As far as plants go, Venus flytraps are pretty hardcore. After attracting its prey with a fruity scent and trapping it inside its leaves, the flytrap slowly digests the insect for 5 to 12 days, releasing the empty husk after its meal. But the exact molecular mechanism behind this behavior had been a mystery to scientists—until now.

In a Nature Communications paper published today, Japanese researchers report that an ion channel at the base of a flytrap’s hairy sensors acts as an amplifier for sounding a plant-wide alarm to shut its trap. To be clear, scientists had a decent idea of how well the Venus flytrap could distinguish between real prey and false signals, as well as the anatomy of the tiny hair sensors detecting these signals. However, it was unclear how a plant with no nervous s

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