Celebrating Plants and People
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Linden Trees Don’t Kill Bees. Bees Kill Bees (As It Turns Out)
As the floral blooming season progresses, the linden tree runs out of nectar. Why, then, would the bees keep returning if they are able to detect nectar levels? (Click on title for full story.)
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Making It Almost Too Easy: Tobacco Keeps Defenders On Duty By Trapping Prey For Them
Tobacco plants provide a trapped-insect buffet that spined stilt bugs are more than happy to feast upon, which helps protect the plant from pest infestation and damage. Better still, the spined stilt bug – which uses its long legs as leverage to navigate across the sticky parts of tobacco leaves to reach its bug banquet – isn’t harmful to tobacco plants, researchers say, although it drinks some sap from tobacco plants to stay hydrated between pest meals. (Click on title for full story.)
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The Humble Garden Flower That Could Help Cure A Cancer
The team was able to extract the compound from the flowers and modify it so it could be used to kill chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) cells in the laboratory. Feverfew is grown in many UK gardens, and also commonly sold in health food shops as a remedy for migraine and other aches and pains. (Click on title for full story.)
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Leave No “Dead” Tree Behind: How Neighboring Root Systems Sustain A Seemingly Dead Tree Stump
Intact kauri trees grafted to a closely intertwined root network may adopt the root system of a connected tree that has lost its crown, thereby extending their rooting space and at the same time allowing trunk remnants to persist over long periods of time. (Click on title for full story.)
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Science Looks At Using Essential Oils To Repel Plant Pests And Learns Some Important Lessons
People often think more aromatic plant oils, like mint, basil and lavender will repel insects, but usually there is no rhyme or reason for choosing, It turns out that as we go along the family tree, plants that are more distantly related from the host plant are generally more repellent.” (Click on title for full story.)
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Forest Elephants, Trees, Climate Change And Extinction: We Are Failing Our Friends
Across central Africa, the “elephant-effect” enhances aboveground carbon stocks by 3 billion tonnes. Indirectly, elephants contribute to reduce atmospheric CO2, and help us combat global warming. However, the collapse of forest elephant populations, mainly caused by ivory poaching, is depriving us of a formidable ecosystem engineer, which is also important for distributing nutrients and planting seeds of future tree generations. (Click on title for full story.)
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Wind Storms Create Opportunities For Invasive Plants… And Priorities For Land Managers
Not surprisingly, the storm-damaged areas also were significantly more invaded than unaffected matching parcels, even 12 years after the first tornado hit. And larger damaged parcels were slower to recover, both in terms of decreasing invasions and increasing tree cover. The results suggest a couple of practical management recommendations. (Click on title for full story.)
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Plants “Pay” Defender Ants With Carbs And The Prey They Attract
In contrast with the previous belief, we discovered that carbohydrate is only one of the forms of payment offered by plants to the ants that protect them. Another is protein, which ants obtain by consuming the herbivorous arthropods available on or around the plants they visit,This finding contradicts the idea that payment is in sugar only It shows that what ants gain from herbivores also matters. We discovered that ants may be more aggressive in environments where arthropods and other sources of protein are scarce, defending their food sources and hence protecting plants.” (Click on title for full story.)
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Those Ladybugs You Are Releasing In Your Garden May Actually Make The Pests Worse!
It showed that releasing pest predators led to fewer pests, less plant damage and increased crop biomass on farms surrounded by more forest and natural areas and less agricultural land. But on farms predominantly surrounded by other farms, the reverse was true, with more pests and plant damage and reduced crop biomass in spite of added predators. (Click on title for full story.)
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The Iconic Joshua Trees May Not Survive This Century
Joshua trees as a species have existed since the Pleistocene era, about 2.5 million years ago, and individual trees can live up to 300 years. One of the ways adult trees survive so long is by storing large reserves of water to weather droughts. Younger trees and seedlings aren’t capable of holding reserves in this way though, and the most recent, 376-week-long drought in California left the ground in some places without enough water to support new young plants. As the climate changes, long periods of drought are likely to occur with more frequency, leading to issues with the trees like those already observed. (Click on title for full story.)