TerraForums Venus Flytrap, Nepenthes, Drosera and more talk
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are pill bugs safe? or are they a good food for a vft because pill bugs do have a shell and they do curl up in a ball. and i was wondering if they get eaten.
Barry Rice advises against bugs with a "sturdy exoskeleton". Plus, pill bugs don't seem to be nice and juicy (full of nutrients) like flies, spiders, and crickets. I spent this past weekend feeding almost all my VFTs flies that I caught with a wide-mouth jar out in the back yard.
Also, keep in mind that you don't have to feed your VFT. It mainly eats sunlight . If you really want to feed it, don't feed more than once a month. (Before this previous weekend, I had not fed anything to my plants since dormancy ended and they have been growing very well.)
Flytraps have no control over what may fall in their traps in the wild! In my experience they can nosh on pretty much any insect, so go ahead and feed your plant pill bugs.
Sorry to contradict Joosa, but whilst sunlight is the number one priority, there's nothing wrong with letting your plant have a good gorge every once in while. Occasionally you may lose a trap to rot, but it's rare if your plant has good air circulation.
With regards to pill bugs, and any insect with a hard exoskeleton in fact, there are always gaps in the armour through which digestive juices can seep, so they can happily dgest such creatures.
The only thing that my VFTs haven't been able to eat is ladybugs (and variants of them). It may very well have something to do with the hard shell, but I don't know for sure. I do not feed them to my VFTs anymore though.
actually I am notcing more and more that...the rate of digestion of a bug reflects the health of a plant. I noticed that when weakened..it takes liek a month for a plant to digest a bug...whereas...IMO...when I fed my typical a earwig (the best meal....as its soft and nice ) .. the thing opened just in 1 week.
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