Celebrating Plants and People
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Plant Poisons Used By Our Palaeolithic Ancestors
Until very recently it has been impossible to prove that poisons extracted from plants were used by early societies. Now a specialist in Palaeolithic hunting weapons believes that she is on the brink of being able to prove that our ancestors used poisons as far back as 30,000 years ago.
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Sexual Deception For Pollination? There’s Lots Going On That We Know Nothing About
While remarkable inroads are being made into the pollination biology of some groups of sexually deceptive orchids, this discovery in Pterostylis highlights the prospect that many future discoveries of this pollination strategy are still possible, both within and beyond the Orchidaceae.
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Forests Almost Gone. Only Pieces Left. What Are The Consequences?
Fragmentation experiments—some of the largest and longest-running experiments in ecology—provide clear evidence of strong and typically degrading impacts of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity and ecological processes. The findings of these experiments extend to a large fraction of the terrestrial surface of the Earth. Much of the Earth’s remaining forest fragments are less than 10 ha in area, and half of the world’s forest is within 500 m of the forest edge
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Tree Rings, The Ultimate Historical Record
The overall aspiration of the Center for Mediterranean Archaeology and the Environment is completion of a 10,000-year tree-ring chronology of the entire Mediterranean region.
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Tricks For Learning (And Remembering) Plant Names
Most beginners are introduced to plant diversity through identification keys, which develop differentiation skills but not species memorisation. A paper in the Journal of Biological Education proposes that mnemonics, memorable ‘name clues’ linking a species name with morphological characters, are a complementary learning tool for promoting species memorisation.
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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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Invasive Ants Disrupt Tree-Ant Symbiosis That Defends Trees From Elephants
The invasion of big-headed ants may strongly alter the dynamics and diversity of East Africa’s whistling thorn savannas by disrupting this system’s keystone acacia–ant mutualism.
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How Is Light Pollution At Night Changing Ecosystems?
The research shows that light pollution can impact the natural environment in complex ways that may be hard to predict. Due to the global extent of artificial light at night, there are concerns that these ecological impacts may be widespread.
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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.