Botanists are hearing an alarm call alerting the world to habitat loss in Colombia, but it’s not a noise that they hear, it’s silence caused by vanishing bird calls marking lost ecosystems.
This week we have gossip from the rhizosphere, why eating melons takes a lot of aardvark, a plant that caters to different pollinators at different times, and more.
The brief Arctic summer is getting briefer. Research using herbaria shows that flowering times are shifting. Not all plants are responding the same way & that’s a problem.
Insurance data suggests plant theft is increasing, spanning local garden crime to international poaching networks threatening conservation efforts and botanic gardens.
High-speed cameras capture squirting cucumbers shooting seeds at 29 mph across 12-meter distances using perfectly angled, pressurised fruit explosions.
The Emperor Caligula wasn’t just interested in plants as poisons, he also knew of their healing properties. It seems that he just preferred the poison side of pharmacology.
Scientists analysing 2,000 herbarium specimens discovered jewelflowers survive new climates not by evolving, but by engineering their own familiar microenvironments