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Level 2 Level 2
Plant Plant

Venus Flytrap Electrophysiology

Electrical impulses aren’t exclusive to animals. Plants like the Venus Flytrap also use electricity to interact with their environment. In this experiment, we’ll explore plant electrophysiology by recording action potentials from a Venus Flytrap!

What Will You Learn?

  • How plants use electrical signals to sense and respond to stimuli.
  • How a plant “knows” that its an insect moving inside the plant.
  • How to record and analyze plant action potentials using the Plant SpikerBox.
  • The differences between plant and animal electrophysiology.

Background

The Venus Flytrap is a carnivorous plant that supplements its nutrition by trapping and digesting insects. But why does it do this?

Plants are stationary and must adapt to survive in their environment. To thrive, they need water, sunlight, soil, air, and nutrients. However, in some areas, like the nutrient-poor swamps of North Carolina, these resources are scarce.

Plants in such environments have two options: grow deep root systems to access nutrients or find an alternative solution. The Venus Flytrap took a different approach—it “hacked” nature by evolving to extract nutrients from another source: insects. But how does a plant eat and animal?

Does a plant have a brain?

How can a plant sense a fly and trap it? That sounds like something an animal would do. Do plants have brains? In fact what does have a brain? In this experiment, you will answer that question and understand the physiology of how this happens.

Procedure

Organize your Plant SpikerBox materials. For the Venus Flytrap recording, you will need one of the orange stake electrodes (short or tall), the short grounding pin with wire, the yellow RCA clip electrodes, and the electrode gel.

You will also need an Android device or laptop with USB. The plant spikerbox can work with iPhones but you need to use the headphone jack with our green smartphone cable.

Find a Venus Flytrap. You can generally find them in museum science stores, but our favorite online supplier is Peter D'Amato's "California Carnivores" store. If you live in Ann Arbor, MI, you can conveniently purchase them at Downtown Home & Garden

Select a nice healthy plant, and find an open trap you want to record from. If it is low growing plant, press the shorter of the two orange electrode stakes into the dirt until the silver electrode wire is pressing up against the side of the trap. If it is a tall Flytrap, use the larger orange electrode stake and do the same.

Apply electrode gel where the silver electrode wire touches the Flytrap. Note: In the image left, you can see the "Trigger Hairs," the three pointy spikes inside the flytrap, which you will be poking soon!

Find the black pin with black wire lead, which will act as our electrical ground.

Next: Ground the ground in the ground! ... Stick the grounding pin in the pot's soil. This allows a path for the current to flow into the SpikerBox.

Connect the yellow electrode to the RCA jack on your Plant SpikerBox.

Clip the red clip to the red wire connected to the bottom of the flytrap. And the black clip to the ground wire. Turn on the SpikerBox, open SpikeRecorder, and you are ready to go!

While recording the signal on your phone, tablet or PC, gently touch one the trigger hairs inside of the trap.

Wait about 60s in between pokes. If a trap closes. It will take a few days to open back up. If it closes a few times, that trap will die. So try not to close the trap!

Results & Analysis

Analyze the signal you recorded. Did you see anything that resembles and action potential? If so, how do they compare to those in animals such as the cockroach?

What behaviours did you notice in the plant when you pressed a trigger hair. Did the behaviour always happen, or just sometimes? What patterns did you notice?