I’m very pleased that posting of some some readers’ photographs has inspired others to send me their nature photos. If you’ve got good ones, send them along, but I reserve the right to choose which ones to publish. This one clearly made the cut. Reader John Chardine, a professional bird photographer, sent me a picture […]
When I first saw these pictures I was startled, for the resemblance of this Australian orchid (Caleana major) to a flying duck is amazing. In fact its common names are the “flying duck orchid” and the “big duck orchid”. Kuriositas has the botanical details: The duck orchid is a perennial but blooms in late spring […]
Unless small monkeys try to copulate with orchids, this isn’t an evolved mimicry, but the resemblance is remarkable. Here is Dracula simia from the cloud forests of Ecuador, often called the “monkey orchid” for obvious reasons. But, as I note below, another orchid species is the one that’s most commonly given that name. Another photo, […]
I won’t go on about this cool new paper at length, for it’s already been described by Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science as well as in a piece at The New York Times. Still, it behooves us to know about it. The upshot is that a group of Russian scientists recovered from the […]
by Greg Mayer There are some interesting comments on live oaks, their distribution, and resistance to hurricanes in the discussion (see #5) of my post on Long Beach, MS and its cuisine. One thing I’ve noticed is the striking zonation of the vegetation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Just a few miles inland, the live […]
This is a beautiful 4.5-minute film on pollination from a TED talk. Someone appears at the end who may have made the film, but I don’t recognize him. If you do, weigh in. But watch the film and enjoy the bounties of natural selection.
In a comment on last week’s post on orchids, reader André Schuiteman, whose team discovered the first night-blooming orchid described in that post, calls our attention to a remarkable film showing a different orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale (“Darwin’s orchid), being pollinated by the long-tongued moth, presumably Xanthopan morgani. It’s a rare sight indeed since pollination occurs only at night. […]
Reader André Schuiteman, who works at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, is part of a team that has discovered and described the world’s first night-blooming orchid. The species, Bulbophyllum nocturnum from New Guinea, is described (along with other species) in a new paper in The Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society (reference below). André wrote me: I think […]
The Adenium in my office has finally bloomed, after three years (I’m not sure of the species, but I think it’s A. obesum): And one of my orchids, the Paphiopedilum spicerianum, has four flowers at once. I love this one because the flowers look like the faces of little gnomes (click to enlarge). Given its shape, I suspect […]
Cycads are a group of plants that resemble tree of ferns or palm trees. But they’re not closely related to either: rather they constitute an ancient group of gymnosperms (naked-seeded plants) that originated around 300 million years ago. They reached their peak of abundance during the Jurassic, the age of the dinosurs, when they were abundant throughout the […]
