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Author: zooplantman

  • Silent forests and famine in east Africa

    Deforestation and replacing indigenous woodland with exotic trees has had a catastophic effect on climate change

  • Healthy woodlands ‘need quality not quantity’

    The mindless planting of trees anywhere in the landscape is not going to do a huge amount for wildlife.

  • Orchids Don’t Flower At Night… Do They?

    The only orchid among 25,000 species, which flowers for only one night, is found near Papua New Guinea

  • Killers Of Pollinators Take Over Their Pollination Tasks

    The rats, which are responsible for devastating the native pollinator populations, are attracted to the flowers for their nectar. The results could mean that the decline of pollinating animals worldwide does not spell the end for all native plants.

  • Lemurs The Key To Madagascar’s Carbon-Storage

    If the trees that produce large seeds don’t get their seeds dispersed—a likely scenario if large seed-dispersing animals like ruffed lemurs disappear—they begin to die out. Species with small seeds that can be dispersed by many animals, and species with wind-dispersed seeds, may then gain a competitive advantage and begin to dominate the forest. The forest becomes one composed mainly of trees with low carbon-storage potential, and the carbon-storage capacity of the whole forest is affected.

  • When Pollinators Can’t Be Depended On

    What if a plant happens to grow in a population that is small or has very few pollinators visiting its flowers? Will all the effort put into flowering and attracting pollinators have gone to waste? Some plants, including a bright pink, short-lived, western European herb, have found a way to ensure their future reproductive fitness despite such limitations

  • Why Use Ipe When You Can Have Black Locust?

    Michael Van Valkenburgh, FASLA, and his fellow speakers got multiple rounds of spontaneous applause at the 2011 ASLA annual meeting for hosting a session on a topic near and dear to many design professionals and wood experts: how to end the unsustainable harvesting of Ipe wood and scale up the use of sustainable alternatives. The real alternative may be […]

  • Curiosity (nearly) killed the botanist

    The American species, by association with this European one, immediately acquired a reputation for being toxic. But this property has never been conclusively demonstrated by physiologists. To my satisfaction, however, an experiment conducted by the Vermont gardener, Alice Bacon, on herself in 1903 leaves little doubt on this issue.

  • Ants On Strike Against Global Warming

    If the temperature increases by just a half a degree Celsius, the most important seed-dispersing ants basically shut down. They do not go out and forage and do the things they normally do.

  • The Surprising Lives of Cycads

    If you had to guess which organism possesses sperm with 40,000 tails, what would you guess? Elephant? Whale? Chuck Norris? Would you have guessed that it belongs to a plant?