Waterlilies cover illustration American Journal of Botany

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.

Brand spanking new botanical research articles

TPP is catching up, or trying to, on lots of things. Here's a link to some research summaries for the latest issue of the American Journal of Botany. The very first article is pretty interesting because fruits almost universally turn from green to a "fruity" color to signify ripeness advertising to seed disperses that a reward is available (often, but not always). But this particular tropical plant has reddish immature fruits and green mature fruits, a situation rather like the leaves of some tropical plants that flush red and then turn green, however a protective function for the red pigmentation could not be supported! So there you go! You can be pretty sure that one of the authors knew about fruit color changes and dispersal, and then noticed that this plant was not playing according to the "rules" so curiosity made them ask why and they devised a research project to test the various ideas involved. Thousands of such questions and studies exist if you just learn how to observe.  
Other studies involved microlichens, fern gametophytes (haploid ferns), genetics of cellulose systhesis, and the origin of C4 photosynthesis. Pretty diverse stuff, but that is the nature of botany and this journal in particular. 

Research tidbits - AJB March 2015

The American Journal of Botany is a publication of the Botanical Society of America. Highlights of several interesting articles is a new feature of each month's volume; this is vol. 102 (3).  Mostly these are brief, non-technical descriptions of a study and they include a nice image. They give you some idea of the types of research, the diversity of scientific interests, and the kinds of questions that interest botanists these days.  You can also access the cover illustration and its legend from this link. Very much bragging rights to get the front cover.  Let TPP know if this is a feature you like or if there are any access problems.