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Thursday, February 11, 2010
‘Mr. Bromeliad’ Heads for Singapore
A famous Florida botanical garden is losing its proud research scientists, as the institution trims the budget and juggles multiple goals.
A bromeliad at Selby Gardens, which has the largest collection in the world
Photo: dotpolka
Thanks to Holly Chase for alerting us to the tumult at Selby Botanical Gardens. Selby, in Sarasota, Florida, has been world renowned for its study and collection of epiphytes – principally orchids and bromeliads.
Here grows “the most diverse collection of bromeliads in the world... over 20,000 plants from some 6000 species in 1200 genera from 214 plant families, including 6,000 live orchids. More than 150 expeditions to the tropics and subtropics have contributed to these collections.”
Recently, two of the garden’s orchid experts were dismissed, and now “Mr. Bromeliad” Harry Luther is leaving to take a position in Singapore. “It comes down to cash,” Selby’s CEO Thomas Buchter told the Herald-Tribune. Ah, yes. It comes down to that, but in the case of this 35-year-old institution, it may keep on rolling downhill, at least insofar as Selby’s reputation and community relations go.
Culture & Society • Gardening & Landscape • Science • Permalink
Friday, September 25, 2009
Spotlight on the Small
Attending to lowly phenomena (like how lilies bloom), a Harvard mathematician earns the highest honor—to continue his research.
A mathematician who’s studied, among other “commonplaces,” the workings of the Venus fly trap, is among this year’s MacArthur fellows
Photo: FlushRush
Call him the Seinfeld of applied mathematics. Or how about the Vermeer of Harvard Square? Professor Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, an exceptional scholar of the ordinary, studies why sheets wrinkle, how flags flutter, why honey coils and flowers open. Mahadevan has received one of this year’s “genius grants” from the MacArthur Foundation.
“I try to uncover explanations for everyday events that are easily seen but not well understood, “ Mahadevan says.
In this interview with Robert Siegel of NPR, the mathematician explains that with a half dozen store-bought lilies and time lapse photography, he and his team hunkered down to decipher an everyday wonder. Blooming. What did they learn?
“Each petal grows, but it grows along its edge more than it grows along its center,” Mahadevan explained. “As a consequence, the petals which are originally convex, closed, became concave and open and unfurl. And so, we made a mathematical theory for it.”
Here, two pink peonies do the convex to concave trick.
Each MacArthur fellow receives half a million dollars to spend as he or she pleases. The foundation stresses that its fellowship is “not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.” We’re happy that the grantors saw fit to encourage this world-class scholar of commonplace things.
Friday, September 04, 2009
HFQ#8: Fungi Need Names
Mystery Mushroom #1
Photo: Georgia Silvera Seamans
Actually, it’s humans who need fungi names.
World traveler, local ecologist and urban arborist Georgia Silvera Seamans poses a question for all you mycologists.
Can anyone identify these Malaysian fungi? Georgia writes that the photos were taken May 2009 and the mushrooms found “on Gunung Mat Chincang Mountain, Langkawi, Malaysia.”
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Rat Traps of Mount Victoria
This carnivorous plant from the Philippines tugs the old chain of being in a surprising direction.
A rat lured into the “slipper like mouth” of a pitcher plant
Photo: Stewart McPherson
We’ve known that some plants are rodent pollinated. Now we learn of one that’s rodent satiated.
Nepenthes attenboroughii, a pitcher plant of Palawan Island in the Philippines, has the scale and gastric juices to digest rats. After hearing of such large carnivorous plants from “Christian missionaries,” a team of botanists began the search. They came upon this mouse-trap, with pitchers big enough to hold 1.5 litres, in the region of Mount Victoria two years ago and recently published their findings in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.