Collective Prey Capture by Juvenile Venus Flytraps (Dionaea muscipula)

The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), first described by Charles Darwin, is a unique carnivorous plant which acquires prey using leaf blades modified into snap-traps. A recent study showed that prey capture by flytraps was not selective. With this study we examined prey capture rates further by analyzing D. muscipula traps less than 1 em in length to determine if juvenile flytraps differ from adults. Similar to the earlier findings, trap size appeared to play no role in prey capture success. This was likely due to the fact that 88% of all prey items recovered were smaller than the smallest collected trap, suggesting that lack of selection by traps could be due to limited prey type availability. Future research is needed to determine if flytraps in areas with greater variation in prey type instead favor selection