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…