FlyTrapCare Forums

Some insects are have quite a lot of hard chitin, and others are pretty mushy. I have no flies, but I have an ample supply of live harvestmen, beetles, cave crickets, and other types. Would a flytrap have any problem with a diet of any one of these single types of bugs?

Thank you flytrap care deities

well i would porbably stick with the crickets and other soft shelled bugs like them. the bettles have tough shells so they are hard to digest so you plant might not get as much nutrients from it. i herd feeding maggots is really good becuse they have no shell or anything and they are really easy to digest. hope this helps and happy growing

I fed a very large trap a earthworm once, just to see what would happen. Usually the exoskeleton of bugs is left when the trap opens, but after about 12-14 days the trap opened and there was absolutely nothing left of it. So soft bugs get digested quite well. I'd imagine small crickets would be fine.

Nickrober wrote:I fed a very large trap a earthworm once, just to see what would happen. Usually the exoskeleton of bugs is left when the trap opens, but after about 12-14 days the trap opened and there was absolutely nothing left of it. So soft bugs get digested quite well. I'd imagine small crickets would be fine.

Did you notice a growth spurt in the plant that was beyond the normal growing it would have done?

Matt wrote:Did you notice a growth spurt in the plant that was beyond the normal growing it would have done?

Nope, everything seemed normal, but I guess it's possible it could have...

Yeah, it seems hard to tell if insects help them much in terms of growth. I assume they do, but perhaps it's not noticeable to the unaided eye.

Matt wrote:Yeah, it seems hard to tell if insects help them much in terms of growth. I assume they do, but perhaps it's not noticeable to the unaided eye.

Sounds like someone needs to do a controlled experiment using time lapse video cameras .

The second idea instead of cameras was just to keep a precise measure of their mass. However, if the earthworm was completely gone, it would be obvious the mass of the flytrap grew by the amount of one earthworm.

I thought I saw pics on here somewhere of a comparison of plants that had been fed vs. plants that hadn't been Maybe I'm imagining things