Category: Amazing Plants
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A Plant Needs Its Neighbors
Researchers found that a rare plant, Trochetia blackburniana, benefits from its proximity to Pandanus plants because they house high densities of geckos responsible for pollination.
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Competition Makes for Drama, But Benefactors Set The Stage
The stage is set by those species that create habitat… The organisms and interactions that occur within the habitat, such as crabs eating snails or annual plants competing with one another, are just players and roles that we see because of that stage.
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Natural Succession Cannot Be Ignored
Lavender and cypress grown together and inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi under glass showed significantly higher growth than when they were cultivated and developed separately.
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Global Warming causes Global Warming: The Phytoplankton Connection
This study shows that as the climate warms, phytoplankton growth rates go down and along with them the amount of carbon dioxide these ocean plants consume. That allows carbon dioxide to accumulate more rapidly in the atmosphere, which would produce more warming.
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Seed Dispersal Makes the Forest Go Round
Trees with smaller fruit tended to be less widely dispersed than trees bearing larger fruit, strengthening the argument that larger-bodied birds and mammals, in eating larger fruit, carry the seeds of these plants over larger distances. Wind-dispersed seeds were observed to have a surprisingly tight cluster radius, likely explained by the dense forest canopy stifling wind speeds.
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Dodder: Plant on Plant Violence
It's probably one of the creepiest plants I know," says [Swarthmore College biology professor Colin Purrington]. "It's a horrible existence for the host plant. If plants could scream, they'd have the loudest screams when they had dodder attached.
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One Plant Species, Two Different Pollinators — Where’s This Headed?
…The future of red and yellow varieties of a San Diego wildflower may depend on the fates of two different animals.
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Orange Snapdragons Pit "Evolutionists" against "Creationists"
If Darwin's theory of natural selection fails because critical intermediates — such as these elusive orange snapdragons — perform no function for selection to preserve, then God Himself would have to intervene to help yellow become magenta and vice versa.
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Newly Discovered Orchid Does Without Pollinators
Scientists have discovered an orchid that never needs to get a date — it can fertilize itself by performing a sexual act never before seen in flowers.
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Dioecious Species Crowd Out Monoecious Relatives
Historical records show that, over the last 40 years, the males and females are rapidly displacing the hermaphrodites and moving south.