Category: Amazing Plants

Here it is at Penn State University — look for the stringy, wiggly thing on the left — sniffing. Notice as it grows from a seedling, it moves in small, lazy circles, like hands groping in the dark, and then, gradually, it leans toward the stalk of the tomato plant — which it then entwines, gouges, sucks and strangles.

Cooperating with fungi didn't just help the earliest plants spread across a barren, rocky landscape; it also played a decisive role in the rise of more complex plants with roots and leaves that make up most of today's flora.

Maize crops emit chemical signals which attract growth-promoting microbes to live amongst their roots. This is the first chemical signal that has been shown to attract beneficial bacteria to the maize root environment.

Given the plant's annual growth rate the team calculated that the Formentera meadow must be between 80,000 and 200,000 years old, making it the oldest living organism on Earth.

Using modern optical methods such as spectroscopy with high spatial resolution we have been able to study the optical function of surface structures on plant petals and discover something new about how they give rise to structural colour in flowering plants.

Philcoxia's murderous habits suggest that we may have underestimated the true number of meat-eating plants in the world. After all, if this rare species feeds on microscopic prey using hidden traps, perhaps other plants do so too. As Mark Chase wrote a few years back, “we may be surrounded by many more murderous plants than we think.”.

Plant pollen may be basically microscopic dust, but as far as evolutionary biology goes it can be as male as any swaggering pool-hall hound with smooth moves and high hopes for the night. Pollen grains competing for access to the alluring green nubbins of female tissue in a pine tree add to growing evidence that a quirky evolutionary force known from animals, called sexual selection, may also show up in plants.

While there are a number of orchids that do attract night-time pollinators, B. nocturnum is the first known species that exclusively flowers at night.

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?

Crawling its way along barren rocks and cliffs where nothing should be growing, Yareta could be mistaken for an alien life form or a primordial green ooze.