It’s plant buying season, and not just outdoor plants or plants for the garden, but indoor plants, too. After every winter, several of my houseplants inevitably give up trying to survive in what is at best a hostile environment. They have too much water, or not enough. They get no fertilizer, then suddenly 3 cigarette sized fertilizer sticks deliver a buzz of nitrogen and phosphorus—the last they’ll likely ever see. I treat my own body similarly, cycling from healthy habits to regrettable nutritional decisions and back again.
A few weeks ago I went to Bachman’s landscape center with a friend and while wandering among little cacti and air plants we stumbled upon a Venus flytrap. I had no idea this little bug-eating carnivorous plant could survive as a houseplant, and indoors in Minnesota, no less. And to be sure, it won’t survive—at least not long term—but nearly three weeks have passed and while I wouldn’t say it is thriving, it’s alive.
Still, it’s not quite prime bug season in Minnesota, and while I can usually count on fruit flies finding their way into my kitchen sooner or later in the summer heat, so far I’ve noticed a lack of flies or bugs of any kind. I’m not sure that I can afford to wait around.
Supposedly, the Venus flytrap can survive on just photosynthesis, with the bugs acting like bonus nutrients (like when a bug falls into your food and you don’t notice). But I didn’t buy a $12 Venus flytrap so it can act like every other plant. I need it to kill.
Personally, I eat a lot of protein especially in the form of meat, so a plant that does the same appeals to me. In any relationship, it’s nice to have at least some things in common. Ideally I would be photosynthetic, but that is likely several evolutionary mutations or gene-splicing errors in judgment down the science road.
So I began to worry that the lack of bugs was thwarting the true nature of my plant. Century upon century of evolution had brought us to this point, after all. The Venus flytrap sitting in its little pot, which I put into a coffee cup for lack of a better vessel, and me staring at it, worrying about whether it was getting enough murder in its diet.
Fortunately, the other day I noticed a spiderweb in the upper corner of a basement stair, and I decided to take action. Since spiders seem to know where the bugs are likely to be, I moved the Venus flytrap to the stairway and pushed it up against the web. By jostling the web a bit, I figured the spider would either share its bugs, or maybe it would even step out to see what all the hubbub was about and get caught in the little leaf grappler.
But after a day I didn’t see any leaves closed around a fresh meal, so I grabbed a little pill bug the spider had dropped under the web and I pushed him into the leaf. The weird thing is that the first time you disturb the interior of the flytrap leaves, it doesn’t close. It knows you’re probably toying with it, but the second time you disturb it, the grapple clamps shut and the dead pill bug isn’t going anywhere now.
And three days later, the pill bug is still dead in there. He’s not being digested or doing much of anything else that I can see. Probably the issue is that he wasn’t fresh, and so maybe the nutrients he’d carried had already evaporated, or maybe his little shell is too hard to digest. Maybe “fly trap” is meant to be literal, and it is incapable of being a pill bug trap. In the meantime, I’m keeping an eye out for more typical menu fare for my little carnivorous friend.
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