Daily Devotional - January 20

Botany

The Venus flytrap is a carnivorous plant that grows only in bogs located in a tiny part of the world covering about 700 miles along the coast of North and South Carolina. These humid, sunny bogs lack nutrients that the plant needs, so this plant traps and eats insects! These insects are like vitamin pills for the plant.

How does this plant trap and digest insects?

• First, it has to get the insects to come to it, so it produces a sweet smelling aroma.
• Second, it has to know the insect is there. As the insect moves around on the “open mouth”, it triggers two hairs inside of the plant’s leaves.
• Third, the plant has to trap the insect. When these two hairs are triggered, the trap snaps shut faster than the blink of an eye. These leaves snap by changing from convex (outward –curving) to concave (inward –curving) - similar to the way a tennis ball cut in half can be quickly flipped inside out.
• Fourth, the plant must “eat” the insect. Trapped inside the imprisoned leaves, the insect is digested in three to ten days – leaving nothing but its exoskeleton. Then the trap reopens – allowing the exoskeleton to be blown away in the breeze.

If you believe in evolution, this trap had to develop over eons of time and thousands of generations. How did the plant, which had no brains, know what aroma to make to lure the insect? How did the plant know to use two hairs to trigger it shut and not just one? How many times did the trap close needlessly until it realized it needed to evolve two hairs to trigger its trap? Once the insect captured, how did the plant know how to develop the correct digestive juices in correct quantity? If it made too much, it could digest itself. The Venus flytrap was made by the Creator from the beginning. He put together a way for this plant to get extra vitamins that the soil lacked. He made the Venus flytrap with the right aroma, the right trapping mechanism, the right amount of digestive juices and much more so that it could survive and thrive in a small niche in this world. A Venus flytrap testifies that there is a Venus flytrap maker, and that maker is God.

O give thanks unto the Lord…who giveth food to all flesh:  for his mercy endureth for ever.
~ Psalm 136:1,25

Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett