A venus fly trap produces leaves that act like traps for insects. A trapped insect is digested over several days. The trap then opens again to catch another insect.
These traps regularly die off. They turn black. They are replaced with new ones. I'm not sure why that happens. As far as I know this is a swamp plant, which makes it unlikely that the traps die off due to being in contact with water. I read that a trap can only be reused 7 times. So I guess the traps are replaced by the plant in some interval.
As the dead traps start to rot in the pot, I pick them up from time to time and throw them away. Recently, during that process, I found this:
and it made me wonder why this mouth would die off. It looks like it caught something. As the mouth is still closed, I think the digestion process is not finished yet. But why would the plant give up this valuable resource?
Is it because the trap could not close entirely? There are signs of rot on the insect, but I don't know if that happened after or during the digestion process. Would rotten prey be a problem chemically? A human can dissolve quite a few things in its stomach, so I guess this could work similarly.
What are the reasons for the traps to die off in general?