Nature and Environment selection. Most of us liked it but didn’t love it.
Things I learned about
- There is tremendous genetic similarity between plants and animals, which is effectively concealed because the genes are misleadingly named for their human effects (“deaf” genes, BRCA “breast cancer”)
- I enjoyed the references to dodder (Cuscuta), a parasitic plant (and a recent friend of mine), and loved the recommended video
- If their leaves are being chewed by beetles, wild lima bean flowers “produce a nectar that attracts beetle-eating arthropods”
- “Mechanical stimulation of a plant cell, like mechanical stimulation of a nerve, initiates a cellular change in ionic conditions that results in an electric signal… [that] can propagate from cell to cell”
- Research indicates that roots are attracted to the sound of water running in underground pipes, not just leaks
- Great John Muir quote used for an epigraph (it’s from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf): “I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!”
- Statoliths, equivalent to otoliths in our ears, let root caps sense gravity and know which way to grow
- Apical dominance
- Auxin – people in our group who had studied botany remembered this
- Glutamate receptors in plants are used for cell-to-cell signaling “in a way that’s very similar to how human neurons communicate with each other”