This is a new story & potentially a very exciting one (& I must thank Grant for drawing this story to my attention!). A Nature News item (Petherick, 2010) describes the discovery of green algae apparently living within the cells of salamander embryos. I’ll wait with interest for the published paper, but if this finding’s […]
Continue readingCategory: plant responses to the environment
how a little green ball of cells controls where it’s going
In one of our first-year biology labs the students spend a bit of time looking down the microscope at various algae & protozoa. Some of their samples come from a container of interestingly weedy water from my fishpond. Not only is the pond covered with duckweed & Elodea, but it turns out to have a wide range […]
Continue readinglet it grow, let it grow…
The tutor running our first-year labs does a wonderful job of seeking out quirky little video clips that she can use to illustrate a particular point & pique her students’ interest. But I think I might have beaten her to this one (courtesy as usual of PZ): a time-lapse sequence of germination & growth of maize. […]
Continue readingdeath shapes us all
Personal & societal attitudes to death shape the way we view the inevitable ending of our lives. And experiencing the deaths of others, particularly those close to us, can affect us greatly. But at a much deeper, cellular level, death shapes our very being.
Continue readingthe costs of transpiration
One of our first-year bio labs sees our students using potometers to determine how transpiration is affected by things like light, humidity, & wind movement. Those of my readers who are school students may well have done something similar, but for those who arent – a potometer allows you to measure the rate of water […]
Continue readingbotanical architecture
Plant roots don’t just grow down under the soil surface. A few posts back I wrote about the aerial roots of strangler figs: beginning as thin hair-like structures, they thicken into strong cables & eventually their interlaced networks engult the trunk of the hapless host tree. Then there are the pneumatophores of mangroves and bald […]
Continue readingof ant hotels and homicidal figs
One of several highlights of our holiday was a guided tour of part of the Daintree National Park. There was so much to see! But we’d probably have walked straight past some wonderful plants & animals if it wasn’t for our guide, Ross. For example, the first time we encountered a Boyd’s forest dragon, all […]
Continue readingsome interesting links to follow
Casting around for something to read, I’ve come across several interesting posts on various blogs. So I thought I’d share them with you 🙂 For those interested in competition & its effects on plant growth forms & also plant diversity, check out Taking below-ground processes seriously: plant coexistence and soil depth at The EEB & flow. We […]
Continue readinghummingbirds & the high cost of s*x
One of the nice things about reading books by great science writers is that I just know I’m going to learn lots. I’ve just got back into Nick Lane’s latest book Life Ascending (it’s been my lunchtime reading at work & recently other things have intruded…). Lane has a lovely lyrical way of writing that I really […]
Continue readingstomata & plant immunity to bacterial infection
My students & I spent our last couple of tutorials talking about how the mammalian immune system functions: innate immunity, acquired immunity, the whole lot. Our immune system is a wonderful & complex thing. But, just as we tend to overlook the fact that plants show a variety of behavioural responses to their environment, I […]
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