Friday Fabulous Flower - almost

The middle of August is not the best time to visit our glasshouse because it's always hot and humid in there. But some plants like it that way. Our collection of cycads is decent and some are quite old, and since they grow so slowly some do not appear to have changed much over the past 4 decades. Here's a nasty one, Encephalartos ferox, the spines on the leaves are quite vicious; E. horridus is worse as if you could not guess.  Every now and again it produces a few cones, and they are almost like flowers, a helix of fertile leaves, which in this case produce pollen.  A colleague, to whom this image belongs, braved the tropical swelter to get a nice image for teaching. A few years back TPP braved bodily injury to remove and pickle one of these cones in ethanol. Isn't that a marvelous helical packing of fertile leaves?

Today's lab - Cycads

Cycads are one of TPP's favorite groups of organisms.  Cycads are the dinosaurs of the plant kingdom, the oldest living lineage of seed plants with a history stretching back to the late Permian, real living denizens of Jurassic Park.  Most people think cycads are palms and some common names (sago palm) suggest as much, but cycads are really, really different.  Generally cycads are more similar to ferns.  They have fronds that develop from fiddle heads and they have their sporangia on modified leaves.  Among gymnosperms, cycads are the only organisms that are predominately insect pollinated. Our glasshouse has 8 of the 11 genera, so that will keep my students busy for awhile looking for cones, fiddle heads, coralloid roots, and all the rest.  The specimen shown is a species of the southern African Encephalartos bearing seed cones.