Category: Evolution
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What’s the Deal With Asclepias?
Table of Contents: Milkweed 101 There’s something creeping its way through our American landscape, a quiet, unassuming thing. Maybe you have seen them along the sides of roadways, in open fields, or in someone’s front garden. It seems more and more to be a force that cannot be stopped. Has milkweed hypnotized the nation, or…
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Plants Are a Liar Sometimes-
Dedicated to my friend and coworker who asks good questions By Lily Rice- 1/20/2023 Recently, my coworker, who shall be named ‘But can I eat it,’ has asked me how evolution works and how new traits evolve in a species. To that I said, “Ah dude, that’s like, an entire biology course of information at…
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Phylogeny of Angiosperms
This poster is a wonderful reference material on the evolution of flowering plants. In it, you can see the major groups, and the plant families that fall within each of them. If you’ve never read a cladogram before- which is the diagram made up of brackets- the horizontal axis is time and reads left to…
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Bogs Have a Favorite Child, and Her Name Is Erica
By Lily Rice – September 12, 2022 If you thought I was done talking about wetlands after my last post, you are unfortunately mistaken. Wetlands are quite possibly the most fascinating ecosystems on the planet (in my opinion). Especially peatlands, where select groups of plants have become highly adapted to the harsh conditions present. This…
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You’ve Got a Fen In Me
Man, I love a good wetland. You might be wondering, what the hell is a fen? We don’t often hear the word “fen.” Most people likely have an image in their heads when they hear someone speak about swamps or bogs, but fens to most are still an enigma. Prior to 2020, I had no…
Watching Plant Sex in the Woods 