The biggest treat of a 15-or-so mile hike I did was getting to hike through a real, honest-to-goodness bristlecone pine forest. It was my first time. These can power through 3- to 5,000 years on stony crags in California and Nevada, making them the oldest single living organisms on Earth. Their entire bodies possess this unearthly Sophia-Loren-like aging prowess; unlike most pines, whose needles last two to four years before they’re shed, bristlecone pine needles may hang around for 45.

I had never seen one up close before, and here was a whole forest of them. Dark olive green and indeed quite bristly, they seemed like stiff, bony, but still somehow elegant codgers of the pine world. I snatched a fallen cone in passing. I examined its scales. And sure enough — bristles.

How the bristlecone pine earned its name. As you can see, the bristles shrink as the cone ages. Not my photo -- I was too busy slogging uphill. Creative Commons mcsboulder. Click for link.

In spite of all this awesomeness in just one of their number, plants get no respect. And conifers . . . well, conifers get made into toilet paper (in fairness, so do some deciduous trees). But cone-bearing trees — gymnosperms to botany nerds — are way cool. From their strappy or needle-like laugh-at-dehydration leaves to their incredibly beautiful bordered pit-pocked water-transporting wood cells called tracheids, to their stranglehold of Earth’s real estate from 50-70 degrees North, conifers deserve respect. But for today, let’s focus on their cones. They’re not all bristly, but there’s more to conifer cones than meets the eye.

Gymnosperms are so called because they make “naked seeds”. Not spores like mosses or ferns, nor seeds embedded in fruit like flowering plants. Just seeds — which are themselves plant embryos packaged with a little nutrition to get them going when they land in a spot with promise. Growing up, I was mystified by pine cones because I could never find the seeds. Was the cone the seed? Did the seeds even exist? As it turns out, the seeds are missing by the time you examine a cone because they have usually taken wing on the little sails they sprout. Each pine cone makes two seeds per cone scale, and sometimes you can see the outline of where the pair once sat if you look at a cone carefully.

Here you can see the lighter shadows of where the two seeds once nestled, with a dark stripe between them.

No one home. Creative Commons Analog Weapon. Click image for link.

And here are what winged pine seeds look like. The oil-rich pine nuts you may have eaten are also pine seeds — packed with much more food and lacking obvious wings. Instead, birds called nutcrackers do the dispersal job, stuffing their seed pouches silly (they can cram a hundred or more in there) and burying them hither and yon. Like squirrels, they inevitably forget where they stashed some, which germinate where they’ve conveniently been planted.

Creative Commons keaw_yead_3. Click for link.

Cones actually come in two different flavors, too. The cones I’ve just shown are all females. But there are male cones as well. These are the ones that shed pollen by the lungful and explode in a cloud of yellow dust when you whack a pine branch in spring. (I wrote about pine pollen here).

Male cones are not so heavily armed and fortified as female cones. In fact, you’ve probably seen them before without knowing what you were looking at. They drop in hordes from the tree in spring, once all their pollen has exceeded its use-by date.

Creative Commons gshepherd_br. Click for link.

The male cones shed pollen — really immature haploid plants called microgametophytes, but that’s another fascinating story — that lands in the cones. There, in a truly byzantine process, it takes another 15 months just for the sperm now sealed inside the cone to eventually burrow in through a germ tube from the pollen grain to reach the eggs, and a full two years before the cones open to release their seeds. The pines hold their cards close.

You’ll notice that male and female appear quite different. The females have the bauplan of a well-armored samurai, while the male cones are so wimpy and evanescent that many people are oblivious to their existence. As it turns out, this wasn’t always the case.

A report published online in February in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy B found that, looking as far back as evolution of pines in the Pennsylvanian era some 300 million years ago, female cones were no huskier than males. But in the Jurassic, some 100-150 million years later, they’ve slowly grew stouter and more tamper-proof while seeds and male cones have remained the same size. For a gorgeous photo of a slender fossil female cone next to modern males and females, see here (click the image to enlarge it).

Over a hundred million years of stasis followed by a sudden increase begs the question: why? Well, when things get ouchier and more prone to causing indigestion, one can generally infer that something something started eating them with abandon. That something could have been newly evolved long-necked dinosaurs like Diplodocus. Or it could have been branch-bombing early birds or mammals, or a fiendish new mastication tactic on the part of insects. In any case, once the arms race began, it appears female cones have seen no reason not to continue fortifying, steadily increasing in size to this day. With over two years from pollination to seed deployment in which to defend the young’uns, can you blame them?

