Where have all the flower-pollinating insects have gone?
Tag - Ecology
Nigel Chaffey
Brand new 3.7 billion years old stromatolites
One of the most ancient forms of life on the planet might be more common than we thought.
Sore diners, cycads and birds…
… and now to … dinosaurs (!). Dinosaurs? Well, we did say at the outset of this mini series of articles that ‘seeds and animals’ was a very old association. Unlike the other animal associations mentioned already in this...
Meet the meat-munching plants
Carnivorous Plants: Physiology, ecology, and evolution edited by Aaron Ellison and Lubomír Adamec, 2017. Oxford University Press. Famously, Charles Darwin’s opinion of the Venus fly-trap is used to embrace his view of...
Does this seedling taste fishy to you…? ***
NIgel Chaffey returns with another tale of asyníthchory, this time involving fish.
What do you know about leaves???
Nature’s Fabric: Leaves in Science and Culture by David Lee, 2017. University of Chicago Press. Ever so occasionally one comes across a book that makes one think, “That’s the book I’d like to have written”. Well...
Plant life at the temperature limit?
It's not just microbes that can live under extreme conditions. Some plants thrive in situations many other life forms simply could not tolerate.
Seed dispersal, the Ecuadorian dimension…
Rather belatedly in our look at animals and seed dispersal, we have our Darwin connection (after all, what biological item would be complete without mention of that venerable Victorian vegephile, Charles Darwin?). If...
Cocoa, chimpanzees, and the restorative value of gorilla dung…
Having reached mammals in our meanderings, and the human involvement in global plant dispersal (admirably explored in Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire) notwithstanding, we couldn’t ignore our nearest and...
From cocks and hens * to cockroaches (and elephants…)
Yasuhiro Uehara and Naoto Sugiura describe a new mutualistic relationship between a cockroach and Monotropastrum humile (Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 185: 113–118, 2017; ). [M. humile is a mycoheterotrophic...
Plant survival, on a wing and a prayer…*
As organisms that are mainly fixed in one place, plants have a problem if they are to extend their range and spread to new areas by production of a new generation. This fixedness of plants is also a barrier when it...
Invasive aliens, not always doom-and-gloom?
Another kind of experiment that takes place out in the real world is when non-native species are introduced into new areas. Usually, and understandably, this causes a knee-jerk response that assumes this must be a bad...
Morphology, phylogeny and adaptation
The study of plant evolution and development in a phylogenetic context has accelerated research advances in both areas over the last decade. The addition of a robust phylogeny for virtually all plant taxa based on DNA...
botanyone
What! Plants can hear water???
The idea that plants can hear is controversial, but Nigel Chaffey finds the evidence keeps building.
