Eddie Wallace, age ll, of Mt. Holly, N.C.; for his question:
What is a Venus's flytrap
The story of the flycatching sundew plant a few weeks ago made a lot of Andy's friends curious about othel meat eating plants. The Venus's flytrap is even more amazing than the sundew. The sundew catches insects with spoon shaped leaves which close around their victims like little fists. The Venus's flytrap has hinged leaves.
We find the sundew in many boggy areas through North America. The Venus's flytrap grows only in the swampy bottom lands of the Carolinas. It grows to be about a foot tall and at certain seasons it bears a straight flower stalk topped with a cluster of small white blossoms. It may have ten or a dozen amazing leaves with young ones always ready to replace the old.
The lower part of each leaf is flat and fairly wide. It ends in two lobes which form a collar for the hinged flytrap. When open, this thick section is heart shaped with a fringe of spikes around its outer rim. The center vein of this section is a very heavy ridge. This is the hinge which can open and close the two halves of the heart shaped leaf.
On the face of the hinged section there are six sensitive hairs. Three form a triangle on each of the lobes. These hairs grow from glands which give off a sticky, glistening fluid. When the plant grows in the shade, these glistening hairs are green. When it grows in bright sunlight, they glisten with crimson.
A passing fly is interested in these bright, dewy hairs and zooms in to investigate. He lands on the heart shaped leaf and the sensitive hairs respond to his light weight. Before he knows it, the hinge down the center of the leaf snaps shut and the curious fly is a prisoner.
The spikes around the rim of the leaf interlock to form a barred prison door. The leaf now gives off an acid digestive juice. The juicy parts of the fly are dissolved and taken into the plant as food. When the process is completed, the double doors open again and the wings and dry shell of the fly blow away on the wind. The booby trap is now all ready to snare another curious insect. Each leaf, however, can trap and digest only a few flies before it withers away. It is then replaced by a younger leaf.
These insectivorous or carnivorous plants are so surprising that they tend to fire the imagination. Some of Andy's friends have heard that certain of them are big enough to eat people. But this is not so at all. The biggest insectivorous plant cannot digest even a mouse, let alone a person. These plants live in regions where the soil is poor in nitrogen and they get this chemical from the bodies of small insects.