MetaFilter posts tagged with botany

One genome, two plants

Joe in Australia — Sun, 12 May 2013 19:00:37 -0800

Mosses Make Two Different Plants From the Same Genome, and a Single Gene Can Make the Difference

One of the most astonishing secrets in biology is this: every plant you see makes two different plants from the same genome. And, scientists recently reported, a single gene from an ancient, powerful lineage can make the difference.

So this is what it's like to be eaten by a plant

prize bull octorok — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:45:21 -0800

How would you like to go on a mindbending 3D journey into the devouring maws of four different carnivorous plants? Video by the Inner Worlds project (via)

The vanishing groves

homunculus — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 19:45:33 -0800

The vanishing groves: A chronicle of climates past and a portent of climates to come – the telling rings of the bristlecone pine.

You Can NEVER Hold Back Spring

EmpressCallipygos — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 11:16:18 -0800

32,000 years ago, a squirrel buried some fruits from a flower related to the narrow-leafed campion in a riverbank in Russia. Either the squirrel forgot, or got eaten itself, and the buried cache of fruits stayed, preserved by the permafrost. This year, Russian scientists discovered the cache, recovered the fruit, and thawed it out to see if they could recover the seeds. Some of the seeds did indeed germinate - and this winter, millennia after first growing on their parent plant, those seeds bloomed.

Getting wood

Horace Rumpole — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 07:19:08 -0800

Romeyn Hough's American Woods is one of the most astonishing books of the late 19th century, a 14-volume set containing a thorough survey of the trees of the U.S., complete with thinly sliced samples of the wood of each tree. Complete sets of this mammoth undertaking are today rare and highly prized.

a 300 million year old fossilized forest discovered

nickyskye — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:50:17 -0800

Photographs of an almost perfectly preserved 298 million year-old fossilized forest discovered under a coal mine in China [pdf] (In Wuda, Inner Mongolia). More about the discovery here: The ash layer was dated from around 298 million years ago, the beginning of the Permian period ( 299 to 251 million years ago). During that time, the planet’s continental plates were still coming together to form the super-continent Pangaea, and the first groups of mammals, turtles, lepidosaurs and archosaurs started to roam the Earth.

Arboreal Art in Nature

zarq — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 08:20:34 -0800

"Magnificent and Weird Trees" Also see, Living, Growing Architecture.

Leafsnap

swift — Thu, 19 May 2011 13:36:29 -0800

Leafsnap is a free field guide for iPhone (Android coming soon) that uses the phone's camera and some biometric processing to identify trees by the shape of their leaves. Development was financed by the National Science Foundation (NYT article), and includes research by Columbia University, University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Bark, An Intimate Look at the World's Trees

nickyskye — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 12:17:12 -0800

The World's Most Beautiful Bark (Or: Trees Worth A Closer Look) l Photographer Cedric Pollet travels the world, barking up trees for a living l A little about the photographer l More of the beautiful images from his book and more.

Wild plants of Japan

gman — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:46:10 -0800

Various Japanese plants (and fungi) spring to life in Omni/ScienceNet's "Action Plant" series of time-lapse videos shot in Kōchi prefecture.

plants in sanskrit poetry

dhruva — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:03:32 -0800

Seasonal Poetry in Sanskrit : The blog Sanskrit Literature has been running an excellent series on plants that appear in sanskrit poetry. Some examples : Jasmine (malati), Lotuses and Water Lilies, Mango.

Lois, you're a tease. And you stink.

yeoja — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:47:08 -0800

During the past 4 days, the Cockrell Butterfly Center at the Houston Museum of Natural Science has stayed open 24 hours to accommodate the record crowds filing into the museum at all hours. Why? A rare Amorphophallus titanium, aka “Corpse Flower,” named Lois is finally about to bloom. Now, Lois is not your average, run-of-the-mill stinky plant. Only 28 Corpse Flowers have bloomed in the US, so Lois has become a local celebrity with her own blog, Flickr feed, live webcam and cupcakes. She even has her own playlist, with songs such as “That Smell” by Lynyrd Skynrd, “I’m Comin’ Out” by Diana Ross and the classic “Smelly Cat” by Phoebe from Friends. And like any trendy Corpse Flower, Lois also has her own Twitter account. She's also a bit of a diva. Yet despite predictions, Lois still hasn't bloomed as of Wednesday morning. In response, Lois makes excuses, bad jokes, complaints and snarky comments.

amazingly old trees

nickyskye — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:22:24 -0800

The 10 oldest trees on Earth. Previously.

The slippery slope of banana farming.

Brandon Blatcher — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:37:42 -0800

A little background about that oddly shaped yellow fruit and the potential for bananageddon.

The most wonderful plant ... and one of the ugliest.

