How do we keep the flytrap alive before our experiment?

When I got the Venus flytrap to University I put it on the window sill next to my desk. I have a nice big window, so I hope the plant will get a lot of sunshine. Recently, the weather has been pretty bad with lots of cloud, but the flytrap still seems to be doing well.

At home, I put a bucket outside the back door of my flat. It will catch rain water and then I can use it to water the flytrap.

Where can we get a flytrap from?

The first thing we needed to set up our experiment was a Venus flytrap plant. My friend Julia has a large Venus flytrap in her conservatory. One day, when she was weeding it, she accidently pulled out some smaller plants from the mother plant. She put two into tea cups and one into a small terracotta pot to see if they would survive. The mother plant and the three babies can be seen in the picture.

The baby plants lived and Julia kindly gave me the one in the terracotta pot for our experiment. She gave me three very important instructions:

1. Always keep it wet - in the wild, flytraps grow in bogs, which are very wet environments
2. Only water it with rain water - nothing else!
3. Put it in the sunniest place possible.

Venus flytrap

The Venus flytrap turns the food chain on it's head. Rather than it being eaten by animals, it dines on unfortunate insects. After a flytrap has digested a fly, the trap opens to allow the exoskeleton to be blown or washed away. Here is a picture of the trap after it has opened. You can see the exoskeleton of the fly. It doesn't look that much different to a live fly. It just looks like it has been squashed.

Sharif and I thought it would be cool to see what happens to a fly as it is digested by the fly trap. We can do this using x-rays to see through the trap when it is closed.

We made a plan for our experiment:

1. Get a Venus flytrap
2. Get a fly
3. Put the fly in the flytrap
4. Take an x-ray scan at just after it have caught the fly
5. Take more x-ray scans every few days to see what changed

Sharif and I realised that we needed to know a few things before we could carry out our experiment of a Venus flytrap digesting a fly. We made a list of questions:

• Where can we get a flytrap from?
• How do we catch a fly - alive?
• How do we keep the flytrap alive before and during our experiment?
• How often should we scan the flytrap?
• How does the flytrap catch a fly?
• What settings should be used on the x-ray machine?
• Would x-raying the flytrap kill it?
• Why does the flytrap need to eat flies?

Time to go and do some research!