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. 2017 May 11;7:1776. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-01954-3

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Lateral view on an Utricularia australis trap. The trap entrance (te) faces left, and the trigger hairs which protrude from the trapdoor are slightly visible (see Fig. 4 for a SEM image). The trap possesses antennae (an) and bristles (br) for guiding prey organisms grazing algae on the trap towards the entrance, and lateral flexible trap walls (tw). The trapdoor is fixed along the upper part of the trap entrance (its median axes in different phases (a–c) are indicated as solid grey lines), whereas the motile lower trapdoor edge rests on the threshold (th, indicated by a solid white line). When the trap is set and ready to ‘fire’, the door is (a) bulged outwards (convex) and highly sensitive to mechanical perturbations. When prey triggers the trap by touching the trigger hairs, the trapdoor (b) becomes ‘unlocked’ by inverting its curvature to concave. Afterwards (c), it swings open and water and prey are sucked into the trap. After attaining a phase of maximum opening, the trapdoor re-closes by an inverted motion sequence and finally regains the initial convex curvature.