The Venus Flytrap

Job 12:9-11
“Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the LORD hath wrought this? In whose hand [is] the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind. Doth not the ear try words? and the mouth taste his meat?”

The Venus flytrap is one of the most fascinating plants you will ever find. In college, I had a Venus flytrap that I would now and again feed with a morsel of hamburger from the college lunchroom. One day a classmate saw me carefully wrapping up the morsel and asked what I was going to do with it. I explained that I was taking it back for my plant. He refused to believe that a plant would eat meat. Well, he stared in doubt as I placed the morsel of meat into one of the leaves and tripped the trigger. When the leaf closed on the meat, he fled the room in absolute disbelief.

Did you ever wonder how the Venus flytrap’s leaf can close so rapidly on a fly or other morsel? It has taken scientists some time to figure out how it is done. When the trigger hairs are triggered, the cells on the outer layer of the leaf grow incredibly fast. The closing leaf is really the result of astonishingly rapid cell growth! It takes days for the cells on the inside of the leaf to catch up. As they do, the leaf slowly opens again.

The wild growth of the leaf’s outer cells is started by an electrical impulse produced when something brushes up against the trigger cells inside the leaf.

The complex systems of the Venus flytrap are difficult to explain as the product of no intelligence. They are yet another example of the variations possible to an infinitely imaginative Creator.

Prayer:
Father, there is no limit to Your imagination. Help me to understand that there is also no limit to Your love for me because of what your Son, Jesus Christ, has done for me. In His Name I pray. Amen.

Notes:
“How plants manage to move.” Science Digest, Aug., 1983. p. 89.