In Boiling Spring Lakes, North Carolina, botanist Julie Moore has dedicated herself to protecting the Venus flytrap from the pressure of encroaching housing development. In her profile, Lindsay Liles explores Moore’s conservation efforts, explains the remarkable mechanics of the flytrap itself, and shows how the plant supports the delicate, narrowly defined ecosystem in which it thrives.
This is a plant equipped to kill, and about to kill in real time, because a carpenter ant has just wandered into the danger zone. I watch with a mixture of dread and fascination as the insect hurries along the eyelashes that will become jail bars should it trip the three fine trigger hairs sitting in an innocuous-looking triangle on each side of the trap. In its frenetic scuttle, it bumps one hair with its segmented body, and the clock starts ticking. The ant has twenty seconds. If it hits a second trigger hair within that time, the trap will—
Snap.
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