Thursday, May 10, 2018

Plants napping through climate change (video)

Marlene Cimons (popsci); Amber Larson, Crystal Quintero, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
(DocumFeed) What Plants Talk About (full documentary) When we think about plants, we rarely associate a term like "behavior" with them, but experimental plant ecologist JC Cahill wants to change that. The University of Alberta professor maintains that plants do behave and lead anything but sedentary and solitary lives. What Plants Talk About teaches us all that plants are smarter and much more interactive than we ever thought!
Buttercups are dormancy-prone plants.
A type of flower called buttercups are dormancy-prone plants (Pixabay)
.
These plants are napping their way through climate change
Asian Xochiquetzal? Chinese Goddess Mazu
(May 7, 2018) Some species are hitting snooze on flowering season to cope with the stresses of a warming planet.
 
Some plant species have found a novel way to cope with environmental dangers like a prolonged climate change-induced drought: They sleep through it.
 
An international research team has discovered at least 114 species capable of living dormant under the soil for up to two decades.

Warming is not natural. It's being done on purpose.
Dubbed “Rip Van Winkle plants” by scientists, they are still alive  -- they just don’t poke their heads out every spring. This extended snoozing underground enables them to survive tough times in a wide variety of ecosystems.
 
The adaptation has evolved over many decades and may well become more common as plants change in response to climate change, according to the researchers.

“The condition has evolved many, many times, and I see no reason to believe that it cannot evolve quickly in other species,” said Richard Shefferson, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Tokyo and lead author of the recent study, published in the journal Ecology Letters.

“I don’t think it can be ‘learned,’ but perhaps if environmental conditions were right, then many species that we do not think go dormant might actually do so.” More
Eric Schneiderman
NY attorney general resigns after 4 women accuse him of sex abuse: Eric Schneiderman went before the news cameras to announce a lawsuit accusing movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and his former studio of abusing and intimidating a multitude of women. Now he's unmasked as an abuser.

No comments: