By Will DunhamJune 11 (Reuters) – Pity the poor fly that lands on a Venus flytrap. When the insect touches hair-like structures on this remarkable carnivorous plant, its trap snaps shut, dooming the victim to be digested over several days in secreted enzymes. Scientists have now found the physical mechanism behind this snapping action.Researchers said experiments showed that the Venus flytrap’s closure is initiated by a rapid softening of the cell walls in the outer layer of the plant’s trap, which is a highly modified leaf divided into two hinged lobes that resemble jaws with teeth.AdvertisementAdvertisementFor more than a century, the prevailing hypothesis had been that the trap’s closure was driven by a rapid redistribution of water within the leaf, with water moving between cells to swell one side of the leaf. The new research points to a different biological mechanism.”One of the most iconic plants in the world can still surprise us. After more than a century of research, we are still discovering fundamentally new things about how the Venus flytrap works,” said physicist Yoël Forterre of the French research agency CNRS and Aix-Marseille University, senior author of the study published on Thursday in the journal Science.The Venus flytrap is a small carnivorous plant native to a limited region of North Carolina and South Carolina in the United States. Like many carnivorous plants, it grows in nutrient-poor environments and supplements its nutrition by capturing and digesting insects.In experiments conducted in Marseille, the researchers used high-speed imaging, mechanical measurements by indentation of the plant’s outer layer and mechanical modeling. They also measured water transport within t …
