See on Scoop.it – AnnBot “The 2012 edition of the FAO Statistical Yearbook presents a visual synthesis of the major trends and factors shaping the global food and agricultural landscape and their interplay with broader environmental, social and economic dimensions.   In doing so, it strives to serve as a unique reference point on the [...]

Ant-plant mutualisms play key roles in the functioning of tropical ecosystems, and are often important components of trophic webs but the net benefits to each partner are rarely quantified: A Carnivorous Plant Fed by Its Ant Symbiont: A Unique Multi-Faceted Nutritional Mutualism. (2012) PLoS ONE 7(5): e36179. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036179 Scarcity of essential nutrients has led plants [...]

First came Flora Novae Angliae, the definitive manual for the identification of native and naturalized vascular plants of New England. Now comes the website with thousands of full-color images and illustrations for teaching and learning botany. Dr Elizabeth Farnsworth has told us about the New England Wild Flower Society’s announcement of the first stage of Go [...]

Genetically-modifed crops have never found the acceptability in Europe that they have in other parts of the World, notably the USA. There lots of reasons for this, ranging from ill-infomed two-headed monster theories to much more considered worries about environmental impact. A recent post on Wired picks up on a January paper from BioScience looking [...]

Unlike ‘Audrey 2’ – the plant which ate members of the cast from ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’ (botanically suspect but with some good songs) – the maize seed grows on the cob by extracting goodies from the mother plant. YouTube has a great video of a production of Little Shop of Horrors: Feed me Seymour [...]