In other pine cone news, a paper in PNAS reported in December that those flimsy male gymnosperm cones may well be the ancestors of every flower you see. They looked at which genes are switched on in flower development and compared this to the genes switched on in male and female cone development. In flowers we consider to have retained the forms of the first to evolve — like water lilies — there is often a gradation between petals and stamens(the things that release the pollen), with some petals doing double duty as boy bits (see also here).

Creative Commons Fungus Guy. Click image for link.

They are arranged spirally, just like the arrangement of the “microsporophylls”, or things holding the pollen sacs on the male cone (go back and look). The researchers found that the same genes that govern male cone formation seem to be guiding the development of floral perianths (the petals+stamens) in these early flowers. Further, the genes controlling the development of the tepals and stamens seem to cover a large spatial area and gradually intergrade with each other, just as in male cones. The development of the flowery female bits (the carpels), on the other hand, seem to be governed by the same genes that shepherd female cones to maturity.

Unlike more derived (evolved) flowers like, say, orchids, or poppies, where there are very specific genetic programs for very discrete organs (stamens and petals in these flowers are nothing alike), in these early flowers, it seems as though sepal (another sort of flower part that often encloses the petals), petal, and stamen are still being “sorted out”, in the words of one of the authors. Clearly distinct floral organs goverened by clearly distinct genetic programs evolved later.

So it appears that somehow, somewhere, a male gymnosperm cone got a bit confused and some genes were flipped on that were supposed to be flipped off. Female parts formed amidst the male. And once that happened, some of the male cone scales began mutating in ways that changed their size, shape, and function. Through natural selection, some bigger, showier male scales became sterile as they specialized in attracting pollinators — a new concept, that. With carpel-seeking insects to do your reproductive bidding (rather than just relying on the deveil-may-care wind, as living gymnosperms do), one may presume reproductive efficiency shot up.  Not long after, we have Darwin’s Abominable Mystery: the sudden hegemony of flowering plants, which went on to take over the world*. Today, 90% of land-based plant life makes flowers.

But some of them could still almost make cones. “Primitive” flowers like water lily or avocado still carry around all the genetic equipment they’d need to turn a pine cone — eventually — into a petunia.

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*Canada and Russia excepted. It seems flowering trees are no exception to the rule: never get involved in a land war in Asia.

Creative Commons Jeans_photos, photo by Fred Hort. Click for link to license.

In 1928, a farmer in Western Australia named Jack Trott was plowing a field newly carved from the Outback by fire. An unusual crack in the soil caught his attention. In it was something extraordinary — a sweet-smelling pallid little flower of the first known completely subterranean plant: the Western Underground Orchid, Rhizanthella gardneri*.

Strange things are known to lurk under Australia’s soils (these come once again to mind), and these flowers must surely be counted among their ranks (although not perhaps for much longer — fewer than 50 individuals are known to exist). Obviously, living your entire life underground is weird for a group of organisms (i.e., plants) known for its sun worship. True to their underground creds, these orchids never break the surface. Or rather, they do break it (crack it, usually), but they never break on through, in the Doors-ensian sense. The flowers form within a few inches of the surface, but get no further. The sweet smell is clearly a lure for pollinators — identity still TBD — to their underground digs.

As orchids go, they are odd in in that their “flower” is actually a cluster of flowers in a cup called a “capitulum”, or “little head”. If you look at the picture, you’ll see a bunch of upside-down teardrop shapes; those are the flowers, in which orchid afficianados can no doubt see a faint resemblance to more conventional orchids that this “flower” as a whole quite lacks.

But also weird for orchids, these flowers subvert the usual fungus-orchid BFF relationship. Many, if not most orchids, have what is usually euphemistically termed an “intimate” relationship with fungi. That starts on day one: germination. Orchids are notoriously difficult to start from seed because they store no food of their own and must be in the presence of their preferred fungal partner — under Goldilocks conditions — to sprout. For most wild orchids, your best source of information on what that fungus and those conditions might be would be your nearest Magic 8-Ball.

Not actually natural size (anymore).

