Friday Fabulous Flower - Mother of thousands

Popped in to the University glasshouse to see what was in flower, and this wonderful succulent was most accommodating.  In general TPP loves this plant because you can use it to illustrate so many things.  Like many members of the stonecrop family (Crassulaceae), this plant is primarily grown for its succulent ornamental leaves.  It's tough and deals with winter time household temps and humidity (and lack thereof) quite well.  However the flowers are quite nice and are good for illustrating flowers with parts in multiples of 4s, including 4 pistils.  And ever so delightfully it produces plantlets on its leaf margins that are easily removed and grown.  They also fall off and quickly populate an area, thus the mother of thousands common name, a great example of asexual reproduction.  The genus is Kalanchoe (kal-an-Koh-ee).

Attack of the clones!

You get a lot of funny, some funny ha-ha, some funny sad, surveys when you work at a university because lots of younglings are engaged in what passes for research in the non-sciences.  So the Phactor gets a call; it's a survey question.  Would you eat a cloned organism?  Certainly.  So, you think cloned food is OK.  Yes, cloned food is OK.  In fact you probably do not go a day of your life without eating cloned food.  No. Yes.  What?  Let's just start with potatoes and sugar.  And what makes you think cloning is bad?  And what taking a survey rule allows you to call faculty on the phone?  It's an informal survey.  Ah, yes, so actually what you are doing is not sanctioned by the university or any faculty adviser, correct?  Thanks for your time.  Click.  At least they understand that being polite is a good policy when breaking all the other rules.  It seems that some math students got all fractionated about the idea of cloned food demonstrating their serious need of some biology courses.  They didn't know how common cloning is among plants, and to teach them about the efficiency of asexual reproduction they are sentenced to weeding my strawberry bed, as soon as they learn about species, that is.