- Venus Fly Trap is the common name for the species Dionaea muscipula, and the Venus Fly Trap is its only member. It is classified as a Droseraceae, which are carnivorous plants that catch their prey using traps. The genus of the plant is Dionaea, which means it has tiny spines that help them catch their prey.
- Fully grown Venus Fly Traps can range anywhere from 3 to 6 inches tall most of the year. When they flower in June, the flower stems make them 6 to 12 inches tall. Venus Fly Trap flowers are white, have five highly symmetrical petals and many anthers (little circular things covered in pollen attached to the flower by skinny supports). Venus Fly Traps also have shallow roots, so they're not invulnerable to being pulled out. Some have rich red or rich green inner markings on the surface of their traps. These variations occur depending on how much sun and light they get.
- Venus Fly Traps only eat insects. These insects have to be just the right size: small enough for the plant to close around it and big enough to provide enough nourishment. Despite the name, the plant will eat any type of insect, and are actually known to eat more ants than flies. They can accidentally traps stones or grass too, but will spit them out within 12 hours. Hamburger meat, fish, and other store-bought meats are toxic to the plant, so people growing Venus Fly Traps indoors will have to find bugs to feed the plant a couple of times a month.
- The Venus Fly Trap moves so fast that if someone wanted to film it closing, they would need a slow-motion camera to capture the details. It only moves when the "trigger hairs" are touched, so if an object passes these bristles, it will not close. Also, the Venus Fly Trap usually only closes when something touches its bristles more than once. Prey can be squeezed or suffocated to death within seconds. When the plant catches something edible, it forms an airtight seal so it won't escape and secretes digestive fluid that dissolves the food and absorbs it into the plant's stem. This fluid only gets rid of the softest part of insects, so when the plant reopens in five to 12 days, only the exoskeleton remains.
- Venus Fly Traps will not eat humans or even harm them since they are too small and take too long to kill prey. This reality hasn't stopped movie directors from using them as man-eating monsters. In the original 1960 "Little Shop of Horrors," Audrey II was a cross between a Venus Fly Trap and a "butterwort." In the iconic 1922 movie "Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens" Dr. Van Helsing shows and describes a Venus Fly Trap as the "vampire of the plant kingdom." There was even a campy movie in 1987 called "Venus Flytrap" that featured the plant as the villain.
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