Sadly, we don’t have time machines that would permit us to go back and see ancient evolution in action. So we have to make do with such devices and stratagems as inference, surmise, speculation, good honest-to-goodness old-fashioned guesswork, and investigating modern-day equivalents that might mimic the original phenomenon. Take for instance colonisation of the land [...]

These are links from our Scoop It page between April 26th and May 13th: Fishing Lake Hawassa, Ethiopia: Rift Valley lakes and catching Tilapia and Catfish Fishing boats on the side of Lake Hawassa, Awassa in the Rift Valley of Ethiopia. Opening with a view of lake from a park next to the shoreline where [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Predicting ecosystems responses under changing environment conditions is one of the major challenges in ecology. It is rendered more complex by the non-linear dynamics which characterise ecosystems and the partially stochastic nature of key drivers. Environmental drivers (including climate, nutrients, fire, and herbivores) change in time and space, sometimes gradually and smoothly, sometimes less gradually, [...]