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Don't tell me they found Tyrannosaurus rex meat again!2 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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Course Corrections4 months ago in Angry by Choice
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
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Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
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A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
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Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
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Bryophyte Herbarium Survey6 years ago in Moss Plants and More
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Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
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WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
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Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
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The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
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Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
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Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
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Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
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in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Orchid pollination and fungus mimicry
Orchids are a fantastically diverse family of flowering plants that employ many fascinating and equally diverse pollination biologies. Animals used as pollen vectors don't pollinate flowers because they like them or anything like that; they visit flowers because they get a reward or they have been fooled, tricked. Some orchid flowers mimic female insects and get males to visit the flower and transfer pollen while attempting to mate with the flower (pseudocopulation). My old friend Peter Bernhardt (He shares an undergrad alma mater with the Phactor.) is among a group of botanists who very recently described a very unique mimicry involving a ladyslipper orchid (Cypripedium) native to China. The leaf spots look like a fungal infection and the flower produces fungusy odors thus attracting a fungus-feeding fly to transfer pollen, a whole new mimicry for a whole new group of pollinators . This is a great looking little orchid (scale bar = 2 cm). Is that cool or what!
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