- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
From Valley Forge to the Lab: Parallels between Washington's Maneuvers and Drug Development4 weeks ago in The Curious Wavefunction
-
Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.4 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Course Corrections5 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Cat's Claw Vine - Greenhouse juggernaut
More years ago than any of us want to admit, the Phactor used to travel to LSU to do some collaborative research with a colleague during our spring breaks. The logic was simple, Louisiana has better weather that time of year, my field work hadn't started yet, and then there's the seafood so the 1st two really didn't count. In addition to bringing back crayfish for friends in the seafood reciprocity pact, one year a bit of cat's claw vine (Macfadyena unguis-cati) was brought back and placed in our university glasshouse because it's not hardy up here. It promptly climbed a nearby tree, Dillenia indica, grasped onto the central support framework of the greenhouse, and has lived their ever since surviving several attempts to eradicate it. Now each spring its shoots droop down and cheerfully flower and although one would think it requiring of a pollinator, it selfs and produces numerous fruit whose winged seeds drop into everything around. Cat's claw vine is so named because the terminal leaflet of the trifoliate leaf is a 3-clawed grappling hook that snags any irregularity and is set in place by the weight of the vine. Later adventitious roots take over the task of holding the vine in place. The flowers are large and quite handsome, clearly a member of the Bignon family (both the fruit, which is flatter, and seeds are similar to Catalpa). This vine will probably exist living in the inside peak of the greenhouse, a most hostile location with both winter and summer extremes, until the entire structure is taken down at some future date, probably by just hooking a truck onto the vine and pulling, and maybe someone will wonder who in their right mind put that vine there in the first place. Dunno!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment