Category: Amazing Plants
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Do Bromeliads Help Protect Host Trees From Predators?
Stereotyped as parasites by most people and treated as impartial hitchhikers in ecology textbooks, epiphytes turn out to be all these and mutualistic too.
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Coffee Evolved Caffeine Independent Of Tea Or Cacao
Caffeine evolved long before sleep-deprived humans became addicted to it, probably to defend the coffee plant against predators and for other benefits. For example, coffee leaves contain the highest levels of caffeine of any part of the plant, and when they fall on the soil they stop other plants from growing nearby.
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What Can You Teach A Plant? And Will It Remember?
This study offers proof that plants not only learn from experience, but remember what they have learned over relatively long periods.
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Modern Forests Yield Secrets of Paleocene Ancestors
The authors show that venation density, like plant metabolism (i.e., transpiration and photosynthesis), is higher in the leaves located in the forest canopy and decreases in leaves at lower levels. Furthermore, they found that leaves from the forest floor, which are the closest analog to fossil floras, preserve this pattern.
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Biologist Climbs High to Prove Hypothesis About Trees
Compared to the human circulatory system, this system is so much more complicated,
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Australian Orchids Pollinated By Sex Crazed Gnats
This study confirms for the first time that highly specific pollination by fungus gnats is achieved by sexual deception in Pterostylis. It is predicted that sexual deception will be widespread in the genus, although the diversity of floral forms suggests that other mechanisms may also operate.
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Where Did Coconuts Originate?
The hypothesis supports the idea that the coconut palm originated, evolved and dispersed by floating in the coral atoll ecosystem, but as this ecosystem is widespread and constantly changing its form, a geographical location for a centre of origin for the coconut will probably never be found – but it can no longer be described as ‘unknown’.
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That After Rain Smell? It’s Nature Talking To Plants
When it’s not raining, though, that molecular mixture serves a different purpose: signaling plants to keep their roots from growing and their seeds from sprouting. No use wasting energy on all that, after all, when there’s no water to be drunk.
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Plant Communication: Look Deep Into my RNA. You are under my spell
Through this exchange, the parasitic plants may be dictating what the host plant should do, such as lowering its defenses so that the parasitic plant can more easily attack it.
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Strung Up! Botanical Beads Of The World
From childhood I have been fascinated by nature’s infinite variety of forms, colors, textures, shapes and sizes. Seeds display this amazing diversity, and over the years I have accumulated a sizeable collection of botanical necklaces. These “beads” consist of seeds, fruits, stems, roots, arils (seed appendages) and rhizomes (underground stems). I admired them, I wore them and I wondered about them. Where had the seed come from and which plant produced it? When I tried to learn something about these “beads” I discovered there were no books that dealt with the subject.