How the Venus flytrap snaps up its victims

People have long puzzled about how the Venus flytrap is able to snare an insect within its clamp-shaped leaves. The jaw like leaves close on its victim in just 100 milliseconds, faster than a blink of an eye, but have no nerves and muscles which fast moving animals have. So how does the Venus flytrap does its amazing feats?

Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, an Indian-born professor of Applied Mathematics and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University thinks he has the answer. The plant first bends back its rubber-like pair of leaves so that it is concave shaped, much like a tennis ball cut into two, then the two halves flipped inside out. The leaves are therefore all tensed up, with the upper surface in tension and the lower surface in compression. A smell exuded from the inner surfaces of the leaves lured the insects to the flytrap. When an insect land on the surface and sets off a hair trigger, the tensed-up leaves suddenly releases its stored-up energy, snapped back to a convex-shap and the edges snap together to trap the insect within.

All very neat. Only question is, how in the first place the Venus flytrap is able to bend back its leaves to a concave shape? And how the signal is transmitted from the hair trigger to the closure mechanism at such a blazing speed?