Celebrating Plants and People
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Plants Reveal Their Own Defenses. A New Approach To Pesticides?
Juvenile hormone (JH) plays key roles in insect development, reproduction, and many other physiological functions. .We report on the discovery of potent JH antagonists in plants, which represents an innate resistance mechanism of plants against insect herbivores. These newly discovered plant JH antagonist compounds could be used as the starting material for developing novel insecticides.
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Every Fig Fruiting Event Is A Wasp Massacre
In fact, when you consider that a single Ficus citrifolia tree may have a crop of several thousand fruits, with female pollinators killing each other in receptive figs and males of multiple species doing the same in ripe figs, every fruiting event is also a massacre.
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S.E.Asian Rain Forests Managed By Humans For 11,000 years
It has long been believed that the rainforests of the Far East were virgin wildernesses, where human impact has been minimal. Our findings, however, indicate a history of disturbances to vegetation. While it could be tempting to blame these disturbances on climate change, that is not the case as they do not coincide with any known periods of climate change. Rather, these vegetation changes have been brought about by the actions of people.
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Orchid Mantis Doesn’t Imitate Orchids. It Does Better Than That!
More colour equals bigger flower, with potentially more nectar. No cross-checks, no two-step authentication. The mantis takes advantage of this shortcut by using “sensory exploitation”. It is a concentrated mass of the right colour – a supernormal stimulus. The insect classifies the mantis as a giant nectar-filled flower and approaches to investigate – to its doom.
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Nasty! Newly Discovered Plant Smells Like Rotting Fish
“It is amazing that we can find a plant that has developed symbiotically with fungi over tens of millions of years and gone undetected near a large urban centre like Sydney,”
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How The Kapok Tree Meets Its Water Transport Challenge
Given its towering height, how does the Kapok get water 150 feet or more off the ground?
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Epiphyte Communities Determined By Host Tree
The crowns of drought-deciduous trees, characterized by sunnier and drier microclimates, hosted fewer individuals and less diverse epiphyte assemblages. Differences were also observed at a functional level, e.g. epiphyte assemblages in deciduous trees had larger proportions of Crassulacean acid metabolism species and individuals. At the population level a drier microclimate was associated with lower individual growth and survival in a xerophytic fern.
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Do Ants Feed Bromeliads?
A new paper studies eight tank- and one tankless-bromeliad species and finds that leaf nitrogen concentrations are positively correlated with the presence of mutualistic ants, with the scale of the benefit depending on the identity of the associated ant species. A protocarnivorous tank-bromeliad not associated with mutualistic ants appears to obtain nitrogen from ant carcasses, but the results suggest that it is more advantageous for a bromeliad to obtain ant-derived nutrients (e.g. faeces, insect remains) via its roots than to use carnivory via its tank.
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What Is Responsible For The Disappearance Of California’s Big Trees?
California has lost half its big trees since the 1930s, according to a study. (Click on title or image for full story.)
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The Future Is Here: Non-Native Plants Already Dominate The Landscape
Ecologists typically think of invasive species as being introduced in one spot and gradually spreading out from there. But, we found that even species with only a handful of occurrences were distributed all across the U.S.,The future may already be here.