You can see the insect-attracting nectar glistening in this Venus Flytrap.
When insects step inside, touching the trigger hairs, the trap closes in from two to six seconds, forming a wildflower cage with those lovely spines.
Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan of Harvard found that the trap is driven by a kind of spring, somewhat like the traps hunters use.
His studies employed high-speed cameras. They did not suggest that the mechanism is somehow a separate spring. Instead, the entire trap -- actually a modified leaf -- is in effect the spring. The two halves of the trap snap from convex (open) to concave (closed) when it is triggered.
There may be no simple, accurate, descriptive metaphor for the trap's action. Mahadevan said it was among the phenomena called "snap buckling."
The trap may continue to close for an hour or more.
At left is a photograph of Venus Flytrap flowers.
It is a smaller version of the original, potentially very large image created by the late Claude W. Rankin of Fayetteville, North Carolina.
These plants were rare and endangered when these images were made, three decades ago.
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Our forest management has made it so.
Regular, lightening-ignited fires were a natural part of the world in which Dionaea muscipula evolved.
Those fires burned back grasses and shrubs which crowd out Dionaea muscipula, and left behind the kind of nitrogen-poor, unpopulared soil on which a predatory plant has a competitive advantage.
Studies have found that they get as much as 75 percent of their nitrogen requirements by capturing and eating insects. If we can stand the head, we can continue to share the world with these astonishing and lovely predators.