Anthrome

A new plants blog. Edible. (HT Further Thoughts).

Dire Evolutionary Active Departments

In hard times, when monney dries out insane, budgets equilibria theory ends up threatening real positions. Universities are no exception. This is apparently what’s going to happen at the university of Leiden, where academic positions will eventually disappear soon. And guess what? All the threatened positions concern evolutionary biologists (and no molecular biologists for example). [...]

Seeds Aside

This time, seeds are really aside. You may read my latest shorty posted at  the wonderful Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog… Thanks to Jeremy and Luigi, taking notice on a seedy affair and asking for my grain of salt. Amazing, for this is happening only 17 km from home (and huh, 291 km from workplace). When I [...]

Another other new blogish blog

Vaviblog. All around Vavilov and plant genetic resources. Check out this one too, I guess another interesting thing to keep track of!

Heliconius resources

An, interesting, sort, of, new, collective, blog about people & labs involved in Heliconius research. Heliconius is a very interesting Genus of South American butterflies that turned into a model to study the evolution of mimicry (many species are aposematic and unpalatable, and others are mimicking the poisonous ones (while the latter are or are [...]

When pollination bugs…

Evolving specialized pollination, where you eventually develop a complete dependence to a single pollinator species, is both a risky bet and a win-win path to success. That is, dependence is critical to your reproduction, since you will only succeed to make seeds when your pollinating pet lives around. Mind you, this is not only tricky  [...]

Narcotic Narcoleptic Narcoterrific Nectar

It’s so hard to just say « no! », when you happen to be a pollinator. Because, you know, nectar is not only food. It is not only highly sweet, nor just energetic like corn syrup. Because of its high sugar contents (many oses at many doses), nectar also happens to make the delight of [...]

Darwin Central

Have noticed the new addition to the blogroll? It’s Darwin Central, and its “corrupting the youth since 1859″ means it all. It’s actually not a recent blog (archives dig back into 2006), and I don’t know how is it I never crossed it before, but there it is. I especially like the recent “Explanatory filter: [...]

Great mountain tropical forest pixies

Okay, that’s just the buzzing story today, even if it made it in the newspapers since a few weeks already, but just in case you didn’t know, a new unexplored forest area was discovered thanks to googlemaps some time ago, and Kew gardens had people going collect there and naturalists were back with species unknown [...]

Derived use of stomata…

In plants,  stomata are wonderful pores, mostly dispatched on leaf epiderme but present on almost any other plant organ. They serve the crucial role of facilitating gaz exchanges between inside and outside. Crucial, since plants are “breathing eaters“, essentially with multiple layers of cells, and they need to ease air transport deep into the most [...]