Can a tomato hear, and what would it listen to?
Over Christmas, a couple of papers came out that suggest plants can respond to airborne sound waves. The findings challenge many ideas about how plants respond to sound.
Alun Salt
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Alun (he/him) is the Producer for Botany One. It's his job to keep the server running.
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Wassailing to wake the trees
January 17 marks twelfth night in the Julian Calendar. It also marks the traditional night of wassailing, a ritual to drive evil spirits from the orchard.
For the Pineapple Lily, attraction is a matter of chemistry
Eucomis regia, the pineapple lily, doesn’t attract insects or birds to pollinate it. So how does it reproduce?
Botanists see the start of tropicalisation
With climate change, plants start colonising new areas, but how will new regions become tropical? A new study hints at the start of the process.
When did the first flowers open?
Finding out when the earliest ancestor of the flowering plants evolved has been difficult. Estimates have been wildly different, depending on the method you use.
The plant that farms other plants for food
It’s not just animals that the bladderwort, Utricularia, eats. Two new papers are finding out how bladderworts also digest microscopic plants.
The act of drawing can teach more about Botanical morphology than writing
A study comparing descriptive writing with botanical drawing has found that both methods aid learning about taxonomy. However, drawing subjects captured more morphological information.
Go Fungal!
It’s a belated present, the PDF of the handout we’ve been using on stands for Botany One.
Reading the fingerprints on your nuts
Are you getting the hazelnuts you pay for? How do you know? A new technique offers an alternative to subjective tests like flavour.
Can carnivorous plants control an invasive hornet?
Betteridge’s law of headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But some scientists in France have tested Sarracenia to find the answer is more like ‘not yet’.
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