Plants
clock | February 12, 2008As a part of the Darwin Day celebration the North Carolina Botanical Garden has organized a series of events for today, culminating in the lecture "Darwin the Botanist" by Dr.William Kimler, a Darwinian scholar and the professor of History (of Science) at NCSU:
Most people do not think of Charles Darwin as a botanist. He is famously connected to the animals of the Galapagos Islands, and to the subjects of animal and human evolution and behavior. But Darwin's famous curiosity did extend to plants. In fact, among his numerous publications are a book on carnivorous plants and one on orchid…
laelaps | January 17, 2008I don't know very much about plants, but this is too cool not to mention; [A]n absolutely massive new genus of palm tree has been described from Madagascar that puts nearly all its energy into fruiting, dying after an explosion of flowers and fruit. The new genus is described in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society (unfortunately I do not have access), and LiveScience has a short piece on the discovery.
You can check out some more details about this fascinating new palm at Further Thoughts.
[Thanks to a kind reader I now have the paper and will have something up about it soon. The…
laelaps | January 7, 2008
Today's beautiful picture of Sturt's Desert Pea (Swainsona formosa) was sent to me by one of my Australian readers, Peter. You can read all about this interesting plant at the Australian National Botanic Gardens website.
grrlscientist | December 24, 2007tags: seedhead on ice, plants, photography, nature, Image of the Day
This is the last image in a series of photos that my friend and long-time reader, Dave Rintoul, took in the aftermath of the recent ice storm that gripped the midwest of the United States. This series began on 20 December.
Seedhead on Ice (Ice Storm, 2007)
Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [larger view]
Go here to see more of Dave's ice storm photography.
awild | December 6, 2007
The Saguaro might, one could fancy, be a tree designed by someone who had never seen a tree.
-Donald Culross Peattie, 1950
voltagegate | November 7, 2007Heather finally printed the follow up to her cellular self portrait (links to the first print), this time using plant cells. I particularly like the difference in movement between the prints.
A week from this Friday she's having her senior art show, which we are both looking forward to. She put up her banner yesterday and postcards are being distributed:
If you're in the area, feel free to stop by next week, check out some unique, science inspired art, have a cupcake and a cream puff (homemade of course), drink some yummy coffee and BS with me and Heather about art and science. Should be a…
voltagegate | November 2, 2007In Part I we looked at the eastern hemlock's northwestern progression after the last ice age,
and the frequency of the hemlock along a slope-oriented moisture gradient:
The distribution pictured above is almost exactly the case in the Laurel Hill old growth stand. The hemlocks are dense at the moist valley bottom, surrounding and shading Laurel Hill Creek and At the different levels of the gradient, not only does the abundance of trees differ, but the composition of the ecosystem. There is a "no-man's land" of sorts between each level that ecologists called ecotones.
Ecotones are imaginary…
voltagegate | October 29, 2007About 16,000 years ago, glaciation from the last ice age finally began to retreat after millennia of occupation. As the glaciers melted and filled scrapes in the landscape with fresh water, the animals and plants followed, once only able to live in the temperate climes of southern North America.
The eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadenis) was one of these pioneers, albeit a slow, steady one. Spreading north at about 100 - 400 meters per year (incidentally about the same rate of large ungulates like elk), the hemlocks wouldn't reach the extent of their expansion, around the glacier-crafted Great…
voltagegate | October 29, 2007This seems to be a more sensible theory regarding leaf color change in autumn:
By taking careful stock and laboratory analyses of the autumn foliage of sweetgum and red maple trees along transects from floodplains to ridge-tops in a nature preserve in Charlotte, N.C., former University of North Carolina at Charlotte graduate student Emily M. Habinck found that in places where the soil was relatively low in nitrogen and other essential elements, trees produced more red pigments known as anthocyanins.
Habinck's discovery supports a 2003 hypothesis put forward to explain why trees bother to make…
voltagegate | July 30, 2007Paleoecologist Margaret Davis' work has become legend among ecologists. She analyzed layer upon layer of pollen buried in lake sediments in the Appalachian Mountains to determine the natural history of trees in the area.
She found an interesting pattern:
Spruce (Picea) pollen dominated the area 12,000 years ago. Beech (specifically Fagus grandifolia) pollen appears 8,000 years ago.
