Celebrating Plants and People
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How Recreational Fishing Is Killing Cape Cod Salt Marshes
Recreational fishing is a major contributor to the rapid decline of important salt marshes along Cape Cod because it strips top predators such as striped bass, blue crabs, and smooth dogfish out of the ecosystem, according to new research by Brown University ecologists.
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Should There Be A ‘Save The African Savanna’ Movement?
These savannahs conjure up visions of vast open plains. The reality is that from an original area a third larger than the continental United States, only 25 percent remains
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Increased Ozone Levels Alter Insect-Plant Interactions
Increases in ground-level ozone, especially in rural areas, may interfere not only with predator insects finding host plants, but also with pollinators finding flowers, according to researchers.
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Orchards Can Reduce Pesticide Use By Planting Flowers
Researchers have found they can control one of fruit growers’ more severe pests, aphids, with a remarkably benign tool: flowers.
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Maybe Palm Oil Plantations And Biodiversity Don’t Need To Be At War
Conservation science can help protect the variety of living things in tropical landscapes even if they are being turned into oil palm plantations, new research argues.
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New Orchid Species Discovered In Florist Shop
In 2013, a rare and beautiful variety of orchid appeared in cultivation under the commercial trade name ‘Big Pink.’ Now, research by Dutch and Australian biologists has established that it is indeed a new species of the wild orchid genus Dendrochilum.
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Are Nectar Stealing Insects Threatening Orchid Survival?
We propose that nectar larceny will negatively impact the orchid if it occurs at higher levels each year (in the case of robbery) or starts occurring every year due to increased northward migration of long-tongued hawk moths that typically live in the south (in the case of thievery)
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The Bat Whose Tongue Is A Straw
Bats in general have some of the most bizarre morphological adaptations — from leaf-nosed bats to wrinkle-faced to sucker-footed — so this seems to be just another one of those really interesting and strange adaptations
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Saving America’s #2 Crop By Collecting Wild Sunflowers
Marek and Seiler, who works at the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Northern Crop Science Laboratory, in Fargo, North Dakota, have spent the last 11 years traversing the American outback—from the deserts of eastern Oregon to the Florida coasts—in search of wild sunflowers.
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Amateur Botanist Discovers Biosensor Qualities Of Common Grass
It acts as a biosensor that can gauge changes in temperature and the acidic/basic nature of solvents. While other plants move in a single direction, its multidirectional movement can be put to use