Triffids

Last post on mobile plants, I promise.

As I mentioned in class if you remove the constraints of requiring lots of water and needing a large light capturing apparatus from photoautotrophs then we do see some mobile photoautotrophs - Euglena for example. Here they are having a party.

One way to lift this constraint for larger plants would be to be carnivorous - then they wouldn't need all that water or that light gathering apparatus. Although we colloquially call many plants 'carnivorous' they are not in fact heterotrophs because they still photosynthesize and use the animal bodies they capture for nitrogen, which is why we see the evolution of plant carnivory in nitrogen limited environments. They are still green, still need to be open to the atmosphere to take up carbon dioxide and still lose lots of water.

If a multicellular land plant did evolve towards true heterotrophy what would it look like? Thanks to the fertile imagination of British author John Wyndham we have the answer in the Triffids - and yes they would be mobile!

Although published in 1951 Wyndham's science fiction classic The Day of the Triffids is still a fantastic read. According to the director of the movie 28 days later, Danny Boyle, it was the opening sequence of The Day of the Triffids, in which a man wakes up in hospital to discover that a meteor shower has blinded his fellow countrymen, which first inspired Alex Garland to write the screenplay. As a bit of a triffid connoisseur I would rate the book and radio adaptation excellent, the BBC adaptations pretty good and the 1962 film version appallingly bad.

In England the book, and adaptations are so well known it is quite common for someone to refer to a large, somewhat creepy looking plant as 'triffid like'.

Galloping moss

Hmm, just when I told you that plants don't move as adults - an assertion you think I'd be reasonably safe making - along comes the Botany Photo of the Day to proved me wrong.

"For my field work I am up in the (sub)Arctic quite a bit, and here I attach some pictures of an interesting plant phenomenon: mobile moss or what we jokingly call "galloping moss". These mosses are slowly creeping downhill, probably by daily frost-thaw cycles in spring and fall, and they seem perfectly happy with the movement. I have seen it in different moss species, including Sphagnum (not shown). Sometimes they stall out at a little crack or ridge, like in the photo, only to start moving again after a while. If the hill side steepens, their leading edges may be overrun by the rest and things get a little messy, but otherwise all is fine. "

Lotusland articles

Please post, or send me to post, any cool pictures you took at the gardens today.

Here are two articles about the Lotusland gardens and their founder, Ganna Walska, Forget About Rubies – She Wanted Cycads from the Christian Science Monitor and What The Diva Wrought, published in the Wall Street Journal. Both are short and well worth a read. The second article is hosted at the Lotusland website so click the links on the left for further information about Lotusland.

Pick the Pollinator

As part of the nova program First Flower, about the evolution of the earliest flowers, they have an interactive 'Pick the Pollinator' game.

You should really all get all of these right although one of them (the violet) is a little clumsily presented.

There are several interesting videos and articles at the website. I don't think you can watch the whole show but you can see a nice clip on youTube.

Yellow fatty beans

...and that's why, today, bananas are called "yellow fatty beans". Questions? Abe Simpson

Bananas are thought to have been one of the earliest fruits to have been 'domesticated'. Apparently in the middle ages both Moslems and Christians assumed that the forbidden fruit mentioned in the bible was the banana (the precise species is of course not revealed). I'm not sure when this tradition changed to the apple but it may have been because in Latin malum means apple and mālum means evil.

All bananas today are sterile. Here's an interesting article on the fate of the poor, sexless and therefore defenceless, banana.

Pity the banana. Despite its unmistakably phallic appearance, it hasn’t had sex for thousands of years. The world’s most erotic fruit is a sterile, seedless mutant—and therein lies a problem. The banana is genetically old and decrepit. It has been at an evolutionary standstill ever since humans first propagated it in the jungles of Southeast Asia at the end of the last ice age. And that is why some scientists believe that the banana could be doomed. It lacks the genes to fight off the pests and diseases that are invading the banana plantations of Central America and the small holdings of Africa and Asia.

Problems you didn't know existed #36 - Cycad smuggling

Scientists at the University of Johannesburg have started a DNA barcoding project to stop the smuggling of endangered cycad species in the country.

"Cycads grow in hot and arid environments and they grow slowly. To get a long stem it might taken 400 to 800 years. As a result, their prices go through the roof,"

"In South Africa, some cycad colonies have virtually been wiped out by collectors seeking a sample," he said. "When a botanist a few years ago discovered a new species, Encephalartos cerinus, thieves plundered so many of the plants that they nearly wiped out the species within weeks of its discovery."

"Identification is nearly impossible when plants are stripped of their leaves for transport purposes, and it is therefore also important to identify species when only fragments from an individual specimen are available."

Least exciting answer ever...

The Liverwort Lunularia cruciata from Botany photo of the Day website. I'd say if your liver looks like this you've got a pretty serious problem.

Wort derives from the Old English wyrt, which simply meant plant! It was often used in the names of herbs and plants that had medicinal uses, the first part of the word denoting the complaint, or area of the body, against which it might be specially effective.

Although some of these names were acquired because the plants actually did contain substances that helped others were acquired because the plant, or part of the plant, merely resembled part of the body. This relationship of plant form to function was based in the "Doctrine of Signatures" and probably had its basis in natural theology: "it was reasoned that the Almighty must have set his sign upon the various means of curing disease which he provided."

Examples include Spleenwort (thought to be useful in treating the spleen), Liverwort (thought to be useful in treating the liver), Toothwort (thought to be useful in treating tooth ailments0 and Lungwort (thought to be useful in treating pulmonary infections). There are also lots of examples where plant in some way resembled the symptoms of a disease. So, for example, Poplar or "Quaking Aspen" leaves were used for shaking or uncontrollable body movements (medically known as palsy).

Lotusland

The picture above is from Lotusland and was at the Botany Photo of the Day site. Well worth an occasional, if not daily, visit. Send me any good pictures you took at Lotusland today and I'll post them here for everyone to enjoy,

Here are two articles about the Lotusland gardens and their founder, Ganna Walska, Forget About Rubies – She Wanted Cycads from the Christian Science Monitor and What The Diva Wrought, published in the Wall Street Journal. This last article is hosted at the Lotusland website so click the links on the left for further information.