Botany 2015 - Over and done

Exhausting. Nothing else describes scientific meetings like these. So many things to do in such a short period of time. Skipped the last lecture and some awards to eat dinner with some friends. One of them got two awards. Oops! AoB lecture by Robert Raguso of Cornell was very interesting; he studies how floral scents interact with insect behaviors. And different parts of flowers can have different scents particularly on the scale of insects. Another interesting talk concerned mycoheterotrophic plants, non-green plants that obtain their food from interactions with fungi that interact with other plants. Another talk dealt with a difficult biogeographic pattern to understand, a South American-Australia disjunction unless you look at continental positions about 50 million years ago. Last meeting ended early this morning, but no way to get home until tomorrow and that requires TPP to get up at 3:30 am to deal with air travel constraints at an international level. Edmonton is sounding a bit like the Hotel California.

Botany 2015 - Tuesday

The fatigue of almost non-stop meetings and talks is beginning to set in. From the street level, the meetings are taking place on three lower levels. There are 130 steps from the top to the bottom, and only the up escalator is working. Everyone is getting a workout. Let's see what has been learned?
A tremendous diversity of herbaceous sphenophyllophytes existed in the Permian; those would be horsetails and their close relatives. Pollen tube growth is not related to flower size in waterlilies, in fact they grow slower in the huge Victoria waterlilies. A lot of creative ways exist for small collections to relate to people and if you want such information you can find it at small collections network.  It's still OK to call yourself a morphologist, which is good because TPP are one. A lot of nasty plants are terribly invasive and rather hard to control. Botanists can take a long time to decide how to spend very small amounts of money. Botanists in general are really nice to students who come to these meetings. Such a small sampling. Oh, and TPP discovered a lovely new sandwich: a toasted brie with red onions and blueberries sandwich. Seriously good stuff.

Botany 2015 -Monday

Botany 2015 is huge for a botanical meeting, around 1800 people attending from a dozen or so different scientific societies; this is about double our usual annual meeting. The meeting is taking place in the colossal Shaw Center which sprawls down from "uptown" toward the river like a tiered greenhouse, which is strangely appropriate and partly what it is, but a lot of up and down stairs. TPP pities a colleague who blew out her Achilles tendon and arrived with a walking boot on!  TPP has learned that Edmonton is sort of a surprising city but you can't get here from anywhere very easily, and everyone has travel horror stories. Yesterday was a lot of meetings, followed by a lecture about how "cool" botany is, and then a big social event. Nice to see so many old friends and colleagues, young and old, and to catch up on everyone. Spent the morning listening to research about invasive plants. Take home advice: do not fertilize tree of heaven. 

Botany 2015 is happening!

Maybe it's a certain environmental cue that triggers an urge to cluster, but around this time of year, somewhere around the continent, botanists gather for an annual event, a meeting, a convention, a social fest, a gab fest, a marathon of science, all rolled into one. This year the event is being held in Edmonton, Alberta, which is pretty far from the upper midwest and explains why it's so hard to get to from here by air and takes too long by ground. At any rate TPP is getting packed for a later flight west. Botany is a far flung field and generally the job situation is such that not very many of us can cluster on a regular basis. Meetings like this are actually pretty important because business gets done face-to-face, you learn new things, you meet new people, you catch up with old friends, and you generally wallow in botany and botanists. TPP will try to send along some of the botanical news from the meeting, but dang they're so jammed packed with activities getting some time to blog isn't easy. At any given point in time the many organizations, the many disciplines and specialities, assure us of having numerous events to attend at any given point in time. Just trying to schedule what you should be doing is difficult enough.