From Stressed Plants as Good Neighbors to the Genome of a Parasitic Flowering Plant. And the top five most popular tweets of 2021 at HowPlantsWork are: #5 – How plants become good neighbours in times of stress “So how do plants prevent elongated growth under deep shade conditions? The secret lies in…
From the Extinction of Indigenous Languages to the Perseverance of New York City’s Wildflowers. What were the top 25 tweets of 2021 from HowPlantsWork? Here’s Part 2 – #20 to #16: #20 – Extinction of Indigenous languages leads to loss of exclusive knowledge about medicinal plants “Many of today’s mass-market…
From How Plants Tell Time To Saving The American Chestnut. Time seemed to be a recurring theme in the plant science news of August 2018…from how plants tell time to how long seeds have to successfully germinate. The future was also a theme…from the future of food production in the…
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…
How Do We Know Plants Can Tell Time? The daily opening and closing of flowers and the rhythmic leaf movement of some plants suggests, even to the casual observer, that plants have an internal clock. To more careful observers, such as Carl Linnaeus and Charles Darwin, the evidence was clear…
When A Blink Takes A Minute Does it take you two hours to tie your shoes? Do you enjoy a Beethoven symphony played over the course of 24 hours ? If so, you may be living on “plant time”. As we saw in a previous post, there are many examples…
The Biology of Moonlight? The moon may have effects on animal behavior (see here for example), but does it affect plants? Last time I introduced the scientific literature on the subject by referring to a 1946 paper by Beeson (see ref. 1 below) published in the journal Nature. In this…