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 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.

Botanical meetings - Day 3

What happened to Day 2?  It vanished into the dozens of conversations with friends and colleagues, multiple sessions of scientific talks, research discussions, mixers, and business meetings.  Events started at 8 AM and continued through an overly long business meeting that ended at about 9 PM.  Can you exist on a diet of snacks, beer, and wine?  Well, yes!  In this case the evening schedule was so daunting that the decision was made to have a larger than usual lunch, and because the food court has some pretty nice items, including Indian with freshly baked tandoori naan.  So while fortified with food, as soon as the lights were dimmed for a talk, the urge to doze off had to be fought, with great difficulty in a couple of them.  And then a young colleague seeks you out because you possess knowledge in a particular subject area that almost everyone else has forgotten, and you are surprised how much of it you still remember from over 25 years ago.  And what's even more surprising is how many older colleagues are still attending these meetings, and are still active botanists.  You see it isn't just a job, or a career, or an expertise, it's an advocation and these people just love what they do, and the students begin to figure out that you've been a professional botanist for more than twice as long as they've been alive.  Now it's Day 3 and a bit of fatigue is setting in. This afternoon the Phactor delivers a research paper on an invasive legume and the impact of several environmental factors have on its growth.  Not much good news here; the invasive legume will "win", prairie diversity will lose.  And at this very moment, other than knowing that nothing critical is happening, the Phactor has lost his custom-made schedule and has no idea what to attend next.  Sounds like more coffee is in order.  Maybe then the next evo-devo presentation will make more sense.  Let's see what has been learned?  Well, the scanty development of diploid endosperm of waterlilies and their relatives may represent an intermediate stage between the female gametophyte of gymnosperms and the full-fledged triploid endosperm of most flowering plants.  A little gnetophyte, Ephedra monosperma (or E. minima) is easy to propogate and grow for research and teaching.  Have to see if it's available from an online nursery.  Time to run.

Botany 2012

The annual botany meetings are in Columbus Ohio, so no big change of scenery for the Phactor, but honestly, sometimes you don't even leave the hotel-conference center.  The best part of these meetings is reconnecting with your longtime friends and colleagues, meeting the new young ones, and that feeling that you belong to an organization, a profession.  So far, so good.  Having been fatigued from driving, and with no cat alarm, one time zone to the east, the Phactor is refreshed but running late.  The first action will be the quest for coffee, and then fortified, figure out when and where everything is happening.  Conference centers are not known for their logical organization.  Last night the kickoff lecture, a rather standard sounding retrospective but embrace the future type of thing, was quite well done by Sir Peter (yes, a knighted botanist!).  Here's an interesting note for people who wonder about how well women fare in science: all of the botanical society's new officers are women, and botany has the highest percentage of women of all the sciences.  Now time to go to a symposium on gnetophytes, those 3 enigmatic genera: Gnetum (silent G), Welwitschia, and Ephedra.