Category: Amazing Plants
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Carnivorous Plants Employ Light Traps For Prey
Some carnivorous plants act as blue ‘fluorescent lamps’ to lure prey, according to scientists in India… To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study reporting such strong and distinct fluorescence emissions in the plant kingdom.
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Botanical Horror! Cannibal Algae
It's the first time that a member of the plant kingdom has been shown to break down another plant's cellulose, the biopolymer that gives strength to plants' cell walls, and use it as an energy source, according to the new research.
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Cacti Collect Fog Irrigation With Their Spines
The integration of the multiple functions within the spines and the trichomes, including water deposition, collection, transportation and absorption in the cactus, facilitated an efficient fog collection system.
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A Celebration Of The Oldest Living Thing
If global warming drives these trees to extinction it will signal an evolution in the technology of deforestation. In the past we have menaced trees with axes and torches, but now it will be the hot, aggregated exhaust of our civilisations. Deforestation once arose out of our animosity towards particular forests, those that stood in the way of our future homes and crops. But deforestation is becoming delocalised; it is becoming an unavoidable byproduct of our existence, a diffuse, Earth-spanning emanation no tree can escape – even those that take root at the far reaches of the bio-inhabitable world. (Click on title for full story.)
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Plant Survival Game: Are You Smarter Than A Bean?
Play this game and find out what strategies you need to adopt to survive as a wild plant and how these strategies are different if you want to survive as a crop plant.
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The Most Shiny Living Thing Plays With Light
But Pollia fruits reflect more light than any bird or butterfly. Vignolini hasn't just found the first strong iridescent colours in a plant; she's found the strongest iridescent colours in nature. Or alternatively: 'Ooh, SHINY!'
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Plants Teach MIT Researchers How To Build Things
From an engineer’s perspective, plants such as palm trees, bamboo, maples and even potatoes are examples of precise engineering on a microscopic scale. Like wooden beams reinforcing a house, cell walls make up the structural supports of all plants. Depending on how the cell walls are arranged, and what they are made of, a plant […]
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No Plant Is An Island: Even Mosses Employ Pollinators
Mosses can use chemical cues to recruit small creatures to help with fertilization, via a process similar to pollination in flowering plants.
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Latest Pitcher Plant Trick: Using Rain To Capture Prey
Scientists have tried to unravel the mysteries of these plants since the days of Charles Darwin. The fact that we keep discovering new trapping mechanisms in the 21st century makes me curious what other surprises these amazing plants might still have in store!
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Rafflesia "Corpse Flower" Is A Genetic Vampire
Harvard researchers have now discovered that food and water aren‘t the only things the corpse flowers steal – over the course of evolutionary history, Rafflesia has also stolen Tetrastigma's genes