Most photosynthetic, self-sufficient orchids seem to associate with saprophytic or parasitic fungi. But R. gardneri has found a different niche: myco-heterotrophy, or exploiting the mycorrhizal fungi of other plants. In this case, it gets all up in the business of the fungal partners of Melaleuca uncinata, the broom bush. Mycorrhizae are fungi that encase or invade the roots of nearly every land plant. This is good; without them, plants would have a considerably rougher go of it. The usual exchange is sun-made plant glucose in exchange for a vastly improved water and mineral uptake thanks to the exponential surface area increase made possible by a network of fungal filaments extending well beyond the roots. Mycoheterotrophic plants break into the mycorrhizal associaton of a fungus and another plant and steal some of the goodies for themselves.

R. gardneri is not the first plant to have figured this sweet deal out. Here in Colorado there are at least two pale pink spiky plants terrorize our fungi: the Heath-family pinedrops, and the Orchid-family spotted coralroot. I often see pinedrops and spotted coralroot on hikes in the mountains, where the former associates with (probably parasitizes) mycorrhizal truffle fungi in the genus Rhizopogon (related to the bolete genus Suillus for those who care) and the latter goes after mycorrhizal Russula, which make the majority of the red-capped, white-stalked (and usually poisonous and/or disgusting) mushrooms found in the temperate forest.  I wrote about another Heath-family floral parasite that I used to encounter often here. In spite of exceptions like pinedrops, almost all mycoheterotrophs are orchids.

In all these cases, these plants have lost their chlorophyll. But none have taken the admittedly drastic step (for a plant) of entirely forsaking wind and rain, sun and cloud.

Chloroplasts: Not Just for Photosynthesis Anymore

The Western Underground Orchid has, and in the process, has gone farther toward forsaking its planthood (if its planthood can be tied to the vir(d)ility of its chloroplasts — the cell bits responsible for photosynthesis) than any other plant.

Chloroplasts — as first understood with genius by Lynn Margulis — are what remains of a fateful meal billions of years ago. A bigger cell engulfed a smaller photosynthetic one, probably a cyanobacterium, or blue-green alga. But the alga didn’t go quietly. It managed to survive and thrive in its would-be predator. It became its partner instead. Already in that cell were the remains of bacterial cells who had long ago struck a similar bargain: mitochondria, the power-packs of the cell. You have these ancient bacteria still in nearly every cell of your body. Plants have both mitochondria (which is how we know that endosymbiotic event happened first) and chloroplasts, the descendants of the world’s luckiest alga. And both still have DNA, the remains of their bacterial chromosomes.

Chloroplasts inside a true moss -- each one a descendant of an alga that gave a predatory cell indigestion billions of years ago. Its offspring (and that of a few other lucky photosynthetic microbes cum organelles) blanket the planet. Creative Commons Krisitian Peters, click image for license link.

But in R. gardneri, 70% of its expected chloroplast genes are gone, according to a new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution. And the total length of the R. gardneri’s chloroplast chromosome (which is still circular like all most good bacteria) is just 59,190 base pairs, also the smallest for a land plant on record.

Chloroplasts are where the proteins and other cogs of photosynthesis are manufactured. They’re where photosynthesis takes place too. But it seems that even chloroplasts must have some functions in the cell aside from harnessing light. Because Rhizanthella has gone as far as any plant in ditching their chloroplasts since they spend their entire lives underground, ensuring zero photosynthesis takes place. So maybe the news isn’t that they’ve shed 70 % of their chloroplasts genes. It’s that they still have 30% of them. What are those genes still doing there? And what can they tell us about how other parasites operate?

Even in your garden-variety plant, the chloroplast genome is sharply reduced compared to its cyanobacterial ancestor. When a cell goes from going it solo to living in a co-op, there’s a lot of genes it doesn’t pay to make in-house. There may be genes already doing the same thing in the host cell’s nucleus, or just not usable from inside another cell anymore. Over time, natural selection will prune these genes away, since they are costly to make if not being used. Other genes, perhaps because it’s more efficient to regulate and transcribe them there, get shuttled to and permanently housed in the nucleus. What’s left is chiefly what’s essential for the business of turning light into sugar, Job #1 for the choroplast.

But in Rhizanthella, which has clearly boarded up the photosynthetic apparatus, there remain 37 genes coding for 20 proteins, 4 ribosomal RNAs (an important constituent of ribosomes), and 9 transfer RNAs (essential tools for turning RNA into proteins within the ribosome; they ferry the appropriate amino acid to the appropriate RNA codon). Scientists checked DNA made from the messenger RNA they found in the chloroplasts; they were all being spliced and edited correctly, implying they were, in fact, still being used, in spite of the strip mining of the rest of the genome.

