See, if you tilt the camera, the rocks slide downhill. Wait. . . let me check my notes . . . A photograph of the fascinating Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, USA. Creative Commons djfrantic. Click for link.

It turns out there’s a perfectly cromulent explanation for this effect; if you don’t know it and want to spoil the magic, see here.

Well, it turns out that this organism,

Sooooooo cute. I'm waiting for the plush version from Etsy. Grimmia trichophylla. Creative Commons johndal.

or one of its close relatives, I should say, can apparently do the same, or something like it. Don’t believe me? There were three photographs and a fascinating account of the phenomenon over at Botany Photo of the Day last week — the most important bits are paragraphs two and three. Don’t miss it! Once you’ve read it, come back here for a little commentary . . .

OK, finished?

Now, my friends, you can see why geologists hate “vegetation”. For in addition to your garden-variety and annoyingly rock-obscuring trees, shrubs, flower, and soils, they must also contend with the biofilm of lichens — little fungus-alga co-ops — and naked algae that encase every rock in sight after a few decades. That means that nearly every rock face you look at is not its true color; it’s the color of the encrusting life. The day the light bulb blinked on and I thought, “That cliff isn’t gray-green. The rock is pink and the stuff living on it is gray,” was one of revelation for me.

This further explains why geologists flock to newly blasted road cuts like flies to honey, and further why they carry around rock hammers* for splitting rocks to see what they truly look like. It also explains why I get nervous around them when they get that glimmer in their eyes suggesting that if they could napalm the countryside in their research area, they would.

When I reach the summit of mountains in Colorado, I’m astounded by the variety of lichens, moss, and algae I find there. Mountaintops are lichen biodiversity hot spots, splashed with green, yellow, black, gray, and orange.

A fiesta of lichens (can I coin that term for a lichen herd?) at Rocky Mountain National Park. Creative Commons shrocket.

Thrillingly orange lichens are particularly common up there, since they thrive in places birds poop (and thus fertilize), and birds seem to like perching on rocks near the summits of mountains where they, like us, have a clear view of the countryside. And yet, almost no one looks down or looks carefully, and with enough foot traffic, the encrusting life dies and peels off.

Apparently, mosses can also induce lichen holocausts as they slide down rock faces. How they do this, I know not, although the lack of light may play a role. But notice there aren’t simply dead lichens in their wake; the rock is scrubbed clean. Which leads to another interesting hypothesis: the moss excretes acids or some other chemicals that allow them to digest the biofilm on the rock surface and absorb the resulting nutrients. Would that make these mosses . . . herbivores?

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*Also because physical and chemical processes called “weathering” alter the surfaces of rocks. Also, by coincidence, they note that in the first two photos of the galloping moss, they are galloping upon the fossils of 1.9 billion year old cyanobacterial mats — thin films of blue-green bacteria that slowly build up characteristic striated rocks called stromatolites. In ancient times, these were prolific and their fossils are common, but today, stromatolites, crowded out by us pesky multicellular organisms, are found in only a few places on Earth, most prominently in the Hamelin Pool in western Australia’s Shark Bay. Interesting biological coincidence!

Creative Commons Cole Shatto. Click for link.

In the murky redwood forests of California and Oregon grows the elusive albino redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). You may remember redwoods from their fame as the tallest trees on Earth. The albino variety grow as sprouts from the base of mature redwoods, a preferred form of reproduction in mature redwood forests where it is too dark for seeds to germinate. When the tree keels over, normal sprouts will be ready to take its place. Unless the sprouts are white — and thus totally incapable of feeding themselves. I’ve seen many a parasitic, achlorophyllous plant in my day, but they are all small and feed off the roots of others. Most trees are free living, and so any albinos they produce — which apparently does happen — won’t make it long (mycorrhizal fungi can’t save them because they need the food from photosynthesis too). But when your mom is 300 feet high, she’s probably making enough food to support a 5-60 foot freeloader.

Here’s a nice video showing from a public television station telling you more about these beauties. The guy at the beginning and end is a little over the top for me, but I love the park docent in the middle.

Mr. Kuty one mistake: he meant to say not that redwoods have six chromosomes instead of two, but that redwoods have six copies of their chromosomes instead of two copies (one from mom, one from dad), like us. That is, they’re hexaploid. Plants are known for their polyploidy; somewhere between 30 and 80% of them are, and they seem able to tolerate a fusion of gametes where meiosis was incomplete in one or both, or to hybridize with related plants in ways that would would devastate development or render offspring sterile in most vertebrates. Suddenly doubling the number of chromosomes also reproductively isolates plants, and seems to be a major source of new species. This can even happen between species. In the plant world, a quadriploid (4x) wheat plus a diploid (2x) rye = hexaploid (6x) triticale. Duplicating sets of chromosomes can have interesting effects. Hexaploid wheat make a much meatier head of grain than diploid wheat.

Here are some other examples:

* Triploid crops: apple, banana, citrus, ginger, watermelon
* Tetraploid crops: apple, durum or macaroni wheat, cotton, potato, cabbage, leek, tobacco, peanut, kinnow, Pelargonium
* Hexaploid crops: chrysanthemum, bread wheat, triticale, oat, kiwifruit
* Octaploid crops: strawberry, dahlia, pansies, sugar cane

Some crops are found in a variety of ploidies: tulips and lilies are commonly found as both diploid and as triploid; daylilies (Hemerocallis cultivars) are available as either diploid or tetraploid; apples and kinnows can be diploid, triploid, or tetraploid.

