Shadowing Practice: 1,000 Flies vs. Venus Fly Trap - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

This is 50 Venus fly trap plants,

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This is 50 Venus fly trap plants,

and in this video, I'm gonna put 1,000 flies in the same container as them.

Will the sheer number of flies trick the traps causing them to close,

or are the flies just simply cooked?

Yeah, I don't know, but that's why I bought this.

This is 1,000 fly larvae.

Yeah, might look extremely nasty,

but over the next week,

as long as I feed them food,

they should all turn into flies so I can do this test.

So while we wait for these guys to turn into flies,

obviously I have all of these Venus fly traps.

But I also have tons of other carnivorous plants that you may have never even seen before.

Meaning I'm going to be able to do tons of different tests in this video.

It's going to be super cool.

And for test number one,

I want to show you guys the smallest Venus fly traps.

Now I know it may sound stupid,

but I promise you how they work and catch insects is actually really insane.

Let me show you how they work.

And yeah, it's not a joke how small these things are,

because when compared to normal Venus fly traps,

the jaws are about 10 times smaller.

In fact, they're kind of cute to be honest.

But since these are minuscule,

the normal prey I feed in my videos is not going to cut it.

Yeah, sorry cricket, you get to live another day.

That's why instead, I got literally the smallest thing available.

These are flightless fruit flies,

which if you've seen my channel before,

you know they're pretty much the most useless animal.

Because seriously, bro, how are you a fly that doesn't have the ability to fly?

That doesn't make any sense.

But anyways, I put the smallest Venus fly traps in the testing enclosure,

then I put one of these flies inside to see if he'd get caught.

Start the timer.

Now this fly didn't waste any time,

because it immediately walked straight up to one of the Venus fly trap pots,

and then started to walk all over the tops of the jaws.

Absolutely risking his life.

You may already know this,

but normal Venus fly traps work by having these super tiny trigger hairs inside of them,

that when a bug or something touches them, it snaps shut.

But these traps are obviously the smallest in the world.

Because of that, they have extremely small trigger hairs.

And I'm talking so small that if I zoom in like 100x on this footage,

they're so thin, my camera can't even pick them up.

And I guess the trigger hairs were quite literally so thin

that every time this flightless fruit fly walked inside the jaw of a trap,

the jaw didn't close at all,

and the fly was able to just walk out.

I mean, it kind of makes sense.

These flightless fruit flies weigh about 0.0003 grams.

So yeah, I guess the traps quite literally can't even be triggered by how light their weight is.

Yeah, clearly the fruit flies aren't gonna work.

So instead, I got the world's smallest cricket instead to test.

Let's see if this works any better.

And oh boy, let me just tell you,

things were a lot more interesting this time around.

Because once again, the cricket walked straight up to one of the trap pots

and started climbing all over the tops once again.

But this time, quite literally within 30 seconds,

the cricket happened to put his face up to the lip of one of the Venus fly traps.

You may also already know this,

but these plants produce a special kind of nectar around the lips of their jaws to lure insects in like this cricket.

And you can see it was working pretty well because this cricket was just absolutely slurping this nectar up.

But he was getting a bit too distracted because he then stepped into the trap,

probably stepping on the micro trigger hairs,

which then caused the jaws of it to close.

But the cricket was too fast and he was barely able to make it out with his life.

Dang, that was a close call,

but you can see how quickly that can all happen.

And yeah, don't worry guys,

because there's only a few minutes later when the cricket did the same exact thing.

He walked up to another jaw, walked straight into it.

And yeah, this time the trap closed on him while he was starting to walk out,

leaving half of his body now sticking out of the trap.

Even though these are the smallest venus fly traps in the

world they trap insects nearly just as well as the fully grown ones it's pretty interesting

and yeah while i wait for those 1 000 flies to hatch

so we can do the final test in the meantime i want to show you some other insane carnivorous plants

that you may have never seen before with the second one

being sundews yep everyone knows what venus fly traps are

but not everyone knows what a sundew is

but they're actually pretty cool let me show you what they do So obviously like fly traps,

sundews are also a carnivorous plant.

Except instead of having jaws,

it has these long stems with these little red hairs on the top of them.

But on each of these little red hairs is a special kind of sticky glue it produces.

That will make it so when a fly or any other insect touches it,

it gets permanently stuck because of how sticky it is.

And when an insect gets stuck on here,

the trap does something insane to be able to consume the insect.

Which I'll show you very soon when it obviously traps an insect.

So yeah, I got multiple of these sundew plants,

and I even got this slightly different kind of sundew called an octopus plant.

That will be cool to see if this can catch any insects as well.

So let's get these in the testing chamber.

And for this, I think I'll be using a cricket once again,

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because they're literally perfect.

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They can just climb up the side of the stems and yeah, just get stuck.

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This should be fun to watch.

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Let's put this dude inside.

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So yeah, once again, I just started with one of these guys.

