on the right has one at 1.1 inches, and I've been keeping 1-2 traps fed with earwigs at all times, not to overload the plants. If they keep getting bigger, I may have to up the feeding regime.



I'm so excited when I see new strikes. I'm hoping my 3 pullings that I did a few days ago make strikes this quickly.

stevelau1911 wrote:My G16 fly trap was wilting away in it's old medium so I moved it to some new peat moss, and I'm hoping it will come back. I think it may have had soil in the nutrients in the container that it came from.

My DCXLs are have made more growth than ever in the past 2 weeks, and there's a strike on the original rhizome that produced the trap on the left which I removed a couple weeks ago. It should grow very quickly once it gets going. Are they accelerating their growth simply because they are coming out of dormancy? The one on the left has it's largest trap at 1.4 inches and the one on the right has one at 1.1 inches, and I've been keeping 1-2 traps fed with earwigs at all times, not to overload the plants. If they keep getting bigger, I may have to up the feeding regime.



I'm so excited when I see new strikes. I'm hoping my 3 pullings that I did a few days ago make strikes this quickly.

When emerging from dormancy, the plant usually starts off slowly then suddenly, the growth will explode.

Once they get to a certain size, will they be bound to start splitting into more plants, or do they keep getting bigger for the given season?

I only did 3 leaf pullings off rotting leaves on the bigger one since they would have rotted away anyways, but I intend to keep feeding them to try and get them as big as possible. Perhaps I could get 2 inch traps. These are only about a foot away from the 400 watt metal halide bulb so they are getting very strong direct light consistently.

Traps will only grow up to a point. Depends on the genetic material how large it will grow, feeding only helps it to get there.

By far the best well written thread on venus fly traps i've seen! 5 stars!

Not only rich on info and content but really well explained on why! Thank you!

Since flytraps love nitrogen, is there some sort of fertilizer high in nitrogen that you could spray on it to replace insects? It would be cool to have one that requires no food to grow quick.

Hello, I've tried this approach and flytraps are just as sensitive to overfertilization through leaves and traps as their roots are. I initially thought that it had something to do with the salt type common fertilizer that hurt the roots. I made totally organic food containing none of the typical salts, only dissolved organic compounds and fed it to some plants.

I thought the traps, being evolved to be the main fertilizer collectors would be more tolerant of the higher dose of nutrients, however, the plants still were shocked. The same thing happens if I made a solution of organics that could be absorbed through the leaves. The roots didn't like high concentrations of organics or typical salt type fertilizers. That was one of my main questions I wanted answers to and those are the results I got. Hope this helps. I just didn't see any way to 'force-feed' the plants more food they could tolerate and make them grow bigger. I know it'll save you months of experimenting.

P.S. I also fed them alfalfa leaves which contain a potent growth stimulator called triacontanol. It only works in very small quantities, about 10 ppm. It tends to make plants taller, as I recall, similar to gibberellins, but I didn't have samples of this specifically so I didn't notice any change. I can say that my plants did just fine on my totally homemade, 'vegan' diet instead of their usual carnivorous diet. There are details in these forums from years ago about how I made the food.

Interesting. So there are ways to make them grow differently, just not faster or bigger. I guess flytraps enjoy taking life in the slow lane .

Amazing write up I could read stuff like this non stop. Thanks for taking the time to enlighten us.

This was such an information packed article. Thank you for sharing!