Venus Flytrap Electrophysiology

Electrical impulses aren’t exclusive to animals. Plants such as the Venus Flytrap also use electricity to sense and react to the world. In this experiment, you’ll record action potentials from a Venus Flytrap and discover how a plant knows it’s an insect moving inside the trap.

Devices and Accessories

About experiment

What Will You Learn?

How plants use electrical signals to sense and respond to stimuli.
How a plant knows it’s an insect moving inside the trap.
How to record and analyze plant action potentials with the Plant SpikerBox.
Key differences between plant and animal electrophysiology.

Background

The Venus Flytrap is a carnivorous plant that supplements its diet by trapping and digesting insects—an ingenious solution to the nutrient-poor swamps of North Carolina. Instead of growing deep roots to find scarce minerals, the Flytrap hacked nature by extracting nutrients from animals.

How can a plant sense a fly and capture it? That sounds like something an animal would do. Do plants have brains? What even counts as a brain? In this experiment you’ll tackle these questions and uncover the physiology behind the Flytrap’s lightning-fast snap.

Experiment

Record Electrical Signals From a Venus Flytrap

Materials:

Plant SpikerBox with orange stake electrode, short ground pin, yellow RCA clip electrodes, and electrode gel
Android device or laptop (USB) – iOS works with headphone-jack + green cable
Healthy Venus Flytrap (try California Carnivores or local science shops)

Step 1 – Insert the Ground Electrode

Insert the black ground pin into the pot’s soil so the Plant SpikerBox has a stable reference.

Step 2 – Attach Clip Leads

Connect the yellow lead to the Plant SpikerBox, red clip to the stake wire, and black clip to the ground wire. Power on the SpikerBox and launch SpikeRecorder.

Step 3 – Trigger the Trap

Begin recording. Gently touch one of the three trigger hairs inside the trap. Wait about 60 seconds between touches—closing the trap multiple times in a row can kill that trap.

Results & Analysis

Examine your recordings. Do you see spikes that resemble action potentials? How do their shapes and timing compare with those recorded from animals such as the cockroach leg?

Observe the Flytrap’s behavior when you touch a trigger hair. Does it always respond? What patterns can you spot in the electrical signals and the trap’s movement?