Category: Research
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How grasses created traditional gender roles in human societies
In a post last year, we looked at how grasses shaped human evolution, which included changing the shape of our skulls and perhaps even the color of our skin. But the tight partnership between people and grains that started with the advent of agriculture, affected many things beyond just the human phenotype. There have been…
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Breaking the Blockade
I’ve been doing a long running observation on a stand of Imperata cylindrica (Cogon grass) in Florida since 2021, with the cogon grass rapidly overwhelming its competitors as it spread laterally along a roadside. For a history of this series of observations (oldest to most recent): April 2021Rapid expansion of an invasive grass as viewed…
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Biological Nitrogen-Fixation in Grasses!
Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plants. But while the element makes up 78% of the atmosphere as diNitrogen (N2), this form is unavailable to plants. The solution to this problem is nitrogen fixation, which involves the conversion of this atmospheric nitrogen into forms such as ammonia (NH3) that are available and useful to organisms….
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Will the grass family go extinct?
The Poaceae have existed on earth for about a hundred million years. In phylogeny, the stem age of a clade refers to the time when a group first splits from its sister lineage, and thus is considered the origin point of that group. In the case of grasses, one paper posits that this would have…
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Scrambling towards vinehood
Awhile back I wondered about the fact that there were so few epiphytic grasses. The attainment of this lifestyle seemed to be a daunting task for a plant family that is in other ways so adaptable. Two weeks back I was walking along a street when a discovery I made highlighted another lifestyle that seemed…
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How grasses directed and shaped human evolution
Note: Thank you to a reader for pointing out that skin pigmentation may also have been changed dramatically by the onset of agriculture. Did you know that many of the attributes of people today are a direct result of a few grasses? The domestication of grasses for agriculture started several thousand years ago, and occurred…
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Diversity Fails Part Deux
The Elton hypothesis states that environments with lower resident diversity will be less resistant to invasion. One possible reason for this is that a diverse assemblage of species or functional types is better able to fully exploit all the resources in the area, and thus the invader will not be able to find any niche…
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A Race Against Time: Oryza sativa (Rice) vs Climate Change
There is no doubts at all that the climate is changing rapidly, and that the average yearly surface temperature has been increasing over the years, with the ten most recent years being the warmest on record. The focus of naturalists and nature lovers in many cases has been on the effect of such warming on…
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In the Shadow of Giants: When Grasses Started their Quest for World Domination
The Fraser River Trail that runs along the Fraser River and connects the town of Fraser, CO and Winter Park, CO passes through various habitats, from meadows to suburban paths, and even to dark quiet areas covered by tall conifers. It is a paved and easy trail that i would highly recommend to anyone interested…
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Bamboos Red in Tooth and Claw
The common perception of bamboo has always been somewhat pacifistic, with images of cute pandas intermixed with the culms or images of the beautiful bamboo forests in temperate Asia. But research from the Amazon rainforest seems to show another aspect of this much-loved group of grasses. In the SouthWest Amazon rainforest, a vast area of…