It's as easy as one, two, three… Venus flytraps count the number of steps their Insect prey make to trigger key stages In catching and digesting them. We knew that brushing the sensitive trigger hairs on a flytrap twice closes the trap in a tenth of a second. The first touch causes molecules to build up in the trap's sensory hairs and the second pushes their concentration across a threshold, resulting in an electrical impulse that activates the trap. This led Rainer Hedrich of the University of Wiirzburg in Germany and his team to feed crickets to flytraps and investigate what happened next.
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