Celebrating Plants and People
-
Newly Discovered Orchid Named For Its Devil Face. Now Everyone Will Want One
Although the curious orchid could be mistakenly taken for a few other species, there are still some easy to see physical traits that make the flower stand out, apart from the demon’s head hidden at the heart of its colours. (Click on title for full story.)
-
How Many Tree Species Have Been Identified In The Amazon? 12,000 And Counting
After analyzing more than 500,000 digitized samples taken of fruits, flowers and leaves, a team of ecologists has compiled what they call the first list of every known tree type in the Amazon. (Click on title for full story.)
-
Started With A Traditional Tea But May End Up Saving A Rain Forest
It also may be helping the climate. The company sources from about 3,000 farmers who tend more than a million trees planted in “forest gardens.” Selling the tea leaves to Runa has created a new source of income for the villagers, who are now getting paid to keep their forests intact, helping them resist the pressure of selling their land to be cleared. (Click on title for full story.)
-
The Death Of Underwater Forests
Before the heat wave, the kelps stretched over 800 kilometers of Australia’s western flank and cover 2,200 square kilometers. After the heat wave, Wernberg and Bennett found that 43 percent of these forests disappeared, including almost all the kelps from the most northerly 100 kilometers of the range. “It was just heartbreaking,” says Bennett. (Click on title for full story.)
-
How A Plant With Bitter Nectar Manipulates Birds To Pollinate It Anyway
The sunbird is curious by nature, and it samples a large number of flowers in its vicinity. The tree tobacco plant produces mixtures containing different proportions of anabasine and nicotine in each of the flowers in its clusters, so that in some of them the bitterness is much less pronounced, so much so that in some flowers the nectar may even be very sweet. In this way, the sunbird has an incentive to sample more and more flowers. It is also a mechanism that promotes pollination, not only increased consumption of the nectar mixture, (Click on title for full story.)
-
Bees Shop For Nutrition-Rich Flowers
Scientists previously believed that bees’ preferences for flowering plants were driven by floral traits, such as color, scent, morphology or nectar concentration.”Here we show that bumble bees actually choose a plant for the nutritional quality of its pollen,” (Click on title for full story.)
-
Did Oak Trees Kill The Passenger Pigeon?
Perhaps there was something special happening to these super-abundant and widespread birds that made them especially vulnerable to extinction? Would it be possible for the researchers identify what that could have been? (Click on title for full story.)
-
How Good Is Internet Info On Invasive Plant Control? That Depends…
Gardeners turning to the internet for advice about Japanese knotweed are likely to find a wide range of sometimes contradictory and potentially misleading advice that could put them on the wrong side of the law (Click on title for full story.)
-
Can Kelp Farming Fight Ocean Acidification?
“We know that kelp plants take up carbon dioxide and incorporate that carbon into their plant tissues. So we’re very hopeful that not only carbon but nutrients can be taken up and essentially removed from the water column,” (Click on title for full story.)
-
Saltmarsh Restoration: Cost-Effective Strategy To Cope With Sea Level Rise
The restoration of currently occupied saltmarshes in temperate zones with an abundant input of sediments could be put forward as a strategy of cost-effective adaptation to counteract the effects of the rise in sea level. (Click on title for full story.)