Scientists aren’t sure about the origin’s of Coast Redwood’s six sets of chromosomes — whether they came from the same species or from a hybridization of two, but there’s evidence it might be from two (AAAABB). Polyploidy is somewhat unusual for conifers. Also unusually for conifers (and for any life in my understanding), its mitochondria are inherited from sperm, not eggs. As you may know, mitochondria are subcellular organelles that produce energy for the cell. They take up space. Eggs are big, and they usually contribute all the mitochondria to a new zygote, which is why in humans, mitochondrial diseases always come from your mother. Yet in redwoods, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Which begs the question: what do redwood sperm (like all gymnosperms and flowering plants, found inside the pollen grain) look like?

Here’s another interesting little coincidence: in addition to being hexaploid (6x), Sequoia sempervirens has exactly 66(!) chromosome, implying the original species had 22. Chromosome number isn’t really meaningful (since chromosomes can have arbitrary lengths), but just for the record, we have 23. : )

Here’s what I still don’t understand: if these things are simply clones that sprout from the base (botanists call them “suckers”), why are they not genetically identical to the parent? Hmmm. . . . In the video and in this story on NPR, they seem to imply that the plant’s hexaploidy is involved . . . but no one gives a mechanism. Without sex, whence the novelty? (if I had a dime for every person who’s asked that question . . . )

Quote of the day: “It’s just that this offspring is the one that sits on the couch rather than going out and getting a job.”
Course, one might still argue that is parasitism. : )

Redwoods, by the way, are in the family Cupressaceae. Their closest relatives are the dawn redwoods (an amazing story of a fossil species presumed long dead discovered alive in a temple in China during World War II) and giant sequoias, the largest trees on Earth. Other relatives include junipers (of gin flavoring fame), cypresses, arborvitae, and the famous southern swamp tree bald cypress.

Merry Christmas, everyone*! For more lovely photos of the albino redwood, click here and enjoy. : )

*In a totally non-sectarian, universal holiday cheer sort of way. Idea for this post brought to my attention by Kati Dimoff. Thanks, Kati!

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 pines, the male gametophytes are the pollen, which come from their own separate male cones. Thus each pollen grain is actually an entire plant, and each little haploid plant is only two cells big: a tube cell, which will make the germ tube that seeks out the female gametophyte in the pine cone, and the generative cell, which will make the sperm. If you have pine pollen allergies here is what one of these little yellow misery-making plants looks like up close. Yes, that’s right: like Mickey Mouse. The “ears” are technically called the wings, and they help the wind-blown pollen grains sail about to find a female cone — or faux finish your car.

You can find the pines on the Tree of Life here.

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.

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.

Well, the same thing happens in the plant world, though thankfully, since plants can’t speak, or truthfully, travel, they don’t tend to get in fist-fights over the gravy with their unlikelier kin. The other day I discovered this plant, the tropical  tree heliotrope — also called octopus bush for fairly obvious reasons — over at Botany Photo of the Day:

Is it just me or does that plant look like it could use a pair of googly eyes above its flower tentacles? http://www.flickr.com/photos/wlcutler/ / CC BY 2.0

Imagine my surprise when I discovered it’s in the same family — the Boraginaceae (bor-aj-i-nase’-ee-ay) — as the sweet little alpine forget-me-nots I know and love!

These things smell divine, too. You'd never guess such a little flower could put out such a big, beautiful smell. http://www.flickr.com/photos/99067413@N00/ / CC BY-NC 2.0 Non-commercial use only.

Such is the power of evolution. Every forget-me-not family member I’d previously encountered had been, well, I believe the PC term is “diminuitive” (being such myself). And then I find this monster. But genes don’t lie.

If you look very carefully at the tree heliotrope flowers, you will see the resemblance to forget-me-not flowers, and the scorpioid cymes (flower spikes (science-nerd term: inflorescences) with a coiled end like a scorpion’s tail) forming the octopus tentacles seem pretty characteristic of the family too (though the presence of 4 little nutlets as fruit is the most diagnostic characteristic of the family). Here’s what they look like in a rather more sedate member of the family, another species of forget-me-not:

Note the scorpion-tail cyme -- it's out of focus but it coils like a backward six that fell over with the ascender pointing left. A second coiled cyme faces us head-on on the left.http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawnzy/ / CC BY 2.0

Naturalists (and you and I) can often recognize new members of families like this instinctually using something the Germans call “bauplan“, or body plan in English. When you start learning bauplans, you start getting a creepy, deep-in-your-bones feeling you’ve *seen* some plant or organism before, you just know it, especially if you haven’t. It happens with all kinds of creatures, and usually starts to become noticeable after you’ve spent enough time connecting names with flowers/mushrooms/tentacles and communing with them in the gardens/woods/deep-sea submersible.

For example, many times when I’m out in the woods I’ll pick up an unfamiliar mushroom and declare — rather mystically for a person of a scientific bent — it’s got that “Cortinarius” feeling. It’s the underlying structural similarities — the angle of a curling cap, the texture of a petal (the texture of forget-me-not petals is quite distinctive: almost styrofoamy), or in this case, the shape of the flowers and flower-stalks — between something new and something old that are tipping your brain off and giving you faux deja-vu. It’s probably the same feeling you’d get if you encountered one of the many lesser-known Baldwin brothers for the first time.

Here is a tree that puts the Forget-Me-Not Family (Boraginaceae) in context — it’s in the asterid mega-clade (would not have guessed a kinship with asters!) and is most closely related to the mint (Lamiaceae), potato/tomato (Solanaceae) and gentian families (Gentianaceae). Back out via the little arrow to the left to put it in larger context.

So this week as you’re sitting across from your cousin Lloyd, just be grateful that the other 364 days of the year you do not have to listen to the talking points of either Glenn Beck or Michael Moore, and you can bloom happily in your own little garden.

p.s. — Haven’t forgotten about finishing up the story of the paleodicots! But they will have to wait until next weekend.