Toxoplasma gondii motherships constructing new invasion craft. Creative Commons Ke Hu and John Murray. Click image for license link.

Compare those 37 genes to a standard photosynthetic orchid, in this case Phalaenopsis aphrodite, whose chloroplast genome has 110 genes. Even the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, notorious for its mind-control abilities (which chiefly involve making hosts — including accidental hosts like humans — do risky things to increase their odds of predation, or from the parasite’s point of view, getting to the next host), actually seems to have been photosynthetic in a previous life, and even it still contains 53 genes on its presumed remnant chloroplast genome, according to the authors.

Thus ex-photosynthetic plants of all sorts seem to share a minimum set of chloroplast genes, and they must be doing so because the chloroplast performs some sort of important non-photosynthetic function that can’t be transferred to the nucleus.

In fact, the scientists compared the reduced gene sets found in parasite ex-chloroplasts from a variety of groups. As mentioned above, they found strong similarities, suggesting that when photosynthetic parasites of any ancestry — related or not — give up free-living, they tend to lose and retain the same sorts of chloroplast genes. This knowledge could provide us with lines of attack in ex-photosythetic parasites that go after us or our crops or livestock. The bare-bones Rhizanthella genes could tell us which genes are most essential — and thus the best targets.

Thanks to convergent evolution, loss of similar genes in parasitic chloroplasts makes it look like Toxoplasma gondii (cause of Toxoplasmosis in humans and cats) is closely related to the plant parasites beechdrops and Western Underground Orchid. Ummm, no.

But wait. Does that mean the chloroplast — the sugar-making machine of plants — does things other than just photosynthesize? Yes. And parasitic plants like R. gardneri are how we know what those things are.

Of the genes that are left on the R. gardneri chloroplast genome, almost all of them encode proteins needed for translation (getting from RNA to protein). Five of the remaining transfer RNAs seem to have remained because either they must interact with many other chloroplast proteins and versions from the main cell would not necessarily recognize the appropriate proteins, or because they have quirky physical modifications that make the chloroplast translation machinery unable to recognize their cellular equivalents. In other words, for these genes, evolution’s backed itself into a corner it’s not easy to get out of with simple chance mutation and natural selection, so instead, it preserves the status quo.

But all these translation-related genes are probably still there for a larger reason: they are necessary to translate the four remaining non-translation related genes on the genome: one making a protein essential for membrane synthesis and two others likely involved in making it, and a fourth gene that makes a protein that seems to have a hand in a variety of important plant processes, at least one of which must be essential. Mutations in the chloroplast’s translation genes are probably fatal because the chloroplast can then no longer make this handful of genes.

Why must these four genes be expressed in the chloroplast and not in the nucleus? The authors hypothesize it has to something to do with a wonderfully vague term called “control by epistasy of synthesis”. As far as I can tell, that means the compartmentalization of these proteins in the chloroplast is essential to their proper synthesis and integration into large protein complexes. So there you have it: the chloroplast may stick around in parasitic plants because it’s handy as a clean manufacturing facility for making parts of a few complicated proteins.

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* According to the poster of the flickr photograph I used to illustrate this post, Trott donated his specimen to an herbarium for identification and offered £100 to anyone who could find another. Although many looked, none was found until 1979, the year after Trott died. His widow, however, paid up.

Delannoy E, Fujii S, des Francs CC, Brundrett M, & Small I (2011). Rampant Gene Loss in the Underground Orchid Rhizanthella gardneri Highlights Evolutionary Constraints on Plastid Genomes. Molecular biology and evolution PMID: 21289370

Your broccoli's 1,458th cousin, once-removed. Creative Commons Kulac.

So let’s say you’re a wild leafy vegetable, innocently minding your own business on limestone seacliffs on the coasts of southern and western Europe. Suddenly, some prehistoric human takes it into their head that you are worth installing in their newfangled “garden”. Fast forward several thousand years, and the results of that domestication almost put Westminster to shame.

That plant was Brassica olearaca — wild cabbage — and it has become the stuff of vegetable legend. For the progeny of that ancestral plant, when subjected to many thousands of years of natural mutations and careful selection of the result by humans, has evolved into a cohort of vegetables that either strike fear or delight in the hearts of man. They are (drumroll please):

• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Kale
• Collard Greens
• Chinese Broccoli
• Cabbage
• Kohlrabi
• Brussels Sprouts
• and last post’s mystery vegetable, Romanesco.