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But if this guy gets caught fast,

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I'll be adding way more inside of here.

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Anyways, this cricket for the first minute kind of just wandered around the walls of the enclosure,

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but it wasn't long until he started heading towards the sundews.

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Now you see, the sticky glue that this plant produces is actually a type of nectar,

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which smells and tastes great to the insects.

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So yeah, just like how Venus flytraps lure insects in with their nectar,

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these traps do the same thing,

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because this cricket then decided to start climbing up the stem.

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The only thing is though,

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that he ended up stopping right before the sticky part,

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and that's actually because of his antenna.

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You see, crickets have these pretty long antennas that help them navigate and detect danger before running into it.

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And this guy's antenna actually ended up getting stuck in the sticky nectar part.

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But using its mouth, it was able to pull the antenna back

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and then started to lick all the nectar off of it.

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Yeah, and I'm not kidding.

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This cricket really just sat here for like 30 minutes,

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constantly licking his antenna, then putting it back into the sticky nectar,

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and then licking it back up.

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He was kind of outsmarting this carnivorous plant and just getting its nectar for free.

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So I'm not gonna lie.

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I just tried to push him towards it with my tweezers

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since he clearly wasn't gonna do it on his own And uh,

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yeah, he just kind of ended up falling off Yo, what the heck?

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I was just trying to record that cricket and I just realized there's a jumping spider in here Do you see that?

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It's on the little octopus plant Is it stuck?

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Yeah, this jumping spider just happened to wander into this enclosure

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by accident I guess he was just living somewhere in my house But since he was here,

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I figured i'd just watch him to see if he would get caught by the traps And pretty quickly,

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he started to climb the stems of the trap and got up to the sticky part.

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Um, but yeah, he was kind of too smart for this trap too,

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and turned around the second he realized it was sticky.

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But it was pretty cool to watch this guy just jump around the plants.

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However, he never really ended up getting trapped,

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and he ended up just climbing out of the enclosure.

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All right, guys, I'm not gonna lie,

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this cricket, I've been trying to record him getting eaten for like two hours now.

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And every time, right before going on the sticky part,

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he just stops and cleans his antenna.

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And yeah, he just turns around and never actually goes on the sticky part.

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He's too smart for this.

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So yeah, let me take this guy out.

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Instead, I actually just got out the flightless fruit flies again,

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because apparently this is actually Sundew's favorite insect.

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And yeah, I just dumped a few on the sand,

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and it wasn't long until some of them started to climb all over the stems

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and eventually started getting stuck all over the different sticky parts.

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I even went

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and just dumped a crazy amount of these flies all over

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the top of the sundew plants to show you guys exactly how cool sundews really are.

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Because obviously, now you can see the sticky parts of the plants are just completely covered in flightless fruit flies.

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Now, if you're wondering how this plant actually eats the flies,

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well, this footage shows how.

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As you can see, it uses each of its red hairs to basically curl around the prey.

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And once all of those curl around it,

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the stem itself also starts to curl around the prey.

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This will basically ensure the fly has a 0% chance of escaping while the plant releases basically an acid to consume it.

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Yeah, it's pretty brutal.

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So yeah, it's pretty cool to see these things work.

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All these flies are just going to turn into food for these plants very soon.

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All right, there's still one more major carnivorous plant type that I haven't shown yet.

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They're called pitcher plants.

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Yep, this plant can also eat insects.

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And actually how it does it is probably the most brutal out of all of them.

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Let me show you.

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Yep, like I said, these are called pitcher plants

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and similar to the last plant they have pretty long stems

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that go up

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but the difference is this time at the top there's this little trap door leaf thing

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that if you look is actually covering a hole

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that leads directly down to a pit of acid at the

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bottom of the stem yep these traps have this little hole

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here that's lined with a super slippery nectar on the inside

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so whenever an insect walks inside they'll slip into the acid at the bottom

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and yeah and what's really cool is if you actually look inside of this pitcher plant,

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since it's kind of small and shallow,

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you can actually see the pool of acid at the bottom.

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And it actually looks like there's a couple little flies and stuff in there,

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which it looks like it's actually already dissolving.

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So yeah, it'd be cool to see some crickets or something following these.

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Let's test it out.

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I didn't even need to use an enclosure this time because I knew this was going to be an extremely fast test.

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Because immediately after placing the cricket on this first pitcher plant,

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it started to climb along the sides of the red pitcher.

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As you can see, the inside of the plant is lined with these downward pointing hairs.

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This is to make it even more slippery and hard to escape.

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And yeah, it's kind of funny to see how fast this all happens,

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but the next time the cricket went to the opening of this plant,

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it straight up just slipped in right away.

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Nah, this dude had no clue this plant has evolved over

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millions of years to just be able to eat them this fast.

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Um, yeah, and as you can see on this footage that I recorded on my phone,

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he was now just sitting at the bottom of this pool of acid.

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Over the next few days,

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it'll dissolve him and turn him into nutrients for this plant to grow even stronger and larger.

