Celebrating Plants and People
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100 million year Romance Of Grasses And Ergot
And if they already seemed a little scary, imagine a huge sauropod dinosaur that just ate a large portion of this psychotropic fungus, which in other animal species can cause anything from hallucinations to delirium, gangrene, convulsions or the staggers. The fungus, the grasses it lived on and dinosaurs that ate grass co-existed for millions of years.
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The Mystery Of Giant Hollow Baobabs: It’s The Secret Of Their Success!
We found and dated many other African baobabs with false inner cavities. We also found that this new baobab architecture, i.e., the closed ring-shaped structure with false inner cavity, enables baobabs to reach large sizes and old ages.
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Coffee Plantations That Are Truly Bird-Friendly
In Ethiopia, coffee is traditionally grown on plantations shaded by native trees. These farms boasted more than 2.5 times as many bird species as adjacent mountain forest
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Most Charismatic Palm Is Also A Doting Parent
“The coco de mer is the only charismatic plant that can rival the giant panda or the tiger,” Now the science behind the charismatic palm’s seeds is proving to be just as fascinating.
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Termites: Defenders Of Savanna Landscapes
Researchers report that termites slow the spread of deserts into drylands by providing a moist refuge for vegetation on and around their mounds. They report that drylands with termite mounds can survive on significantly less rain than those without termite mounds.
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A Tree Is Not A Tree, It Is A World
Interactions between trees and their associated microbial communities are tremendously complex and the resulting multiorganismal networks have central roles in plant growth and productivity (Bonfante & Anca, 2009). A more holistic view of plant health and disease is needed to better understand these ‘superorganisms’, in which interacting species are thought to play a role in the overall stability of the system. Similar to the human microbiota, disruption of the homeostasis between plants and their associated fungal and bacterial communities may alter the stability of the system, with potential impacts on host fitness
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Was Isaac Newton The First To Figure Out How Water Moves Through Plants?
Sir Isaac Newton’s interest in botany extended well beyond the fabled apple falling from a tree – he also appears to have understood how water moves from roots to leaves over 200 years before botanists did.
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How Bears Eating Ants Benefit Shrubs
We found that plants near bear-damaged ant nests had greater reproduction than those near undamaged nests, due to weaker ant protection for herbivores, which allowed herbivore suppression by arthropod predators. Our results highlight the need to integrate mutualisms into trophic cascade theory, which is based primarily on antagonistic relationships. Predators are often conservation targets, and our results suggest that bears and other predators should be managed with the understanding that they can influence primary producers through many paths.
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Wild Harvesting Of Botanical Medicines Declared Unsustainable
“We will also recommend that companies be encouraged to take up cultivation of these species, instead of using them from the wild,”
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Another Nail In Biofuels’ Coffin?
Turning plant matter into liquid fuel or electricity is so inefficient that the approach is unlikely ever to supply a substantial fraction of global energy demand, the report found. It added that continuing to pursue this strategy — which has already led to billions of dollars of investment — is likely to use up vast tracts of fertile land that could be devoted to helping feed the world’s growing population.