In all of these plants, gardeners noticed interesting traits that emerged over the generations in their garden, and began to selectively breed for ones that were desirable. In broccoli and cauliflower they selected for genes that put flower development on overdrive (the tumorous mass at the top). In cabbage, they selected for genes that caused the apical (apex) bud to stop growing vertically and swell with leaves. In Brussels sprouts, they selected for the same process, but instead of the apical bud, to the lateral buds that develop from each leaf axil (junction) with the stem. In kohlrabi, they selected for a big fat swollen stem itself. And in kale and collard greens, they selectively bred plants with the biggest, fluffiest green leaves. This is artificial selection, and it is evolution every bit as much as natural selection is. Darwin noticed the same process had taken place when humans turned wolves into dogs, and pigeons (Columbia livia) into the explosion of bizarre and sometimes disturbing forms favored by pigeon fanciers. And we all know how the dog thing turned out.

As Amy correctly intuited in the comments to the last post, romanesco is most closely related to the cauliflower branch of the family tree. For those who care, according to the wikigooglepediatron, romanesco was first documented in the 16th century in Italy, but was probably around for quite a while before that. Obviously, in Romanesco some gene (or genes) for floral development got turned on and stuck in Sorcerer’s Apprentice (or Funhouse Mirror) mode, splitting and dividing and spiraling seemingly ad infinitum. And, being human, we couldn’t help promoting(bio-pun!) this. Could we be satisfied with the lumpy and grotesque flower-buds-on-steroids approach of broccoli and cauliflower? No! We must have flowers to feed our soul. We must have . . . romanesco.

Examine the buttonhole.

I have been looking for this flower for years, not least because it was Linnaeus’s (as in Carolus “Father of Taxonomy” Linnaeus) favorite flower in the world. Nearly every painting you see of him shows him clasping or otherwise displaying a pair of the dainty blossoms. They were on his coat of arms.

For years I’ve gazed at them in my flower books, hoping and waiting and trying to be patient for the day. That day was Saturday. My mushrooming buddy Johnny was there to see it, and he patiently endured five minutes of me exclaiming over the low mat of little pink flowers. I tried to sniff for the “light vanilla scent” one of my books advised me they would have, but I could detect nothing. I don’t care. They are awesome.

Twinflowers are in the Honeysuckle family, the Caprifoliaceae (Kap’-ri-fo-lee-ase’-ee-ay). The Honeysuckle family is notorious for producing flowers in . . . you guessed it . . . pairs. The sweet honeysuckle blossoms of southeast Tennessee I remember from my youth came in pairs; the kids used to say you could pluck them and suck the nectar, though I don’t recall ever being successful at that. At the foray this weekend, someone came up to me to ask me about another plant he’d found with glossy twin black berries mounted on shiny red bracts; it was the bracted honeysuckle, or black twinberry, yet another member of the family. It was a Caprifoliaceae kind of weekend.

Twinflower is unusual because it grows in a low green mat rather than a woody shrub, like most honeysuckle. I even found a clump this weekend growing right on top of a tree stump (pictured above. You can also see the pixie stick form of Cladonia lichen mingling with the twinflower as if they were at a cross-kingdom cocktail party). Twinflower is, as its name implies, circumpolar in the northern hemisphere, which is why both Linnaeus and I can enjoy them, despite the fact that I’ve never been to Sweden, and he never experienced the Rocky Mountain High.

In this new book, not only is art gorgeous and the plants (as ever) fantastic, the works are organized according to currently accepted evolutionary order. Useful! Educational!

The book highlights modern examples of botanical art created after the advent of the camera. Though some may argue that instrument made natural history art obsolete, I beg to differ. Often art can highlight features that would be quite difficult to see in one photograph. Anyone who disagrees is directed to the Sibley Guide to Birds.

Any guesses what the work above is of? It’s something you use a lot . . .      Think . . . don’t peek till you’ve really thought about it . . .

Vanilla planifolia is its name. Dairy flavoring is its game. When the long skinny fruit (packed with jillions of tiny seeds) turns brown and is properly cured and subjected to alcohol extraction, you end up with a dark brown liquor that little kids are always surprised to find tastes wretched. That’s why you’ve got to add the products of Saccharum sp. and Bos primigenius.

