Berry Go Round #4!

You can read the fourth edition of the Berry Go Round here at Foothills Fancies. Spring inspired many interesting posts and plants theme posts are flowering through the blogosphere. Enjoy the latest photosynthetic news…

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Les joies de l’informatique

Ah les joies de l’informatique… Par Chanson Plus Bifluorée.

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Lizzards making a soup

Read the whole story at Pharyngula. A lizzard species introduced on a small island evolved a completely new organ to adapt to a rather radical diet change in only about thirty generations (introduction dates from 1971). Really cool evolution story to store. On their way they became shorter on leggs, have a bigger mouth though they don’t shout at each other since they also turned from territorial creatures into more communal neighbours.

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Nothing to do with lizzards, something I thought to blog about but a colleague did it just better than I would have done. The experiment described above is (sort of) not cool, or at least unethical, because it hurts plainfully “plant dignity” (’cause those creepy lizzards have gone veggan). Yep, somewhere on earth there will be committees to investigate if planned experiments are not going to be damaging plant dignity. What is the next swearword?

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Take in global conversation

It’s above Expelled  being exposed for what it is, a shameful piece of typical fraudulent creationist propaganda. Greg Laden’s has an excellent piece about the case bringing the (cell) gap into a general public discussion. Maybe he’s right, and American people may eventually end up with a better understanding and knowledge than any other people worldwide as to what cells are made of and as to how they function. Finally creationism has found its use: serve as an anchor to educate lay people into the true nature wonders… Or would the compulsive commitment to a fair treatment occuring there (actually completely unfair since it’s giving equal weight to a handful of lies) become the major cultural obstacle to a better understanding of the world?

Ah, fair treatment. Let’s revive the stork theory…

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Panoramic of a mossy trunk

Okay, it’s moss times at Seeds Aside, so I give you this panorama… This might have been another game (with “how many moss species do you see here?”), but I can’t identify these so I won’t start up. If you want a good game, these seeds still need some guesses… :-)

(for a larger size, click on the picture).

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What are the two sexes of a plant moss?

That’s cool when requests coming here are direct questions. Eventually turning into posts of some sort…

Such a recent question was “what are the two sexes of a plant moss?”. Well, the two basic sex functions are male and female, as long as gametes can be differentiated (big gametes are defined as female, small ones as male –both or none may be motile in plant species, so being able to move is not a feature that we can ascribe to a male gamete as we do in animals). That said, we know flowering plant species can express a wide diversity of co-expression of these sexual functions, resulting into sex phenotypes that vary from perfect hermaphroditism to a complete separation of sexes (that’s for the plant sex post).

The thing is that mosses are somewhat special. They spend most of their life cycle at a haploid stage (having only one set of chromosomes), while the diploid stage everyone regards as normal is a transient part of their life: the erect organ bearing and dispersing spores, whose morphological diversity is illustrated on your right (picture from Wikipedia, it’s a drawing from the very famous biologist Ernst Haeckel).

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Berry Go Round is coming

The next edition will take place at Foothill fancies… Send your submissions before the 25th!

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What use are herbaria?

If you really think this question is important, then go read this post at Catalogue of Organisms.

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Geographical oddity

Confusing trivia. Did you know about Miami University? (there’s a great department of botany there, I found this when looking for a paper…).

So guess what?

#1. Miami University is located at Oxford.

#2. This Oxford is located in Ohio.

USA really are a world apart on their own… :-)

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Amazonian plants blog

For those who read Brazilian Portugese, there is a good blog about Amazonian Brazilian plants to read, Raphael Serathiuk’s blog (but if don’t, you can always go for the pictures).

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