How a parasitic plant may “sniff out” its victims. As on the internet, once information is broadcast, even if only among ‘friends’, it becomes available for other unintended and unexpected uses. Dodder (genus Cuscuta) is a parasitic plant on other plants. But how does this plant find its host? Apparently,…
Smells Like Trouble If you’re crunching on a Wintergreen Lifesaver®, while drinking a cup of jasmine tea, you may be totally “freaking out” your nearby house plants. Why? Because you’re disseminating two volatile organic compounds known to have significant effects on plants, you may be inadvertently turning on hundreds of…
Just Keep Talking The idea of chemical communication among plants has recently gone from being viewed as a fringe idea to an accepted biological phenomenon. We now know that plants use several different volatile organic compounds not only to send signals from one part of the plant to another part,…
Stress Causes Genes To Jump When plants experience environmental stress, such as very hot temperatures, interesting things may happen inside plant cells at the genetic level. For instance, heat stress (typically, leaf temperatures above 95o F for several hours) may increase the activity of “jumping genes” within the plant genomes.…
Can Chemically Inducing Dormancy Help Plants Cope With Stress? This was a very bad year for wheat in Russia because of an extraordinarily hot and dry summer. And many climatologists believe this may be only a glimpse of the not-too-distant future in many parts of the world. If so, then…
“Near-Death Experience” One of the main problems for plants when they colonized terrestrial environments on Earth nearly a half billion years ago was how to survive the dryness. Today, much of a typical vascular plant’s anatomy, morphology and physiology is dedicated to obtaining and retaining water. Although most vascular plants…
The End of Winter? We experienced a relatively warm January here in western Washington (record-setting, in fact). Some daffodils are already coming up and the witch hazels are blooming. But most of the trees haven’t started to leaf out because they haven’t yet emerged from winter dormancy. Most woody perennial…
Plants Can’t Come In From The Cold Imagine for a moment that you had to stand outside your house or apartment, without moving, all winter long…and that you were naked. How long do you think you could last? Not long, especially if the temperature went below freezing. And certainly not…
As previously mentioned….if most climatologists are correct, then parts of the Earth’s surface may experience increasing episodes of heat and drought as a result of global “weirding”. (see here and here and here for recent examples) Some of the effects of heat on photosynthesis were considered in part 1 of…
If most climatologists are correct, then parts of the Earth’s surface may experience increasing episodes of heat and drought as a result of global “weirding”. (see here for a current example) In a another post in this blog, I briefly explore the complex subject of how increasing atmospheric CO2 may…