The plant is in the massive orchid family(Orchidaceae), one of the coolest on the planet. Its members generally live in trees and require particular symbiotic fungi to infect and feed their endosperm-less seeds before they can germinate, and they’re known for producing exquisite flowers pollinated by a variety of specialized insects. Orchids have gone as far as tricking insects into having sex with their flowers so they can . . . have sex. Oh, the irony.

I also love the way natural patterns are repetitive*. Similar patterns pop up in the oddest places. Look at the Charter Oak on the Connecticut quarter

and you’re looking at the search pattern of a feeding plasmodial slime mold (a giant ameoboid eukaryote), Physarum polycephalum,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomtruth/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

which sends out protoplasmic veins in all directions in search of its prey: bacteria, fungal spores, and other microbes.

Does math underlie that too?

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*I also love how this video was for his mom. : )

Here’s a further taste of the delights that await us (with the correct Attenborough narration):

Life – Venus Flytraps: Jaws of Death – BBC One from Paulo Martins on Vimeo.

Is it just me or do those hairs remind you of the time-delayed booby traps laid for Indiana-Jones style adventurers in gold-laden caves? You know, the kind where you rest your arm on a stone projecting from the wall, and 10 seconds later it starts moving into the wall as the ceiling sprouts spikes and assumes skewering speed? Yeah. I really did feel bad for the little flies after they got trapped, though. Although their slurping of nectar with that repulsive labellum-tipped proboscis really was revolting (where has that been?) and I have no qualms about mercilessly swatting them around my home, they are living creatures too, and their little cries of despair were truly pitiful. Perhaps I’d make a good Jain after all.

Venus flytraps are in the Droseraceae, the Sundew Family, along with the sundews and a curious little package called the waterwheel plant, which is essentially an aquatic flytrap, but sadly does not occur in the western hemisphere. This family is in the Caryophyllales, a group of related plants that have evolved many ways of living in nutrient-poor and/or hot, dry soils. These include clever heat-beating photosynthetic adaptations (C4 and CAM for you biogeeks in the know), salt-secreting glands, and insect carnivory. See here for an idea of their place on the tree of life (click on the arrow to the left to back out and get a bigger picture).

In case you’re wondering, the title of this post is both a reference to the infamous “Uma, Oprah” David Letterman debacle at the 1995 Oscars and to the bird Upupa epops, the hoopoe (pronounced hupu), which happens to have the favorite scientific name of my friend and birdsong enthusiast Nathan Pieplow, who blogs over at earbirding.com.

The one that blew me away was the parasite that has evidently converted itself (or rather, has been converted by evolution) from a snail into a worm-shaped set of gonads, much like adult tapeworms (or guinea worms!). The chief way scientists know it is a gastropod is its larvae — which still appear as “tiny, delicate snails.” Evolution: Totally Frickin’ Crazy/Awesome.

Still, just to prove that not all parasites are insects, worms, worm wannabes, or politicians, here is a plant parasite that I used to stumble upon all the time in the murky gloom while mucking around upstate New York forests hunting mushrooms and other oddities: Monotropa uniflora, also called Indian Pipe.

Monotropa uniflora (once-turned single flower, I think), also called Indian Pipe, Ghost Flower or (most luridly) Corpse Flower.

You see, parasitism can happen to anyone — even a nice flowering plant like Monotropa. Its flowers are the bulbs at the end of the curled-over stems, above. It is usually ghostly white or sometimes pink (though I’ve never personally seen a pink one) because it has no more need of chlorophyll, the chemical that allows most plants to convert sunlight into food. It has found a way to parasitize the fungi collectively called mycorrhizae (miko-rye’-zee) that are cooperative with nearly all trees (and, in fact, nearly all plants!).

Since the mycorrhizae get most of their food from the tree they are helping support, this little flower is in effect parasitizing the trees it grows under. Its proximal victims tend to be mychorrhizal fungi in the family Russulaceae (Roo’-syu-lay-see-ay or Russ’-you-lay-see-ay), which contains the prolific genera Lactarius and Russula. If you’ve ever been in the woods odds are you’ve seen the mushroom fruits of these fungi. Russula sp. tend to make very common but mostly inedible chalky white mushrooms with red caps and white spores that frustrate North American ‘shroomers looking for better, more edible fare. In Russia, they pickle and eat some. No accounting for taste (or cast-iron stomachs), I suppose.

