Last time we had a taste of HOW plants tell time. But what, if any, are the adaptive advantages to plants for doing so? It has long been presumed that the ability to anticipate day/night cycles gives organisms a fitness advantage. For instance, this would allow plants to anticipate daylight…
Florigen = Tuberigen In an online report (ref 1 below) published this week in Nature, researchers in Spain and Japan have provided evidence that a protein similar to FT, currently regarded as the flowering signal florigen in plants, not only initiates flowering in potatoes, but also triggers tuber formation. “Seasonal…
Plant memory? Can some plants access past experiences so that this information can be incorporated into new responses, such as flowering? The answer is: Yes! (as illustrated in the photo on the the left). This picture shows a cabbage plant that was grown for five years in the laboratory of…
Can You Hear Me Now? A fundamental step in understanding how a signal works is identifying what specifically receives the signal. The signal in question here is the flower-inducing hormone in plants called florigen, which has recently been identified in several plant species, including rice. (Please see this recent post…
The Mystery About 150 million years ago dinosaurs were disappearing from the Earth, and flowering plants were appearing. Since that time, flowering plants (angiosperms) have flourished, rapidly diversifying and spreading into virtually every landscape on the planet. Charles Darwin referred to this abrupt origin and highly accelerated rate of diversification…
Some Pollinators Attracted By The Scent Of Death Floral odors, produced by the vast majority of flowering plants, play important roles in plant–pollinator interactions. A recent report of an orchid that attracts pollinators with the smell of carrion (see reference 1 below) reminded me of the infamous Voodoo lily, which…
“Hot Plants?” In the previous post, the topic was how plants survive the cold. Although some perennial plants can withstand winter temperatures well below zero (F), plants certainly don’t generate body heat like mammals do in order to warm themselves. Or do they? There are a few plants in nature,…
The eye of a honey bee (photo credits). Flowers look very different to insect pollinators, such as honey bees, compared to what we mammals see. As the photo on the left shows, bees have compound eyes. How a bee sees patterns as a result of its compound eyes is wonderfully…