Joe in Australia — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:21:45 -0800

Welwitschia mirabilis lies around the Namibian coastal desert like misshapen heaps of horticultural debris, either singly or in untidy clumps. Each plant has two huge leaves lolling out from its gaping trunk that collect moisture from the sea fogs. These plants would win no awards for beauty - the Regius Keeper of Kew Gardens described them as "one of the ugliest" plants brought to England, and it's hard to disagree with the Daily Mail's description of it as "hideous ... leprous ... snaking and sinister". None the less, it is a tourist attraction in its own right and supports the Namibian coat of arms where it symbolises fortitude and tenacity. If you're still hanging out for some Welwitschian goodness, here's a video and lots more photos on Wikimedia Commons. You can even try growing one yourself!

computerized flowers

dhruva — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:18:11 -0800

Botanical Drawings for the Digital Age "Macoto Murayama can spend months on one of his botanical illustrations, and when he’s done, the plant looks like something that blossomed in outer space."

Vertical Gardens

alms — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:29:27 -0800

As a boy he grew plants up his bedroom wall. Patrick Blanc's most recent vertical garden is eight stories tall.

Living Root Bridges

homunculus — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:06:51 -0800

The Living Root Bridges of Cherrapunji, India. [Via]

The "Intelligence" of Plants

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:23:10 -0800

New botanical research is shedding light on plant behavior and "intelligence". Additional reading: "Some experiments have shown that if a plant's roots grow near to those of another unrelated plant, the two will try to compete for nutrients and water. But if a root grows close to another from the same parent plant, the two do not try to compete with one another. Karban says he was 'pretty surprised' at the results. 'It implies that plants are capable of more sophisticated behaviour than we imagined.'" "To commence use of the term intelligence with regard to plant behaviour will lead to a better understanding of the complexity of plant signal transduction and the discrimination and sensitivity with which plants construct images of their environment, and raises critical questions concerning how plants compute responses at the whole-plant level."

400 Years Ago

netbros — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:35:41 -0800

Have you ever wondered what New York was like before it was a city? Find out at The Mannahatta Project, by navigating through the map to discover Manhattan Island and its native wildlife in 1609. “The goal of the Mannahatta Project has never been to return Manhattan to its primeval state. The goal of the project is to discover something new about a place we all know so well, whether we live in New York or see it on television, and, through that discovery, to alter our way of life. New York does not lack for dystopian visions of the future…. But what is the vision of the future that works? Might it lie in Mannahatta, the green heart of New York, and with a new start to history, a few hours before Hudson arrived that sunny afternoon four hundred years ago?”

Let me show you a world of bats and bees, ants and trees, morning glories and a few beached whales

filthy light thief — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:49:39 -0800

The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, casually referred to as Sōkendai (a contraction of Sōgō kenkyū daigakuin daigaku), was founded in 1988 as the 96th national university in Japan. Amongst other things, it is home to the Soken Taxa Web Server which in turn hosts the first online Japanese Ant Color Image Database that currently lists 273 species of ant, the Illustrated Guide of Marine Mammals and the Marine Mammals Stranding DataBase, the Mammalian Crania Photographic Archive that currently includes 704 specimens, the Morning Glories Database that covers the many mutants of Ipomoea nil, closely related species and interspecific hybrids, the Makino Herbarium Database, which is named after the pioneering Japanese botanist, Tomitaro Makino, and the Japanese Bees Image Database.

Tropicos -- the Missouri Botanical Garden's online database

cog_nate — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:54:00 -0800

"All of the nomenclatural, bibliographic, and specimen data accumulated in MBG’s electronic databases during the past 25 years are publicly available here. This system has over one million scientific names and 3.5 million specimen records." (Description from website.) Searchable by scientific or common name, the database includes brief descriptions, images and references (with some links to full text in Botanicus), and specimen and distribution lists that are available in Google Maps and Earth. Quite a nice resource for anyone interested in botany. Also, their devs have a (infrequently updated) blog, as does Botanicus.

Expand Your Plant Knowledge

netbros — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:38:09 -0800

Whether you're a casual cultivator or gardening guru, PlantCare.com has a wealth of information about the care and feeding of indoor and outdoor plants. You can search the extensive plant database to find information on thousands of house plants, participate in and discuss your favorite gardening topics in the plant forum, and expand your plant knowledge with hundreds of gardening tips and guides.

Where are the acorns?

afu — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 01:55:29 -0800

Where did all the acorns go? With reports of acornless oaks coming in from all over the U.S., what is a squirrel to do? Oaks produce acorns according to a mast cycle, which is thought to be related to climate, but the exact connection is far from clear.

The Color(s) Out of Space

Kronos_to_Earth — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:54:30 -0800

The hills of other earths might not be green...The Color(s) Out of Space. In order to work, I think the first link (slide show) requires Macromedia Flash to be enabled/installed.