Monotropa itself is in the blueberry or heath family, also called Ericaceae (Eric-ay’-see-ay, which you can see placed among its relatives here). This family contains many familiar berries, including blueberries, cranberries, lingonberries, and huckleberries (alert Val Kilmer). Members of this family usually prefer the acidic soils of peat and bogs often have  “urn-shaped” flowers in which the petals are all fused (botanists would say the  corolla, or whorl of petals, is united), which you can see in these blueberry flowers.

Vaccinum (blueberry) flowers. Photo by Thomas Kriese. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License. Click image for link.

Though the petals of Monotropa aren’t united, they are clearly urn shaped, as you can see more clearly in this photo of the pink variant.

Note the bright orange pollen on the stamens around the dark-colored pistil, the tube that leads to the ovaries below. Photo by Magellan nh, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Click image for link.

Since I moved out west I have not seen M. uniflora, though it allegedly does occur here. On the other hand, I see two other ghostly-pink parasitic plants all the time — pinedrops, also in the heath family, and spotted coralroot, an orchid (which also parasitizes mushrooms in the Russula family).

I seem to have written my way into an unplanned series on parasites. Let’s see if I can write my way out of it next time. Hmmm. I’m sensing slime molds in our future . . .

POTD discovered via The Loom.

An Antony van Leeuwenhoek original: Portrait of the Ash Tree as a Young Cross Section.

When it has a Water Flea Circus, a Rotifer Room, and a Radiolaria Lounge you know this blogger is going to love it, and the Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms is home to all these things. The website, proudly presented by the Institute for the Promotion of the Less Than One Millimetre, is the labor of love of Dutch artist Wim van Egmond.

If you just want the highlights, here’s a nice slide show by Wired Magazine.

Following in the steps (or perhaps slides) of his famous countryman and father of microbiology Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Wim has not only produced a great collection of microscopic photos, he’s got a great collection of microscopic photos in 3D, a technology sadly not available to the great microscopist. And as we know from our Avatar experience, everything’s better in 3D . . . .

You’ll need a cheap pair of red-blue glasses in order to experience the 3D. I highly recommend investing or procuring such, since there’s a lot of great 3D space images also getting tossed around the internet lately.

Antony (Antonie) van Leeuwenhoek (Lee-oo-ven-hoke Lay’-oon-hook — I think. Please correct me if I’m wrong, Jasper) is a guy you should know about if you read this blog. He was a Dutch cloth merchant who took up microscopy in the mid-1600s; met Peter the Great and may have known Johannes Vermeer (my favorite painter); and may have been the first human ever to see and draw microorganisms, which he called (delightfully) “animalcules”. He lived to be 90 — no small feat in the 17th century, and a reminder of how rugged humans can be even in the absence of antibiotics, toothpaste, text messages, etc., etc. He mastered a technique for making a small and optically excellent microscope that is essentially a melted bead of glass. It is so simple you can teach schoolchildren to make them in a few minutes, as protistologist Patrick Keeling has figured out how to do. Yet van Leeuwenhoek wanted to maintain his microbial monopoly so he could get the glory for his accomplishment (understandable but rather stifling to science, it must be said). So he seems to have let on like he spent hours in the kitchen grinding lenses to get his beautiful pictures. Hours. [Wipes dewy brow while letting out long-suffering sigh]

Above you see one of Van Leeuwenhoek’s actual drawings. It’s remarkably accurate (he certainly spent hours on that) and shows the cross section of a one-year old ash tree. The big holes are the vessel elements and the small holes are tracheids, the two chief cell types of wood (which is mostly xylem (zy’-lem)) in flowering plants. These cells move water and minerals when they are new, and once defunct, provide structural support. Thus, when you hold a piece of wood, you’re the holding the lignin and cellulose skeletons of tracheids and vessels.

You can see that early in the year, the tree made lots of big vessels for pumping water into swelling leaves, while later in the year the flow slowed. This annual variation in vessel/tracheid size is responsible for the growth rings you see in angiosperm (flowering) trees. Those big vessels are a flowering plant innovation that conifers lack, and may be partly responsible for their evolutionary success. It should also be said that vessel elements and tracheids are among the most beautiful (and abundant) tissue-class cells on the planet, thanks to their lignin-thickened decorations. See some more here and here and I believe in Fig. 1(?) in van Leeuwenhoek’s drawing above. Way cool!

Must get on top of getting a microscope. Must. Must.