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Celebrating Plants and People

  • The Worst Contemporary Ecological Disaster Is All About Profit

    We are witnessing the worst manmade environmental disaster since the BP gulf oil spill. Huge, out-of-control fires rage through the forests of Indonesia – and the source of many is the practice of deliberately burning the land to clear it for palm oil and paper products. (Click image or title for full story)

  • Uncovering The Underground Wonder Of The Prairie

    The bulk of a prairie grass plant, it turns out, exists out of sight, with anywhere from eight to fourteen feet of roots extending down into the earth. Why should we care? Besides being impressively large, these hidden root balls accomplish a lot—storing carbon, nourishing soil, increasing bioproductivity, and preventing erosion. Unfortunately, these productive, perennial grasses (which live year round) are more rare than they once were. (Click on image or title for full story.)

  • Monarch Butterflies Use Milkweed Toxins For Their Own Defense

    Monarch butterfly caterpillars have evolved the ability to store toxins known as cardenolides, obtained from their milkweed diet, specifically to make themselves poisonous to birds, as has at least one other species of milkweed-munching caterpillar, according to a study (Click image or title for full story)

  • Tallest Trees Are Physiologically Different From Mere Mortals

    (The) research group climbed the world’s tallest redwoods, and collected leaf samples from various heights. They discovered that, with increasing height in the tree, the proportion of “xylem tissue” which transports water from the roots decreased, whereas “transfusion tissue,” which stores water, increased. They inferred that in redwood, the stored water came from moisture absorbed through the leaf surface, such as fog and dew. (Click image or title for full story)

  • Oldest Tree In Europe Considering Sex Change. Really.

    But botanists have spoken of their surprise after finding three red berries on a branch of the yew this year – in signs at least part of the male tree is becoming female. (Click image or title for full story)

  • Can Botanists Save One Of The Rarest Trees In The World?

    A graceful birch native to Japan is one of the rarest trees in the world. Two decades ago, botanists counted just 21 remaining in the wild, all confined to a single stand in the remote, rugged forest of the Chichibu Mountains — likely far too few for the species, Betula chichibuensis, to sustain itself. (Click on image or headline for full story)

  • Farmer Bees Discovered

    A team of entomologists has discovered that a stingless bee species from Brazil feeds its larvae on a special type of fungus grown in the nest. (Click on image or headline to read more.)

  • Nutritious Leaves Determine Orangutan Population Success

    Lacking any top-down population control from predators, the main factors that predict how many orangutans can survive in a given patch of forest is how much nutrition that forest provides for them. In other words, their population size is controlled from the bottom up (Click image or title for full story)

  • Wildflowers Near Crops Expose Pollinators To Neonicotinoids

    Meant to be clean refuges for pollinators, wildflower buffers instead become sources of pesticides. (Click image or title for full story)

  • Is Your Pesto Endangering Rare Wildlife?

    According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a majority of pine nuts imported into the United States come from the Korean pine tree, a keystone species found primarily in the southern parts of the Russian far east. The temperate rain forest of this wild corner of Russia represents a mere 1 percent of the country’s territory yet contains about a quarter of its endangered vertebrate species.