Bunchberry - World's fastest plant explodes with pollen
Cornus canadensis (bunchberry or Canadian dogwood) grow in dense carpets in the tiaga or boreal forests of the northern hemisphere. Flowers bloom in late spring and produce small, edible, red berries during the summer. Credit: J. Edwards.Like a medieval catapult, the bunchberry dogwood shoots pollen grains into the air faster than the Venus flytrap can snap its jaws shut, giving this launcher the speed record for plants.
"Most people think of plants as stationary and sedentary," said Joan Edwards of Williams College. "We were even surprised how fast this flower opens."
Using high-speed video observations, Edwards and her colleagues timed the tiny explosions of
Cornus Canadensis, a species of dogwood that covers the ground of spruce-fir forests from Virginia to Canada. The flower opens its petals and fires its pollen in less than 0.5 milliseconds.
This discharge is quicker than other speedy organisms: the Venus flytrap closes in 100 milliseconds; the froghopper (an insect) leaps in 0.5 to 1.0 milliseconds; the mantis shrimp (a tiny crustacean) kicks in 2.7 milliseconds.
Source: www.livescience.com
This shows a flower first closed and then open. The bar is 0.04 inches (1mm). Credit: M. Laskowski.
Bunchberry flower opening, recorded on video at 10,000 frames per second. Time elapsed is indicated. First frame shows a closed flower with four petals fused at the tip, restraining the stamens. Scale bar is 1mm. Credit: D. Whitaker, M. Laskowski, A. Acosta, J. Edwards.
Venus Flytrap's Speed Secret Revealed
Closed cilia around the prey
The Venus Flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is a carnivorous plant that catches and digests animal prey—mostly insects and arachnids. Its trapping structure is formed by the terminal portion of each of the plant's leaves and is triggered by tiny hairs on their inner surfaces. When an insect or spider crawling along the leaves contacts a hair, the trap closes if a different hair is contacted within twenty seconds of the first strike. The requirement of redundant triggering in this mechanism serves as a safeguard against a waste of energy in trapping objects with no nutritional value.
The carnivorous Venus flytrap plant can snap its clamshell leaves around an insect in less than a second. But how?
Unlike animals, plants have no muscles or brains. And plants are not known for their ability to move quickly, as a team of scientists and engineers point out in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal
Nature.
The secret has been revealed: The flytrap's leaves snap from convex to concave the same way that a contact lens can flip inside out, the scientists say.
The team cut up leaves to study their natural curls, and also painted fluorescent dots on intact leaves to track their insect-devouring action with high-speed cameras.
Like most lenses, Venus flytrap leaves are doubly curved, that is, curved in two directions, which allows the leaves to store elastic energy.
With a contact lens, the two directions are perpendicular to one another. With a Venus flytrap leaf, they are not. That property creates an especially rapid elasticity that causes the leaf to snap even more quickly from convex to concave.
Source: www.livescience.com, wikipedia.org
Bamboo - The Fastest Growing Woody Plants in the World
Bamboo is a group of perennial evergreens in the true grass family
Poaceae, subfamily Bambusoideae, tribe
Bambuseae.
Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family.
In bamboo, as with other grasses, the internodal regions of the plant stem are hollow and the vascular bundles in the cross section are scattered throughout the stem instead of in a cylindrical arrangement. The dicotyledonous woody xylem is also absent. The absence of secondary growth wood causes the stems of monocots, even of palms and large bamboos, to be columnar rather than tapering.
Bamboos are also the fastest growing woody plants in the world. They are capable of growing up to 60 centimetres (24 in.) or more per day due to a unique rhizome-dependent system. However, this astounding growth rate is highly dependent on local soil and climatic conditions.
Bamboos are of notable economic and cultural significance in East Asia and South East Asia where the stems are used extensively in everyday life as building materials and as a highly versatile raw product, and the shoots as a food source.
Source: wikipedia.org
Only veteran operators are allowed to handle the L-2350, and Ruben Rosalez looks the part. Rosalez, who started out working in underground mines and whose burly build, graying ponytail and weathered work clothes would look perfect atop a Harley, jokingly says his greatest qualification for operating the L-2350 is his "depth perception." But seeing him drive the monster using two joysticks--the left one controls the machine's movements, the right controls the bucket--is to see professional expertise become a mechanical ballet. My perch, a small jumpseat next to his chair, gives me a view of the 13-ft-tall, chain-wrapped tires from high above. "The chains aren't for traction," Rosalez says. "The tires just last longer this way." The whole machine is covered with the mine's dust--washing the L-2350 would itself probably yield a couple of pounds of copper. But we're here today to get that L-2350 a little dirtier. "The name of the game is to fill those trucks," Rosalez explains as he settles in and points to the line of dump trucks.
