Thu 24 Apr 2008
There are still gnats flying around the courtroom, so the Venus Flytraps I brought in the other day weren’t doing much on my desk. My courtroom assistant complained yesterday that the bugs were at her desk a lot, so I loaned her the container of flytraps. She jammed the entire plastic cylinder into the wide bowl planter of dirt that her large ficus tree is in, next to her desk.
After everyone left for the day, I walked over to her planter and looked. There are visible gnats walking around the dirt of her planter, so now I know the source. (Gym Trainee said if the courtroom assistant would quit dumping tea, coffee, anything she could think of into the planter, maybe there wouldn’t be a living compost pile in the courtroom.) Peering into the clear cylinder surrounding the flytraps, I saw that a gnat was already in there. Excited, I looked around for something to cover the top with so the gnat couldn’t escape. I ran to my desk, grabbed a few half-page sized Request for Time Off forms, and clapped them over the top of the clear plastic cylinder, and I watched from the side.
I watched the gnat flit around, and land inside the open pink mouth of one of the flytraps. I watched the gnat walk around in there for awhile. I watched the gnat get bored and fly off again. The flytrap didn’t even move! Perhaps the gnats are too small to trigger the traps. My plant was gonna starve to death.
Today at lunchtime, I took a brisk walk with Gym Trainee so we can enjoy the sunny 80-degree weather. I spotted a dead bee on the sidewalk, took 5-6 steps past it, and then decided to go back and pick it up. Gym Trainee gave me a receipt and I folded it into a makeshift compact-dead-bee-transportation-device. Back in the courtroom, I used two pencils like chopsticks, picked up the bee, and dropped it onto the open mouth of a flytrap. The weight made the trap vibrate a little. I stared at the open trap. Good gawd, did this plant have a suicide anorexic death wish? I poked around the trap with the tip of the pencil, and finally it sprung closed.
I can’t believe I bought a dependent PET instead of a clever and helpful resolution to our insect problem.
Maybe your plant is a vegitarian? Or a picky eater and only wants flies??
maybe your flytrap is defective and is actually a vegetarian.
but that might be considered cannibalism in his own social circle.
i’m assuming you know the mechanism to trigger the fly trap to close.
if not…
if you look at the inner surface of the inside of each “mouth,” you’ll see a few fine hairs sticking up. those are the trigger mechanism. if a bug lands in there and doesn’t touch the hairs, it won’t close.
btw…don’t go triggering the fly traps to shut with a pencil or something. that will eventually kill the plant.
A cannibalistic vegetarian plant! HAHAHA!
Greg – Yeah, there’s 3 hairs on each internal half of the “mouth,” but the bee filled the whole mouth and it still didn’t close.
Why does triggering the traps with a pencil kill it? Is it the fruitless closing? Or the contact with the pencil that’s the cause of demise?