Best of Seeds Aside 09

Here are the posts that got the most reads this year:

• Drip tips drain leaves more efficiently. (I had no idea it would be so successful as to throw out #3… Seems like this was an unanswered question that found its place in the internet)

• What are the two sexes of a plant moss? (Maybe I should go more into mosses. They are interesting plants)

• Male meiosis in onion (just meiosis is so popular, who would have guessed! Should we infer that internet is not porn, internet is populated by biologists?)

• Breaking news: Plant autophagy (Should have more breaking news in here! ;-)

• Best fruit ever?

• There’s no porn like an orchid flower (Hum, maybe internet is for porn after all…)

• How do you know the sex of a plant seed? (Hum, maybe internet is really for porn after all…)

• Méiose mâle d’un oignon (hey, am I still a French blog?)

• Where does your potato come from? (a field guide…).

Okay, this was for the top 10. I also add the very bottom down of Seeds Aside. Only one, let’s try to have this one not be the bottomest of next year… :-)

• Signs of bias

Aren’t people interested in biases?

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PSOTW: Aloha Aloe!

Aloe Plant. Originally uploaded by Just chaos

Plant species of the week.

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Can this question possibly belong to the exam?

I can’t possibly produce an excerpt from this post without actually quoting the whole… You should go read this wonderful letter at Adventures in Ethics and Science. Especially if you ever had students asking questions about the exam that you could not imagine were actual or relevant questions but hopelessly designed to get bits if not the whole expected answer. A really good read, unfortunately reminding teachers the worst situation ever: when students realise they will regret their own decisions about what was important to know the big day and what wasn’t…

I suspect, from your crestfallen look, that you are now rethinking the cost-benefit analysis that led you to skip that lecture and those reading assignments.

It’s sad but you can’t possibly do more at this time. My latest crispation was students asking me, with regard to a distance from place X, whether the starting point was 0 or 20 (meters -that is, which ends of the graph does place X stand?). Hey, a senior is expected to know better!

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Buds and ends

In plants, buds differ in size and that matters.

If you want a way to illustrate how buds length varies between plants using pictures, than you’ll have to use anything worth calibrating. For example, insects would.

So is this what one would call scale bugs?

Scale Bug (Poss) (Pulvinaria regalis)

Originally uploaded by Eco Heathen

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Kiwano (quick)

Kiwano is the fruit of Cucumis metulliferus, or Horned Melon. I have known the fruit for a long time without ever affording one (this was more because I couldn’t find it, though the price would have made me think twice before buying one). It is very attractive, with a bright orange epiderm and more or less redish circles and lines driving along the skin. The inside is quite green (which I didn’t expect at first and was really surprised by the colour contrast). The inside is good. The inside is inside.

Kiwano (open fruit, right nut to spot size)

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When will Seeds Aside go extinct?

Link drift caused me yesterday to read a blog post (unfortunately, not a blog I knew, and I can’t remember anything allowing to get the link back now) investigating the publication rate for that blog over time.

I did the same for Seeds Aside (# of post / months spent since creation), and got this:

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Stapelia glanduliflora flower

Stapelia glanduliflora flower. Originally uploaded by Martin_Heigan

Plant of the week! What do you think of a weekly share of plant diversity?

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No more veggies please!

I belong to this kind of biologists that takes natural selection quite seriously, though this is a conceptual bias I rather easily acknowledge. It doesn’t mean that I’m completely indifferent to other processes impacting biological evolution neither*. I’m perfectly aware that the omnipotence of selection to shape life is a long standing and recurring debate, and many aspects of life indeed clearly don’t fit the simplistic view of adaptive wonderland (a classic strawman by the way). That said, I don’t think  blowing up everyone as soon as natural selection is invoked as a so interesting position. Sure, it is important to remind lay people that many other things impedes selection to achieve its powerful canalisation -drift, constraints (be they devo or of any other kind) and so… But please let’s be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater: there are still so many features which are best explained by natural selection (and for which the closest ‘best’ explanation would be intelligent design rather than things like randomly drifting  developmental pathways).

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CotS #45

You can read Circus of the Spineless, 45th edition, down there at Greg Laden’s Blog (link). This edition includes many blogs I don’t know, so if you’re like me there’s lot of reading in perspective. Go have a look at thee arthropods and Molluscs (or mollusks… should I even try mollux?).

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The Botanist Next Link

The Botanist Next Door. This blog exists since over a year and I just realise. I have to remember when updating the blogroll (no time but real need). Please have a visit!

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