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Nice.

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And yeah, that's really all there is to these pitcher plants.

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They're not really the most interesting thing ever,

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but I actually have some great news guys.

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Cause if you look in this container,

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you can see many of my flies are starting to hatch.

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And that means we can finally start doing some massive scale of Venus fly trap tests

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and eventually test as many flies as I can against all of my Venus fly traps to see who wins.

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Let's start very simple though with five Venus fly traps versus a single fly

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and let's see if this fly can get trapped in under a minute.

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Now I know you may be thinking,

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Brat Teregrine, I don't care about one fly, this is boring.

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Well don't worry because this literally only lasted like 20 seconds

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because immediately this fly started to crawl up the side of a pot And of course,

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he made his way immediately into a jaw,

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triggered one of the hairs,

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and it closed directly onto him.

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Yep, flies are basically the one thing Venus fly traps are the best at catching.

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I mean, they're called Venus fly traps for a reason.

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Anyways, I got the tank where the final test will be taking place, right here, obviously.

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And oh, on top, there is a box that I want to show you.

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There is something really cool in this box.

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It's these two little drawstring bags.

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As you can see, they say Terra Pals on them,

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and that's because Terra Pals is what I'm calling my brand new line of plushies.

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And in this first limited edition drop,

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we've released a super cool jumbo snake and a super cute little axolotl.

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And when you buy this,

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you don't only get the plushie from inside,

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but you also get this super cool golden trading card pack that obviously you can open.

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As you can see here,

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I got the Axolotl card and this one's actually one of 25.

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Yep, I've signed 25 of the Axolotl and Snake cards,

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meaning some of you will get some signed cards that I'll never be signing again.

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But either way, if you get a signed card or not,

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I know you guys are going to enjoy these new plushies.

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Anyways, let's get back to the final flytrap test.

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And I didn't waste any time.

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I just got out the flies that I've been hatching.

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And I put them straight into this enclosure so we could get this final test started.

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Quickly, I removed the lid and started the timer.

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Let the test begin.

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Now immediately a couple of the flies started to fly out of the container

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and others started to walk out of the sides.

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Now there was something weird though because while the container had a decent amount of movement in it,

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only like 10 of the flies were actually leaving the container over the 4 hour time lapse here.

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Yeah, basically all the flies were staying in there.

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So I decided to just take the paper towel out

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that they were all on and try to just shake off as many as I could onto the Venus fly traps.

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And obviously, this meant that a few of the flies were now scattered all over the traps,

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and were actually starting to get trapped.

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But most of them were just being super inactive,

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barely moving, and not flying.

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I guess because they were just newly hatched flies,

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and it takes a while for them to become normal.

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Yeah, I'm not gonna lie guys,

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this is kind of a fail.

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Basically, none of the flies are flying around,

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and I don't think I'm gonna be able to finish this.

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But don't worry, because my YouTube friend Fly Trap Films recorded a test with an insane amount of flies,

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a super similar to this and he wanted me to show you it

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and you can see he has a venus fly trap plant out

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and also a bunch of rotten meat in order to attract the flies yeah

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and it worked really well because instantly tons of flies started to gather around this plant

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and you guessed it started to get trapped i mean

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when you have this many flies it's a given

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that tons are just going to get trapped right away

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and what's so crazy is that sometimes

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so many would gather on some of the jaws before they

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close causing up to six flies to get trapped in the

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same jaw at the same time what flytrap films himself said

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that this is the most flies he's ever seen

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that get caught at once also some bonus footage for you

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guys hey you remember those pitcher plants from earlier flytrap films

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also did the same test with a massive pitcher plant to

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show you guys how effective these things are at catching flying insects

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and this plant literally just looks like a vacuum cleaner sucking up all the flies

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which in a way it kind of is

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because every time a flying insect flaps its wings above the

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opening in this plant it creates a weird kind of vacuum

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effect with the wind causing the bug to actually get pulled down into it

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and yep after not too much time this thing just caught

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so many flies it was literally just starting to overflow

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that is probably the craziest performance from a carnivorous plant

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that i have ever seen thank you flytrapfilms for letting me show you this footage.

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Make sure to check out more of his videos,

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guys, if you want to see more like this.

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His content is so cool.

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Anyways, hopefully you guys learned something new about carnivorous plants in this video.

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And remember, guys, check out the brand new Terra Green Limited plushies that just dropped.

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Remember, I only signed 25 of each of the limited edition trading cards,

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so make sure to get these soon if you want to get those.

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All this is available on TerraGreenStore.com.

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Seriously, guys, thank you for watching the videos.

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It means a lot, and have a good day.

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Goodbye.

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Shadowing Practice: 1,000 Flies vs. Venus Fly Trap - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Shadowing Practice: 1,000 Flies vs. Venus Fly Trap - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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About This Lesson

Key Vocabulary & Phrases

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What is the Shadowing Technique?