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Vegetarian Food Traps
Venus Fly Traps are quite interesting plants, with a number of evolutionary adaptations that allow them to live in an environment that's deficient in the nutrients needed for plants to thrive. This comes at some cost in adaptability to other environments. Websites and videos created by enthusiasts explain the VFTs' need for pure water, even distilled water, rather than tap water or any other water that contains dissolved minerals or salts. They need to grow in something like sphagnum moss, which doesn't decompose quickly even if it's kept moist, and has almost no nutrients.
"Feeding" the plants, via their specialized leaves, isn't trivial, because of a mechanism that has evolved to prevent them from wasting energy. The two-sided traps have three tiny touch-sensitive hairs on each side, and two touches within a period of 15 or 20 seconds trip the trap to close part way, enough to loosely interlace the spikes that extend from the edges of the traps. But three more touches are needed in a short time to make the trap close tightly and to start producing the digestive enzymes that allow the plant to extract nutrients. A random bump from something in the environment isn't likely to trigger a trap, and if a tiny insect does, it will probably escape between the "bars" of the "cage". If too large an animal trips the trap, the trap won't be able to close on it, and eventually the trap will open again. If one is feeding a VFT with something other than a live insect of the appropriate size, it's necessary to do something to provide those extra touches.
The instructions I've found on line regarding appropriate VFT food are pretty specific: only insects. Some say that a VFT should never be given anything that a human would eat. And that's nonsensical, on its face, because many insects are eaten by humans. There are pictures of VFTs with tiny frogs in their traps. On one website, the "expert" was asked if it would be okay to feed a VFT with pieces of a worm, and the "expert" said that it should be okay. The apparent logic was that VFTs could eat "lower" forms of life... or something like that.
All of which got me wondering.
So last summer, I bought three VFTs. I fed one with tofu, one with textured vegetable protein, and one with whey protein. With a sample size of 1 apiece, I can't be rigorous with a comparison, especially since about a month into the experiment, I knocked over the whey-fed plant and it lost a couple of its leaves. What I can say is that in a few months, the whey-fed plant approximately doubled in size in all dimensions, the TVP-fed plant grew by a factor of about 2½, and the tofu-fed plant by a factor of about 3.
VFTs require a dormancy period of about 3 months during the winter: reduced light and no food. They don't tolerate temperatures much below freezing, so in the Ottawa climate, the simplest solution is to make them hibernate in a refrigerator. That didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd have liked, since the trap leaves were hanging down over the sides of the pots. In future, I'll make sure the pots are large enough for the traps to lie more or less flat on the surface. I brought the VFTs out and repotted them a couple of weeks ago, and they seem to have done okay. All have had some of their leaves die, as expected, but they're putting out lots of new leaves. The whey-fed and TVP-fed plants have both budded off new little plants, and the tofu-fed plant has put out a flower stalk that's growing rapidly. I'm especially pleased about the last one, because if I can get some seeds from it, I should be able to grow a number of new plants whose "diet" I can control from the start, with decent sample statistics.
There are some tricks to feeding a VFT with these concentrated protein sources, which I'll get into later.
"Feeding" the plants, via their specialized leaves, isn't trivial, because of a mechanism that has evolved to prevent them from wasting energy. The two-sided traps have three tiny touch-sensitive hairs on each side, and two touches within a period of 15 or 20 seconds trip the trap to close part way, enough to loosely interlace the spikes that extend from the edges of the traps. But three more touches are needed in a short time to make the trap close tightly and to start producing the digestive enzymes that allow the plant to extract nutrients. A random bump from something in the environment isn't likely to trigger a trap, and if a tiny insect does, it will probably escape between the "bars" of the "cage". If too large an animal trips the trap, the trap won't be able to close on it, and eventually the trap will open again. If one is feeding a VFT with something other than a live insect of the appropriate size, it's necessary to do something to provide those extra touches.
The instructions I've found on line regarding appropriate VFT food are pretty specific: only insects. Some say that a VFT should never be given anything that a human would eat. And that's nonsensical, on its face, because many insects are eaten by humans. There are pictures of VFTs with tiny frogs in their traps. On one website, the "expert" was asked if it would be okay to feed a VFT with pieces of a worm, and the "expert" said that it should be okay. The apparent logic was that VFTs could eat "lower" forms of life... or something like that.
All of which got me wondering.
So last summer, I bought three VFTs. I fed one with tofu, one with textured vegetable protein, and one with whey protein. With a sample size of 1 apiece, I can't be rigorous with a comparison, especially since about a month into the experiment, I knocked over the whey-fed plant and it lost a couple of its leaves. What I can say is that in a few months, the whey-fed plant approximately doubled in size in all dimensions, the TVP-fed plant grew by a factor of about 2½, and the tofu-fed plant by a factor of about 3.
VFTs require a dormancy period of about 3 months during the winter: reduced light and no food. They don't tolerate temperatures much below freezing, so in the Ottawa climate, the simplest solution is to make them hibernate in a refrigerator. That didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd have liked, since the trap leaves were hanging down over the sides of the pots. In future, I'll make sure the pots are large enough for the traps to lie more or less flat on the surface. I brought the VFTs out and repotted them a couple of weeks ago, and they seem to have done okay. All have had some of their leaves die, as expected, but they're putting out lots of new leaves. The whey-fed and TVP-fed plants have both budded off new little plants, and the tofu-fed plant has put out a flower stalk that's growing rapidly. I'm especially pleased about the last one, because if I can get some seeds from it, I should be able to grow a number of new plants whose "diet" I can control from the start, with decent sample statistics.
There are some tricks to feeding a VFT with these concentrated protein sources, which I'll get into later.
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One complication with doing the dormancy thing in the refrigerator is that the instructions I followed recommended gently removing the plants from their moss/soil before putting them in containers in the fridge. This should have been easy to do, by gently sloshing the root system in clean water. I found that the plants had been grown in those little peat-in-mesh growth media things, and the plants' roots had grown through the mesh. And the roots took some damage while I was trying to cut the mesh.