Always enjoy getting the newest issue of the American Journal of Botany and they have piled up a bit over the years, some 50 years worth, TPP's own 43 years worth plus a few extra years from somewhere. But what to do with them? Hard to believe that nobody wants journals like this any more. At any rate the cover illustration for the October 2015 issue is just great. Waterlilies! The whole order. But probably some you've not seen before unless you've hung out with the people who study them. At any rate here's the caption:
Flowers of Nymphaeales (water lilies). Water lilies are considerably diverse in their ecological and morphological traits, including pollen characters, relative to other early-divergent angiosperm lineages and, therefore, are an excellent system for investigating the evolution of reproductive traits in early-diverging angiosperms. In this issue, Taylor et al. (see “Pollen structure and development in Nymphaeales: Insights into character evolution in an ancient angiosperm lineage” on pp. 1685–1702) provide new morphological and ultrastructural data for pollen of Nymphaeales and synthesize the available data on mature pollen and pollen ontogeny in water lilies. This comprehensive, comparative evaluation provides insight into the evolution of pollen characters in Nymphaeales. (Image credit: Mackenzie Taylor.)
Take it from TPP, the pollen while interesting isn't as pretty as the flowers. And drat, what were they thinking? What was the editor thinking! Of course you didn't find out what you wanted to know, what everyone wants to know. You want to know what the flowers are. Let's see how many of the genera of Nymphaeales, in three families, can be named?
Trithuria, Brasenia, Cabomba, Nuphar, Nymphaea,Victoria, Euryale. Hmm? That's only 7 and there are 9 images. Your challenge is to put the genera in their order of appearance and explain the discrepancy, including, if possible, a faulty memory. TPP is just happy to have remembered this much.
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