The American Chestnut pollen did not show up in the sediment record until 2,000 years ago; it quickly vanished around 1920.
Cryphonectria parasitica, a type of blight (type of fungus), was transported to North…
clock | July 21, 2007A good WaPo article: Pelosi takes heat for OK of farm bill
Ken Cook explains it very clearly: The Pelosi Farm Bill: A Corn Subsidy Windfall
voltagegate | July 18, 2007
Welcome to the Tangled Bank and to The Voltage Gate. The theme of this 84th edition of TB is science in Ancient Greece, so we'll be exploring what that meant to them, and jumping ahead a couple millenia to find out what it means to us.
I want to begin this edition with an important announcement. Aetiology's Tara Smith has some news about the Clergy Letter Project (and Evolution Sunday). This founder, Mike Zimmerman, is trying to create a list of scientists who would be willing to answer the more technical questions posed about science and evolution by participating clergy. Tara has all the…
voltagegate | July 17, 2007Found this in ScienceDaily this morning:
A team of John Innes centre scientists lead by Professor Nick Harberd have discovered how plants evolved the ability to adapt to changes in climate and environment. Plants adapt their growth, including key steps in their life cycle such as germination and flowering, to take advantage of environmental conditions. They can also repress growth when their environment is not favourable. This involves many complex signalling pathways which are integrated by the plant growth hormone gibberellin.
Publishing in the journal Current Biology, the researchers…
clock | July 11, 2007New Habanero Blasts Taste Buds -- And Pepper Pests:
The super-hot, bright orange TigerPaw-NR habanero pepper offers extreme pungency for pepper aficionados, plus nematode resistance that will make it a hit with growers and home gardeners. Plant geneticist Richard L. Fery and plant pathologist Judy A. Thies at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) U.S. Vegetable Laboratory, Charleston, S.C., put the pepper through three years of greenhouse and field tests before determining, in 2006, that it was ready for commercial fields and backyard gardens.
Exhibiting A Pepper For Every Pot:
Peppers don'…
voltagegate | May 23, 2007Linnaeus on systematics:
"I can not understand anything that is not systematically ordered."
-from a letter to a friend
"There are as many varieties as there are plants produced by the seed of the same species."
-quoted by Gunnar Eriksson
Clashing with theology and human origins:
"I ask you and the whole world for a generic differentia between man and ape which conforms to the principles of natural history. I certainly know of none... If I were to call man ape or vice versa, I should bring down all the theologians on my head. But perhaps I should still do it according to the rules of science…
voltagegate | May 15, 2007Welcome to the 5th edition of Oekologie, the 'sphere's only blog carnival focusing on ecology and environmental science. We are always looking for hosts (especially for October) and contributors, so please check out those tabs if you're interested in either.
Some of you may know that I have a tendency to mix in some history when hosting science carnivals. So, for the first themed edition of Oekologie, we will be using ancient and medieval Arabic nature writing to frame our moving monthly mag of biological interactions in the environment.
Zoology One of the most famous Arabic zoological…
grrlscientist | May 4, 2007tags: Venus flytrap, plant, biology, mechanics
A Venus flytrap lies open, waiting for an insect to set off its trap. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan and colleagues have shown that the plant uses stored elastic energy to operate its hinged leaves.
Image: Yoel Forterre.
How does the venus flytrap accomplish what most people cannot? How does a mere plant capture live flies? The mystery of the Venus flytrap's rapid movement lies in storing and releasing elastic energy, says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, who is the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at Harvard University.…
voltagegate | May 1, 2007I caught an episode of National Geographic's Wild Chronicles discussing the Wollemi pine, a rare, ancient contemporary of the dinosaurs that was discovered alive in Australia in the '90's. The stand is the only one known in the entire world, and conservationists are trying to find ways to preserve it.
Australian officials hope to bolster the tree's numbers by encouraging gardeners around the world to each take one home and plant it. Unlike other nonnative species, the Wollemi doesn't grow or reproduce fast enough to be an invasive threat, experts say.
In the U.S., the tree is sold exclusively…
clock | December 2, 2006Festival of the Trees 6 - Taking Root and Bearing Fruit - is up on Arboreality.