Category: Amazing Plants
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It Took A Microscope To Confirm Discovery Of Tiniest Orchid
The world’s smallest orchid flower has been identified by a botanist in Brazil, measuring just half a millimetre. The tiny bloom was initially mistaken for a fungus before being examined under a microscope
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The Only Plant To Attract Pollinators With Moonlight
At night, the many pollination drops glitter like diamonds in the full moonlight
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Glow On Little Plant: The Phenomenon Of Iridescence
The phenomenon can be observed in most plant groups, but on a limited number of species. Interestingly, it has been mostly recorded in understorey plants of Asian forests, where the light level is only 1% of the light level in the canopy. This had led to the hypothesis that iridescence could be an adaptation to low light levels
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Date Palms’ Hidden Water Reserves
The stem of mature date palms can hold up to 1 m3 of water and supply 25% of daily transpiration (i.e. 5000 l of water in 100 d of summer). The internal stem water reservoir is consistently recharged by over 50 l per night which allows for successive daytime reuse throughout the entire growing season.
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Symbiosis Between Bacteria And Plants May Produce Plant Poisons As Well As Nutrients
Symbioses between plants and bacteria are not only responsible for binding nutrients, as previously assumed, but can also be responsible for the production of plant poisons.
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Botanical Innovations. How Did Conifer Seeds Come To Fly Like Helicopters?
Conifers’ helicoptering seeds are result of long evolutionary experiment. Early trees experimented with various winged-seed designs before settling on just one
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The Plant, The Predatory Bug, And Genetic Engineering in The Dark
Plants produce odors known as herbivory-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) that are thought to offer indirect defense against herbivores by betraying their location to predators and parasites. However, HIPVs also influence other members of the ecological community, sometimes in ways that are detrimental to plants. Moreover, despite 30 years of research, no study has demonstrated that HIPVs increase the fitness of a plant, so it is unclear what they have evolved to do.
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Does Soil Determine Plant Community? Or Do Plants Determine Soil Type?
The research is based on the finding that certain plants have the ability to alter a soil type by mining elements and hydraulically lifting them to sites in the soil profile where microbes assemble them into new minerals.
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Small Does Not Have To Mean Simple: The Genetic Wonder That Is Bladderwort
Great, wonderful, wacky things can come in small genomic packages. That’s one lesson to be learned from the carnivorous bladderwort, a plant whose tiny genome turns out to be a jewel box full of evolutionary treasures.
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Tree Rings Clear Rats’ Good Name Of Black Death Accusations
They compared tree-ring records from Europe with 7,711 historical plague outbreaks to see if the weather conditions would have been optimum for a rat-driven outbreak.