I just got this venus fly trap and it immediately caught tons of bugs and killed them, but now it's just opened up and not eating. The only one that's still closed, there's a big spider inside. Is that normal? Should I tweezer these dead flies out?
by Irgendwannabe
8 Comments
If you look closely, you’ll notice that those “uneaten” dead flies are actually simply the shriveled husks left behind after the insides were digested.
Insect exoskeletons are more or less indigestible to flytraps, but they still get nutrients from the stuff inside. Nothing to worry about- you can clean if you want, but rain/wind does the job in nature.
I think they were eaten. The exoskeleton is too hard to dissolve, I think. But you can see that their butts are flat. This is because the inside has been digested.
They dont really “eat” like an animal does, they’re basically killing the bug and then using it as fertilizer that gets absorbed through the inside of the traps. instead of the roots like other plants. It’s normal for them to leave a bug husk behind.
Nice looking plant! I agree with the others, that the prey was digested. If the traps sealed up and stayed closed for a week or so, the plant definitely did its thing. I’ll just add that picking the corpses out is very difficult without tripping the trap. This puts it out of action for a while, and shortens its life because each trap can only cycle so many times before dying back.
They squeeze out all the good shit and leave the shell.
those are bones
Like the shells after crab legs
See [this panel](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figures?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0104424), if the trap closed (pic B) and then locked (pic C), and it stayed that way for a few days, then it digested the prey. What’s left is the exoskeleton, which you can leave there or remove, it’s up to you. The ideal timing to remove the exoskeleton is while the trap is slowly opening again, because at that time it’s unresponsive and you won’t cause it to fire again.
However if the trap only went to closed (pic B) and then opened up again in few hours, then it didn’t accept the prey. Dionaea traps need to feel the live insect moving inside the closed trap, it’s their way of knowing that they actually caught something and it’s not a random twig that fell there. If you kill files and then give them to the plant, you can simulate this squirming by gently massaging the trap for a short time after it closes, just some veeeeeery light squeezes, just enough to gently trigger the small hairs inside the trap. If you do this, gently, then you can feed it dead bugs too. Otherwise the prey needs to be alive.
Edit: I can count 3 traps digesting prey in this pic, so as a rule of thumb I’d say it’s eating well. The fly to the left (at “9 hours” so to speak) and the one at the bottom left (7 hours) definitely look digested too, they’re thin, grey-ish from mold that appears after a while on digested prey, and the wings are stuck to the trap because they were wet with digesting juices when the trap re-opened.