I was having tea with very good friends of ours, a couple of evenings ago now, & they showed me this stunningly beautiful short film clip called Nature by numbers. The film-maker, Christobal Vila, describes it as a ‘movie inspired by numbers, geometry and nature.’ Absolutely gorgeous!
Continue readingCategory: plant structure
the 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 readingcross-species hanky-panky
My first-year students & I are currently studying plants. This is actually something of a balancing act from my perspective as a reasonably large proportion of the class didn’t study the ‘diversity in plant structure & function’ standard back in year 12 (or don’t remember doing so), so I’ve got to bring them up to […]
Continue readingcauliflory (but not with cheese)
Plants have a fascinating array of adaptations that function to maximise the odds of successful reproduction. Flamboyantly shaped & coloured flowers spring to mind, not to mention nectar rewards & attractive scents (which are not necessarily pleasant to the human nose, but then, Rafflesia isn’t out to attract us!). One of the more unusual adaptations is […]
Continue readingtrees on stilts
And no, I’m not talking about triffids here. More a part of the continuing series on plant root adaptations. I’ve mentioned mangroves in passing before (to do with their pneumatophores), but the thing that stood out for me about the mangroves we saw in Queensland was the fact that they looked like they were on […]
Continue readingaustralian red beech
We saw this lovely tree on the shoreline at Cape Tribulation. The flowers last just a day before their petals fall. I took this particular photo because I liked the way the fallen petals exposed the colourful reproductive structures – I’m always on the lookout for images to use in my lectures. This reminds me […]
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 […]
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