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Latin is a dead language, as dead as it can be. It killed the ancient Romans,and now it’s killing me!
But it’s payback time. In July, The International Botanical Congress voted to relax the rules that required that all new plant species be described in Latin. This move breaks with a tradition that botanists had maintained since the Renaissance. James Miller, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden, explained why this change makes sense:
Miller is a big fan of the relaxed rule, which, along with another measure allowing species to be published in electronic journals alone, will remove bottlenecks in the process of getting new flora out there.
When he published the discovery of a small tropical tree called Cordia koemarae, he had to write a Latin description that ran to 100 words and included: “Folia persistentia; laminae anisophyllae, foliis majoribus ellipticis.” Roughly translated: The tree hangs on to its leaves, which vary by size. The bigger leaf blades are elliptical.
“The bottom line is that only a tiny percentage of us really learn much Latin and are really capable of writing a grammatically correct description,” he said. “It’s an additional encumbrance.”
Link -via @brainpicker | Image of the Roman poet Virgil via QuartierLatin1968
We often post about endangered animals, but plants can go extinct as well. Plant species’ fortunes are affected by the actions of humans and other animals. Consider the strange case of the plant pictured here known as Cabbage on a Stick:
Cabbage on a stick is pretty much what it sounds like: a tuft of leaves that looks like a head of cabbage sitting on top of a thick stick. It’s also known as alula. In the wild, this plant is only found on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and without the work of botanists, it would be extinct. Because the only insect that could pollinate the cabbage on a stick, a type of hawk moth, doesn’t exist anymore, the plant species can only reproduce if humans hand-pollinate it. Botanists repelled down cliffs to reach the existing alula, pollinate it, and bring some back with them to grow in nurseries.
Other plants are endangered because of over harvesting, environmental encroachment, or even poaching. Link
Plants and herbs play a big part in the magic of Harry Potter. The students of Hogwarts encounter plants that scream, pulsate, spew poison, and most importantly, become ingredients in magic potions. What’s more is that many of those fantastic plants are based on real plants, or at least real legends of plants. Garden Design gives us the lowdown on the fictional and the actual botanical specimens mentioned in the series. For example, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, we meet a plant that grabs people with its tendrils, intending to eat them!
Carnivorous trees have popped up now and again in various superstitious texts, including one outrageous tall tale invented by a 19th-century German explorer named Carl Liche who claimed to have seen an eight-foot-tall plant with long hairy tendrils pick up a woman—supposedly belonging to what was later deemed a fictional Malagasy tribe—and devour her whole. Liche’s story, which was written up as a non-fiction travel account in the South Australian Register, was later found to be completely false.
An entire list of plants from the series are examined in this article. Link -Thanks, Claire!
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Have you ever seen a saguaro cactus like this? This is a cristate (“crested”) cactus, a result of fasciation, which is explained at TYWKIWDBI. The cactus somehow leads to an explanation of the Stevie Nicks song “Edge of Seventeen”. Link
What if you could train plants for national security? A biologist at Colorado State University working with the Department of Defense is doing just that. Genetic engineering is making plants react to threats they never encountered in nature -for human benefit.
Picture this at an airport, perhaps in as soon as four years: A terrorist rolls through the sliding doors of a terminal with a bomb packed into his luggage (or his underwear). All of a sudden, the leafy, verdant gardenscape ringing the gates goes white as a sheet. That’s the proteins inside the plants telling authorities that they’ve picked up the chemical trace of the guy’s arsenal.
It only took a small engineering nudge to deputize a plant’s natural, evolutionary self-defense mechanisms for threat detection. “Plants can’t run and hide,” says June Medford, the biologist who’s spent the last seven years figuring out how to deputize plants for counterterrorism. “If a bug comes by, it has to respond to it. And it already has the infrastructure to respond.”
That would be the “receptor” proteins in its DNA, which respond naturally to threatening stimuli. If a bug chews on a leaf, for instance, the plant releases a series of chemical signals called terpenoids — “a cavalry call,” Medford says, that thickens the leaf cuticle in defense.
So far, plants have been produced that react to the presence of TNT, but other factors, such as light and movement, interfere with the process. Medford thinks a working plant is still three or four years away. Link -via Fortean Times
Over 700 paired species of fig trees and wasps have symbiotic relationships. The fig tree host wasp eggs, and the wasps pollinate the fig trees in return. But according to a new study, if the wasps don’t pollinate the host plants, the fig trees retaliate:
If the wasps don’t do their duty, the trees respond by enacting a sanction — aborting their fruit, killing off the teeming mass of baby wasps. A new study of this killer tree phenomenon, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B comes from Cornell University and The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, shows that negative reinforcement may be an important part of symbiotic relationships.
Pollination by wasp comes in two varieties: passive and active. With passive pollination the wasps carry pollen that happens to stick to their bodies; where with active pollination they collect pollen in special pouches to deliver to the flowers.
With the passive pairings, the fig trees abort their fruit far less often than with active pairs. In the actively pollinating groups, the tree species that tend to enforce sanctions less often have a higher occurrence of freeloader wasps, who take advantage of the figs without doing any of the work. Inversely, by using the sanction option more frequently, some fig species have a lower incidence of non-pollinating insects.
Link | Scientific Paper | Photo: University of British Columbia
The desert rhubarb has a remarkable ability to move water in channels down its leaves in a way that lets water penetrate much deeper than other plants can:
Ecologists had been puzzling over the desert rhubarb for years: Instead of the tiny, spiky leaves found on most desert plants, this rare rhubarb boasts lush green leaves up to a meter wide. Now scientists from the University of Haifa-Oranim in Israel have discovered that ridges in the plant’s giant leaves actually collect water and channel it down to the plant’s root system, harvesting up to 16 times more water than any other plant in the region.
“It is the first example of a self-irrigating plant,” said plant biologist Gidi Ne’eman, a co-author on the paper published in March in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal of ecology. “This is the only case we know, but in other places in the world there might be additional plants that use the same adaptions.”
Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf came from a long line of talented glassmakers. As a hobby, Leopold began making glass flowers from illustrations in natural history books. So beautiful, accurate and delicate were these models, a buzz began to generate in his hometown in Germany, and a local aristocrat commissioned 100 glass orchids. Leopold’s son, Rudolf joined him in the painstakingly intricate work. Thus began a prolific career in natural history glassmaking, ending in the largest commission of their lives; an order from Harvard college for over 3000 plant and flower models for their botany students. Leopold didn’t live to see the completion of the project, but Rudolf continued on without him, working alone from 1895 – 1936, three years before his own death.
Link to story. Link to more photographs at Flickr.
(image credit: Curious Expeditions)
