Stompy caught his (her?) first fly.
I wasn’t there at the moment of the capture, but it couldn’t have been long after that I noticed two of Stompy’s traps had closed. On inspection, one was quite empty, but in the other, a juicy fly…
It’s probably worth describing the way a trap is triggered to close shut – each trap (which is just a specialised leaf) has several “hairs” on it, if you touch a hair, nothing happens, unless you touch another within some critical period of time (I don’t know exactly how long) – I guess this mechanism is to save wasting energy “capturing” raindrops or other falling detritus. Anyway, two touches causes the leaf to close around itself, hopefully trapping whatever it was that foolishly brushed against these hairs.
So, with two traps shut, obviously, Mr (Mrs?) Fly had had one narrow escape, but, having got a buzz out of it, risked another. Alas, for Mr Fly, Stompy was too quick the second time (buwahahaha).
This is where I first observed the fly, when the trap was closed in its first “mode” (imagine your hands tied at the wrist, bring your hands together interleaving your fingers – that’s what this mode looks like), the fly is trapped in its little green cage, but free to move around. Mr Fly waved to me through the bars of his cage. I waved back, and made a cup of tea.
Now, having closed around a fly, the trap needs to be sure that it has indeed captured something so that it can go into digestive mode – this is why the foolish fly should have kept still, in to-ing and fro-ing inside the cage the fly again brushes against those hair-triggers (this might be worth remembering, just in case you ever fall into one of Stompy’s larger cousins).
The capture thus confirmed, over the next few hours the trap slowly tightens around the fly (as in the analogy above – imagine pushing the palms of your hands together – notice how the fingers tend to move up, and if you really want your palms to touch the fingers must un-interleave – that’s what the trap does). Then it secretes digestive juices to, um…, digest the fly. Yummy!
But, and this is the horrible bit, nearly 24 hours after the capture, when the sun was low and shining through the translucent leaves, I could see that little fly, held tightly, but still alive and able to wiggle the odd leg now and again. I swear I could hear the tiniest voice saying help me!.
Eek!
Apparently it takes several weeks for the trap to digest the fly – eventually it will re-open leaving the dried up exoskeleton husk to blow away on the wind.
