Plants
grrlscientist | June 20, 2008tags: flowering succulents, Huernia zebrina, plants, Image of the Day
Blossom from Huernia zebrina
Image: Biosparite, 2008 [larger view].
laelaps | June 20, 2008
Eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), photographed in New York on June 14, 2008.
clock | June 19, 2008Five species of ferns, happily cohabitating in a single large flowerpot on my porch - I have four other species, but those appear to be happier when kept seperately, one in each pot:
laelaps | June 16, 2008
Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia), photographed in New York on June 14, 2008.
edyong | June 12, 2008
On an isolated rock plateau in southern Israel, surrounded by steep cliff-faces, stands the imposing fortress of Masada. The site was built by King Herod as a pleasure palace and became famous for the alleged mass suicide of its Jewish inhabitants, who chose death over capture by Roman invaders.
But while the fortress's occupants have long died, one former resident is still around - an ancient seed that survived beneath the rubble for 2,000 years and has today germinated into a tree. The seed comes from a date palm and appropriately enough, its carries the genus name of Phoenix and…
edyong | June 11, 2008
A Canadian spruce and a Caribbean pine couldn't live in more different environments. One sits amid freezing tundra and the other basks in tropical heat. But despite their wildly different habitats, both trees have something in common - the temperature inside their leaves. Over the course of a year, their leaves manage to stay at a balmy average temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, the ideal temperature for photosynthesis.
The amazing finding comes from a survey of 39 trees by Brent Helliker and Suzanna Richter from the University of Pennsylvania. The pair looked at both deciduous and…
sporte | June 4, 2008Have you ever wondered what kinds of viruses can be found in human waste?
Mya Breitbart and team have been sequencing nucleic acids from fecal samples in order to find out. You might expect that we'd find viruses that infect humans or viruses that infect the bacteria in our gut.
I wouldn't have expected to learn the result that they found.
A large number, 60% of the viral DNA sequences were from unknown viruses. That's not a surprise. The surprise came when they looked at the RNA viruses.
Instead, the viral sequences most often came from a plant pathogen called the pepper mild mottle…
clock | May 29, 2008I was wondering what to do about the Classic Papers Chellenge. The deadline is May 31st, and I am so busy (not to mention visiting my dentist twice week which incapacitates me for the day, pretty much), so I decided to go back to the very beginning because I already wrote about it before and could just cannibalize my old posts: this one about the history of chronobiology with an emphasis on Darwin's work, and this one about Linnaeus' floral clock and the science that came before and immediately after it.
In the old days, when people communed with nature more closely, the fact that plants and…
laelaps | May 26, 2008
A close-up of a prickly pear, photographed May 17, 2008 at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
edyong | May 24, 2008The prisoner was plucked from a free-living existence and plunged, without trial, into a cell from which it will never leave. It will be provided with food but will have to cater to the needs of its jailer, bereft of its own independence. And yet, this apparent injustice will go unchallenged. No liberal hackles will be raised and no bags of angry letters from Amnesty International will flood the oppressor's mailbox.
For this event did not occur in the world of autocrats and tyrants, but in that of a microscope slide. The captor measures less than a thirtieth of a millimetre across and its…
edyong | May 12, 2008A common wasp on a foraging mission catches an enticing scent on the breeze. It's a set of chemicals given off by plants that are besieged by hungry insects and it means that there is food nearby for the wasp's grubs - caterpillars. The wasp tracks the smell to its source - a flower - and while it finds nectar, there are no caterpillars and it leaves empty-mandibled. The smell was a trick, used to dupe the wasp into becoming a unwitting pollinator for the broad-leaved helleborine.
The broad-leaved helleborine (Epipactis helleborine) is an orchid that grows throughout Europe and Asia. It is…
clock | April 28, 2008(First posted on July 21, 2006) Some plants do not want to get eaten. They may grow in places difficult to approach, they may look unappetizing, or they may evolve vile smells. Some have a fuzzy, hairy or sticky surface, others evolve thorns. Animals need to eat those plants to survive and plants need not be eaten by animals to survive, so a co-evolutionary arms-race leads to ever more bizzare adaptations by plants to deter the animals and ever more ingenious adaptations by animals to get around the deterrents.
One of the most efficient ways for a plant to deter a herbivore is to divert…
clock | April 6, 2008There are many organisms that one can extract milky substances from, but cactus is NOT one of those. Which is a simple and useful way to figure out if the needly thing in front of you is a cactus or something else....
edyong | March 25, 2008We've all seen the images of receding glaciers and stranded polar bears that accompany talks of climate change. But rising carbon dioxide levels also have subtler and less familiar effects, and may prove to be a boon for many animal groups. Plant-eating insects, for example, have much to gain in a high -CO2 future as rising concentrations of the gas can compromise the defences of the plants they feed on.
Plants and herbivorous insects are engaged in a silent war that we are rarely privy too, where chemicals act as both weapons and messengers. Munching mandibles trigger the production of…
clock | February 26, 2008Excitement on science blogs! Karen James of the Beagle Project Blog has just today published a paper in PLoS ONE:
Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT) for Pan-Genomic Evolutionary Studies of Non-Model Organisms:
Background
High-throughput tools for pan-genomic study, especially the DNA microarray platform, have sparked a remarkable increase in data production and enabled a shift in the scale at which biological investigation is possible. The use of microarrays to examine evolutionary relationships and processes, however, is predominantly restricted to model or near-model organisms.…
clock | February 25, 2008'Fiona' Gene Controls Flower's Physiologic Clock:
Scientists have found a new gene that regulates the daily and yearly physiological cycles of flowering and seeding.
POSTECH researchers, led by Nam Hong-gil and Kim Jeong-sik, said that they named the gene FIONA1 after the heroine in the popular animation ``Shrek.'' In the animation, princess Fiona is human by day but becomes an ogress at sunset. Fiona also sounds similar to the term ``flowering'' in Korean.
The research is a foundation for further discoveries of the plants' clock systems, the team said. To study the gene, the POSTECH team…
clock | February 22, 2008I was lucky to be in the car at the right time this morning to catch a story about Mastodons in Manhattan: A Botanical Puzzle, i.e., why honey locust trees in NYCity have long thorns - an interesting story (click on the link and click on "Listen Now") which, among others, features our blog-friend Carl Buell.