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To cut, or not to cut....

One of my traps is dying (not the plant, just the trap) and I wanted to know when to cut it off. Would it be ok to cut the whole trap off now? or should I wait until the entire trap is dead? Currently, the trap only has a few dying spots, but I just wanted to know if it would be bad to cut the "neck" (I forget the correct term) of the trap since it is still alive at the moment...
Now when the leaves are invovled, I would only cut the dead sections off, correct?? But I'm not sure about the traps...
any advice?
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ANYTHING that is still alive, don't cut it. if it's yellow/green, wait untill it turns black to cut it off.
i think when you say "neck" you mean the petioles, petioles are what the traps are attatched to. if it's still alive, don't cut it.


it's like this, if your hand needed to be amputated because it started to "rot" from a spiderbite or something, it doesn't make sense to amputate the rest of your arm, does it? so if you need to amputate a dead trap (hand) , theres no need to amputate a healthy petiole (arm)


i never cut anything off my my vft's i just let the leaves die and i don't ever do anything about it. guess i'm just lazy
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I also leave them on as long as they are a little green.  The green parts should still be able to use sun/light to carry out photosynthesis.

edit:

ps. Nice analogy JustLikeAPill
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Thankies guys!! Ive been wondering this for a while, but just now have I had the need for the information!! Thanks for the help!! (yes very nive analogy, Justlikeapill! Very understandable! lol):;):
 
thanks for the compliments on my analogy lol.
 
Y'know I don't know why people started telling everyone to cut dying traps off immediately. When I was a newbie I was under the impression that if the whole leave rotted down to the rhiozome that it would spread and kill the plant. I'm not talking about fungi or anything I'm just talking about when a trap dies of exhaustion. Then one day that I realized that if you HAD to cut the rotting traps off then they wouldn't live in the wild. I felt reeeeeeaaaally dumb back then. I guess people were afraid of making their precious plant look unpretty or something. I mean, my VFT is precious but y'know there is a line to be drawn. No makeup for the VFTs now!
 
auctually i think plants look prettier with a skirt of dead leaves at the bottom, maybe it's just me but i often see a deep purple hue to the black leaves
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