do you have carnivorous plants in your house? have you seen how they trap insects? does it work as a passive fly trap vs. spraying chemicals all over my house?

 

http://www.carnivorous-plants.co.uk/dionae...lees_smalla.avi

just found this. very cool.

 

I've got LOTS of carnivorous plants from all over the world. They're awesome and beautiful!!

I'll post pics and give details later.

 

thats scary
how do they work? Instict? mind? U know sensors alaram while there is an insect on the hunting strip?

 

ok, I've got all sorts of carnivorous plants at my apartment and I think they're beautiful and amazing. Here are a few photos of some of them.






EDIT: ^ the pitcher in the foreground is another tornak, but the one in the background is my flava.


EDIT: ^ in the lower right is the Nepenthes ventricosa, but it's not a good photo and doesn't show any of the beautiful red gourd-like pitchers.


the Drosera is also known as a Sundew, and basically if a fly or other insect lands on it's arm, it's get stuck on the red sticky hairs. the plant then curls it's hairs and leaves around the fly very slowly to trap and digest it. and it is very slow-- slower than what the human eye can percieve (and trust me, I've tried). it takes maybe an hour or an hour and a half for it to completely wrap up a bug. if you look closely at the first picture, you can see a leaf that has wrapped around a fly.

the Sarracenia varieties are pitcher plants that basically have no moving parts. instead they passively lure insects into their mouths and it's a one-way trip into their gullet. these plants are beautiful and hands-down the most successful at catching flies is my Sarracenia flava. I've left this thing on my porch for a week and found pitchers that were half full of flies, wasps, and what-have-you (I dissected the tube when it eventually died off and looked at the carcasses).

I also have a couple other varieties, including the common venus fly trap, which is pretty cool. personally, my favorite (which is barely seen in the last pictured -- I couldn't get a good photo of it or it's pitchers) is my Nepenthes ventricosa. the Nepenthes variety are some truly magnificent pitcher plants from the tropics. my ventricosa puts out these red, gourd-like hanging pitchers that are really cool to look at. they're not very good at catching flying insects, but I once had an infestation of ants in my room that I couldn't really get rid of (I try not to use poisons if possible). well, one day, they were all gone! I happened to look in one of the pitchers of my Nepenthes and all the ants were in the bottom of it, unable to escape!

now, if you're expecting these plants to attract and kill insects in short order whenever one gets into your house, you're bound to be disappointed. there's just too many other sweet and tempting things in a house than the nectar that these plants put out. usually, I like to catch flies from my porch, put them in a container and pop them in the freezer for about 3-5 mins. this chills them enough that you can handle them with tweezers, but they still come alive after a few minutes... and I like to feed my plants live bugs.

but if you have a fly or wasp problem in your patio, having some potted Sarracenia flava nearby will definitely help cut down on the flying insects. that is just a bug catching machine.

and all of these plants are really beautiful and amazing to look at and try to imagine the complicated evolutionary changes that had to have occured in order for them to lure and catch insects. definitely fire up Google and take a peek at some of the plants I mentioned.

 

You are sooooo lucky that you can grow these things in your home. I've tried with little success. A Venus Flytrap lasted only a few weeks. Our humidity in Calgary is so low that most plants like this do not survive. And I'm not prepared to build a humid green house in one of my rooms. I have always been fascinated by such plants.

 

actually, it's not all that humid where I live (but certainly warmer). if you look at my flava pitchers, the outer lips of them are dried and brown, but other than aesthetics it doesn't really seem to affect them too adversely. the most important thing is keeping them in trays of water that are always kept topped off. and it has to be distilled water, since the roots get burned easily by any minerals or chemicals (the venus flytraps are fine on regular tap water though). yes, believe it or not, my plants drink more expensive water than me (I filter the tap water, but they get $1.25/gal drinks of purified H2O. considering how much of it just evaporates into the air, I do notice the bite in my grocery bill. )

 

I had a venus flytrap a couple of years ago. This is possibly the coolest plant a sadist can have. I placed it in a terrarium and pointed a streaming webcam at it. I kept the container topped off with live flies as well. Every couple of days it managed to catch one.

I grew much larger than it was when I got it, and was a beautiful shade of green. Then it suddenly just died off after 6 months or so. It was nowhere near the time when it was supposed to go dormant and it never came back. I was quite sad.

 

FYI, Venus Fly traps are only found to grow naturally in a 75 mile radius of the town I live in....Wilmington N.C. Special combination of acidic soil, temperate climate etc. It's a crime to dig them up in the wild and the legal farmers ship them all over the world."the natural distribution is a little more confined than what people may believe. The entire natural distribution of the flytrap is a circle about 75 miles (120km) from Wilmington, N.C. This covers the Southeast part of N.C. and the Northeast part of S.C."
The bogland areas where it normally grows are devoid of the nutrients that it requires, so the plant grows stems which have traps on the end. It is in these traps that the insects are caught.