Carnivorous Plant Simulator (2D)

Carnivorous Plant

🪰 Click a trigger hair on an open trap to bend it. A real Venus flytrap "counts" touches — it takes a second bend within a short memory window to actually snap shut, so a single raindrop doesn't waste the trap.

Traps open

Traps digesting

Prey caught

Hair touches armed

Controls

Trigger sensitivity 2 touches

Digestion time 6.0s

How it works

Each lobe of a Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) carries a few stiff trigger hairs. Bending one flexes mechanosensitive channels at its base and fires an electrical action potential through the leaf — but one action potential alone doesn't close the trap. The plant keeps a short-lived calcium "memory" of the first touch; only a second bend within roughly 20–30 seconds (compressed here to a few seconds so you can see it) pushes the calcium signal over threshold and triggers the rapid snap-buckling of the leaf's curved cells that slams the lobes shut in under a second.

Insects wandering near an open trap bump its hairs the same way a click does, so a struggling fly can trip the trap on its own. Once shut, continued struggling against the inward-curled teeth tightens the seal further and switches on digestive glands that secrete enzymes — digestion of real prey takes five to twelve days; the digestion-time slider compresses that into a watchable interval before the trap reopens, empty and reset.

Trigger sensitivity — how many hair touches within the memory window are needed to snap the trap shut (real flytraps need two).
Digestion time — how long a closed trap spends digesting before it reopens.
Click an open trap — bends one of its trigger hairs.

Trap lobe (open / closing) Digesting (closed) Insect