The Venus flytrap gets all the attention, but the world’s quickest plant trap belongs to the humble bladderwort. It’s an aquatic plant with tiny hollow bladders dangling from underwater stems. Each bladder is about a millimetre across and has a hinged door at one end with trigger hairs.
The bladder pumps water out of itself until it’s like a tiny vacuum balloon, ready to snap. When a passing water flea or mosquito larva brushes the hairs, the door pops open and the bladder slurps the victim inside in around half a millisecond. That’s roughly 100 times faster than a Venus flytrap snaps.
The trap is too quick to see with the naked eye. It took high-speed cameras filming at thousands of frames per second to capture how it works. Once inside, the prey gets dissolved over a few hours, and the bladder resets for the next victim.
