Venus Flytraps Snap Their Traps Shut in Less Than a Second. Scientists Say They’ve Discovered How the Predatory Plants Are So Fast

The walls of cells in the leaves’ outer layer suddenly soften, allowing the structures to hinge into a closed position, according to a new study

Margherita Bassi | Daily Correspondent

June 15, 2026 4:06 p.m.

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Venus flytraps are iconic carnivorous plants. When an insect or spider touches trigger hairs on one of the plant’s jaw-like leaves, it snaps shut around the unsuspecting critter, which will then be digested. However, the exact mechanism behind the unbelievably fast closure has remained unclear.

Now, scientists say they’ve solved the mystery.

In a study published June 11 in the journal Science, a team reports that the chomping motion happens when rigid walls of cells on the leaves’ outer surface suddenly soften. The findings provide new insights into plant biology and could inspire new robotic designs.

“When Darwin saw these plants move so fast, he was convinced that the plant had a muscle inside. But plants do not have muscles, and they do not have nerves,” study co-author Yoël Forterre, a physicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, tells the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin. “For more than a century, there have been many hypotheses. It’s very surprising that plant cell walls can tune their mechanical properties so fast.”

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Researchers have suspected that softening cell walls might be behind Venus flytraps’ quick closure. But another leading hypothesis posits that the action might stem from the movement of water. In that proposal, water travels into cells in the outer surface, or epidermis, of the jaw-like leaves, causing them to swell and the trap to shut.

So, Forterre and his colleagues investigated these possible mechanisms. Using a needle-like pressure probe in cells revealed that water took around 30 to 150 seconds to move into a leaf’s outer epidermis, meaning the swelling mechanism is too slow to be behind the lightning-fast closure.

In another experiment, the researchers examined the stiffness of the leaves’ outer cells before and after they were triggered to shut. Some of the traps were glued open and others had holes cut into them to provide a clear view for measurements. The decrease in cell stiffness aligned with the time it took for leaves to shut, the team found, and further analysis revealed that the cell walls softened upon touching trigger hairs.

“Our hypothesis is that the trap is already mechanically loaded before triggering, much like a spring,” Forterre tells Reuters’ Will Dunham. “When ​the trap is stimulated, the cell walls of the outer epidermal layer rapidly soften by roughly 30 to 40 percent, meaning that the cell wall becomes more flexible. This releases internal stresses stored in the ‌tissue and causes ⁠the trap to bend and close.”

The new study is “breathtaking” and “very elegant,” Simon Poppinga, director of the Botanical Garden at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, who was not involved in the work, tells Nature’s Lauren Wolf. He says that the discovery could inspire soft robots that move by changing stiffness.

Not everyone is convinced, however. The researchers didn’t account for another water transport process that could be faster than the one they examined, which led them to rule out the swelling mechanism, says Sergey Shabala, a plant physiologist at the University of Western Australia who did not participate in the study, to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ellen Phiddian. He also doubts that a cell wall can relax as fast as outlined in the study.

What’s more, the identified mechanisms were inferred based on indirect measurements because it’s “really difficult to measure these types of things at scale,” says Kim Johnson, a plant biologist at La Trobe University in Australia who also wasn’t involved in the study, to the ABC. More work is needed to confirm the findings, she adds.

Still, the research reminds us that there is much to be uncovered in the natural world.

“One of the most iconic plants in the world ​can still surprise us,” Forterre tells Reuters. “After more than a century of research, we are still discovering fundamentally new things about how the Venus flytrap ⁠works.”

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Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.