Question
hi guys I had a Venus fly trap from Tops. It was a really good one because it had lots of traps and about to flower. At the time I thought terrariums were good so I took the fly trap out of the little terrarium that it came in. I left it out over night. In the morning it was all wrinkly what happened? I used distilled water and was put in a window sill.

Answer
Hi John,

The issue is acclimation.  This is a process in which a plant adapts to its new environment.  Unfortunately, your plant went from an extremely humid environment to one of relatively low humidity rather suddenly.  While flytraps will grow in lower humidity, if it's growing in high humidity, it needs time to acclimate to lower humidity.

Think of it like going to the beach.  If you spend all day at the beach, and you haven't built your base tan first, you'll likely get a serious dose of sun burn.  To build that base tan, you first spend only a few minutes in sunlight or use sun screen lotion.  After a week or so, you'll have the ability to frolic on the beach all you want without the risk of getting sunburn.

The same is true with plants.  They need time to develop the ability to withstand lower humidity.  If you suddenly remove it from an extremely humid environment, moisture will quickly evaporate from the leaves and cause plants to shrivel and become wrinkly.  This will happen to all plants, carnivorous or otherwise.

Ideally, you needed to expose the plant to various degrees of lower humidity by first leaving a small gap in the terrarium dome.  After a few days, you increase the gap. You'd then continue this process of exposing the plant to lower humidity until you can remove the lid altogether without the plant showing any signs of shriveling up.

However, in your case, the damage is already done and there isn't any thing you could do to reverse it.  At this point, leave your plant alone.  Continue to water it normally and look for new growth.  The new growth will be perfectly acclimated to lower humidity.  When new traps develop, cut off the older traps.

We also discuss this process and the issue of humidity in our DVD and e-book.  
http://www.cobraplant.com/DVD
http://www.cobraplant.com/ebook

Good growing!
Jacob Farin