The Aspleniaceae is a family of ferns, some of which are terrestrial and some of which are epiphytes. A new study has found a rarity, a hemiepiphyte.
Tag - Ecology
Alun Salt
Final course: ‘Coffee’… *
Or, rather, something to ponder as you finish your meal, maybe with a coffee. Whatever your food(s) of choice, you need the right equipment – e.g. teeth – to cope with it (unless it’s a liquid or intravenously...
Nigel Chaffey
3rd course: Cereal and fern (and meat and fat…) **
Teeth are one source of evidence for food preferences [see previous course/post], but how can you be sure that what is found in the mouth is actually swallowed into the digestive tract proper? Arguably better is the...
2nd course: Cereals, nettles and conifers (and fish…) ****
Famously, humans will have a go at eating anything, which is why they’re considered to be omnivores, and they are therefore omnivorous *. However, information concerning how such dietary preferences came to be, and when...
1st course: Seagrass ****
What’s the one dietary fact everybody knows about sharks? Correct, they eat human beings – as graphically shown in the creature feature film sensation of 1975, the movie Jaws (and its various good, bad, and indifferent...
Food, glorious food! ***, ****
Plants provide animals [and it is acknowledged that the following listing is somewhat human-biased] with many things: e.g. medicines; building materials; oxygen; useful chemicals (e.g. dyes such as madder, essential...
Wood-wide web wins world-renowned writing award
The Overstory by Richard Powers, 2018. William Heinemann. As a would-be botanical educator who’s reviewed a lot of botany texts over the years, I don’t really have time to review – or just read – ‘novels’. But, having...
Burning States
Wildfires are on the move in North America. Not just sweeping across landscapes in a season, but also changing where they appear over the years.
The plant that farms other plants for food
It's not just animals that the bladderwort, Utricularia, eats. Two new papers are finding out how bladderworts also digest microscopic plants.
Plants are weird – and rather wonderful too!
Weird Plants by Chris Thorogood, 2018. Kew Publishing. There is a view that plants are sufficiently amazing in their own right that they don’t need to be ‘sensationalised’ or over-hyped in order to make them...
Mammoth news: Bees help plants
What! That’s news?? Surely everybody knows that many plants are pollinated by bees? Hopefully, yes, but this item is not about that well-known plant-insect association. OK, but does it feature mammoths? No, but it does...
Cell cycle arrest in plants
In the cell cycle, the G1 phase can be like a prison, where plant cells are arrested, unable to divide. These cells have been arrested for different reasons, serving sentences of different lengths. So how and why did...
Anna Jacob
How fungi oxygenated the Earth
Now that’s an eye-catching headline, isn’t it? The thought of mushrooms and toadstools – that famously don’t produce oxygen, unlike green plants with their oxygenic photosynthesis – adding oxygen to the planet’s...
The hyperactive heavy metal band
It has been said that humans try to understand plants for two reasons: Either to kill them better – e.g. if they are considered to be weeds that compete for resources with our crop plants – or to exploit them for human...
