All three of these I found while camping in the Catskills last summer. They are also three of my favorite photos I have taken of organisms, especially the middle one. I'm fairly certain the top one is a Hygrocybe genus. Anyone able to point me to the right genera for the others?
As spring gears up I’ve been thinking a lot about gardening. We’re going to try growing more food this year and I’ve been researching vegetables that are easy to grow in
Some of you know this but a really great fact is that the simple act of putting one’s hands in soil releases endorphins in the brain. I haven’t been able to track down a primary source for this fact so if you know of one please leave me a comment. I’m quite confident it is true, though, from secondary sources and, more importantly, personal experience. Working in the garden just makes me feel good. And that’s directly related to the fact that this is a behavior that we should engage in, from a natural history perspective. We should garden and we should engage with the natural world because these things are part of who we are as a species. We are not primates designed to hunch over a keyboard as I am presently doing but primates who evolved in a natural world and used our intelligence to remove some of the uncertainty from procuring proper nutrition.
But I digress. One variety of vegetables we are going to try to grow this year is Brussels sprouts (and I just learned that it is Brussels sprouts and not Brussel sprouts). They are actually a variety of
PTC played a major role in the development of our understanding of the biochemistry and genetics of bitter taste detection. Ability in all animals to taste bitterness has evolved as a way to avoid toxic compounds. It is the only one of the five tastes (yes, five) that is activated by more than one family of molecules. It was little understood just how this worked until the 1930s when a scientist was experimenting on PTC and accidentally blew some of the substance into the air. His colleague began to complain of a bitter taste in his throat that the lead researcher could not detect. This lead to a line of research that now accounts for the genetic difference between humans who can and cannot taste this bitter molecule.
It is still somewhat unclear why some can and some cannot taste PTC. It is often found in toxic plants and PTC itself is toxic in very high quantities. We should, at least in theory, have all developed an aversion to the molecule as it is a sign of toxicity. Perhaps the molecule’s presence in vegetables we’ve been eating since antiquity accounts for some of our inability to taste PTC (or as I like to think of it, an ability not to taste PTC). What plants (either edible or not) are you looking forward to seeing in your garden this year?
Discovery News: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/13/brussel-neanderthal.html
Parington, Charles Frederick (1835) British cyclopaedia of natural history. Accessed via Google Books
I took these photos last summer in the woods in the town where I grew up,
I used to think jack-in-the-pulpit was carnivorous. The tube-shaped structure reminded me of pitcher plants. They aren’t carnivorous and the jack-in-the-pulpit has a modified flower while the tube-shaped trap on a pitcher plant is made of modified leaves. However, I recently found out that they aren’t quite that far off.
A. triphyllum is a member of the family Araceae, an entomophilous group of flowering plants (that is they are pollinated by insects: ento = insect phil = attraction). Most of these plants are pollinated by dipterans (flies) but can either form mutualistic or antagonistic relationships with them. They all lure the flies in with the smell of their flower and some provide the flies with sites for mating and ovipositing (egg laying) while others fake it and simply take advantage of the little insects’ desire to reproduce in a safe place. This one, A. triphyllum, is a deceptive species.
The males of the species, which are slightly smaller than the females, lure the insects into the flower. The insects are then released through a small opening at the bottom after getting covered in pollen. They are then free to either find another male, picking up a different individual’s pollen, or to eventually find a female. But here’s the commonality with the pitcher: the females lack that little opening which allows the flies egress to their freedom. Usually the dipteran pollinators simply die after pollination is complete. It is unclear why exactly this is the case. It may be a step towards evolving into a carnivorous plant but this tends only to evolve in places like bogs and other areas of very poor soil nutrition. Probably it is just a random mutation that may never be utilized for any kind of real increase in the plant's fitness.
Oh yes and the best part is that jack-in-the-pulpit flowers grow from corms. You can read more about corms in my post below about crocuses.
Barriault,
Read the article here.
