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!