It definitely has a sensor-like mechanism, but is it qualitatively different to some plants growing to face the sun, or a climbing plant climbing up a wall?
I've had flytraps and they are fascinating, though I've found them to be very fragile, at least in the conditions I can provide in my balcony. Their traps often turn black and rot after trying to digest a single fly, and I had one Venus flytrap die after flowering (the advice I found online was: don't let it flower, under most less than ideal conditions, the effort of producing the flower will spend the plant's energy reserves and kill it, and the single flower it can produce is not pretty anyway. I should have followed this advice, but curiosity got the better of me).
Yes, the counting part is mentioned in the brief summary at Wikipedia, and I find it fascinating. I wonder if it's some kind of cummulative chemical effect that wears off in a short time, but if it passes a threshold it triggers something.
> It definitely has a sensor-like mechanism, but is it qualitatively different to some plants growing to face the sun, or a climbing plant climbing up a wall?
Are you able to prove that your behavior is qualitatively different? That you are not merely a sufficiently complex chain of reactions to stimuli?
I'm of course unable to prove anything about my behavior.
That, however, is besides the point in my opinion. All taxonomy is arbitrary; there aren't "races" or "species" or even distinctions between "mineral" and "organic". All that matters is that those artificial distinctions are meaningful to us, humans.
In that sense, we consider we humans are qualitatively different than plants, and a Venus flytrap is closer to a plant than to an animal.
I've had flytraps and they are fascinating, though I've found them to be very fragile, at least in the conditions I can provide in my balcony. Their traps often turn black and rot after trying to digest a single fly, and I had one Venus flytrap die after flowering (the advice I found online was: don't let it flower, under most less than ideal conditions, the effort of producing the flower will spend the plant's energy reserves and kill it, and the single flower it can produce is not pretty anyway. I should have followed this advice, but curiosity got the better of me).