I'm an incorrigibly geeky transboy with a love for neuropsychopharmacology, cacti (or plants and botany in general), weird music, spiders (and other cute animals), experimental film, might and magic, daggerfall, pokemon, and math (especially when symmetries are involved).
A chart of opuntia phylogeny, from Griffith and Porter, 2009.
I’ve always insisted plants had to have senses. I mean I have no biology training but I know they know how to react to all kinds of things. It’s hard not to notice if you spend any time at all around them. And while researching human sensory experiences I found this detailed article on plant senses. I’m not sure about the thing on hearing at the end (and neither is the author) but the rest looks legit. As in, not at all resembling the “fluffy” stuff that claims all kinds of things I’m dubious about at best. (Like that guy who was convinced he’d measured plant brain waves.)
Especially when it comes to chemistry plants are just amazing in the complexity of the way they react to their environment, and 9 paragraphs could never do it justice. Allelopathy is a really interesting example that the original author didn’t mention: plants using chemical signals to influence plants of different species. it’s not universally accepted but I think the evidence that it exists is pretty strong. Basically for every alkaloid, terpene, or polyphenol in plants that we know the function of, there are a hundred we don’t. But they almost certainly do participate in the way plants react to their environment, which means that these reactions are incredibly complex beyond anything we can explain. And that amazes me.
“I feel like practicing Cree right now! Oh darn, I left kinêhiyâwiwininaw nêhiyawêwin in my dorm. I know, I’ll just go check out ka-pimwêwêhahk’s Counselling Speeches!” *leaves library with three more books*
I am pretty sure I am abusing my library privileges, being that I have 15 books checked…
Oh damn, you’re only supposed to use ILL for class? Well there go my dreams of trying to find copies of all these botanochemistry/pharmacobotany (are those words?) books I’ve been lusting after. I’ll just have to scour UCLA’s library for them when I’m back home, I guess…
Well…I mean…it’s not like they ask if they’re for class…if they’re sufficiently academic I don’t think anyone is really gonna yell at you for it or even be suspicious :P
Hmm… then perhaps I will go abuse ILL!
“I feel like practicing Cree right now! Oh darn, I left kinêhiyâwiwininaw nêhiyawêwin in my dorm. I know, I’ll just go check out ka-pimwêwêhahk’s Counselling Speeches!” *leaves library with three more books*
I am pretty sure I am abusing my library privileges, being that I have 15 books checked…
Oh damn, you’re only supposed to use ILL for class? Well there go my dreams of trying to find copies of all these botanochemistry/pharmacobotany (are those words?) books I’ve been lusting after. I’ll just have to scour UCLA’s library for them when I’m back home, I guess…
plants are amazing and better than people
plants legitimately are the rulers of the earth.
Camponotus fulvopilosus (by planthead667 on Flickr)
normally I’d be more interested in the insect but look! it’s a Welwitschia, one of the only 3 extant genuses of gnetophytes! (Ephedra is one of the others, and is the only reason I know about the clade at all.) gnetophytes are basically ‘transitional forms’ between conifers and flowering plants, making plants like Welwitschia “living fossils” in a sense.
In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World
The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans.
In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods—millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the “Asian” long bean, for example—are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding.
In this exciting, original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves’ food plots—“botanical gardens of the dispossessed”—became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.
Here’s another monstrous Trich. If you want to look at a few other pics about crested trichs & monstrose bridgesii, check this thread on The Shroomery.
I think I’ve heard the same growth pattern in other families (e.g. Euphorbiaceae) called “cristate” or “crested”.
Thanks for the link!
The meager beginnings of my mescaline garden.
Trichocerus tershleckii x 2
Lophophora fricii
Trichocereus bridgesi (monstrous form)
Trichocereus pachanoi
+++My T. pachanoi seeds sprouted today so I’ma have lil cactus babies
Those are some beautiful cacti! Your bridgesii looks much better behaved than mine. Is that because there are two different monstrous forms (as I’ve heard some websites claim), or is mine just reacting to different growing conditions?
Pomegranate (Punica granatum) - Family Lythraceae
from Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé’s Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, 1885
Important question that I have been completely unable to find the answer to: did the alkaloids (pelletierine, isopelletierine, pseudopelletierine, etc) in the pomegranate plant have any role to play in their cultural history? Wink and Roberts claimed so but I’ve been completely unable to find any other references for this claim and it’s really bugging me (partly cause I want it to be true :P).
Rauwolscine … is a stereoisomer of yohimbine
Then why does it get it’s own name? Why not simply l-yohimbine and d-yohimbine?
Corynanthine is another stereoisomer of yohimbine with its own name; maybe the fact that there are at least 3 stereoisomers meant you couldn’t just call them levo and dextro-yohimbine.
That said, people are weird about naming alkaloids. Atropine is just racemic hyoscyamine, and yet it gets its own name. Pretty sure there are other cases of this, but I had to return Wink and Roberts’ book on alkaloids to the library a few days ago so I don’t really have a good source to look them up in.
