Nature's Garden: Plant World News

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Gardeners and Nature lovers already appreciate the botanical wonders around us, but plants are more than floral beauties. We owe the air we breathe to them, all of our food, and most of our medicine, chemicals and housing. Animals from elephants to ants depend on plant-life. And the world's flora has an equally intimate relationship with the birds, insects, mammals and humans around them.
Explore these relationships and find the latest botany discoveries through the links below.
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Plant From Another World: 3000 Year Old Yareta: "Crawling its way along barren rocks and cliffs where nothing should be growing, Yareta could be mistaken for an alien life form or a primordial green ooze."
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Invasive Species: Separating Innocent Guests From Voracious Party Crashers: "When invasive species first show up, can we predict which ones are going to become major modifiers of ecosystems or harm other species?"
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One Fast Little Sucker (Plant): "Aquatic, meat-eating bladderworts are among the world's best suckers and they have just been named the fastest trapping carnivorous plants... Their traps suck in prey in less than a millisecond, making this one of the speediest movements in the entire plant kingdom."
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Lemurs The Key To Madagascar's Carbon-Storage: "If the trees that produce large seeds don’t get their seeds dispersed—a likely scenario if large seed-dispersing animals like ruffed lemurs disappear—they begin to die out. Species with small seeds that can be dispersed by many animals, and species with wind-dispersed seeds, may then gain a competitive advantage and begin to dominate the forest. The forest becomes one composed mainly of trees with low carbon-storage potential, and the carbon-storage capacity of the whole forest is affected."
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Scientists find lager beer's missing link -on Patagonia trees: "German lager yeast appears to have originated on beech trees in southern Argentina. But how did it get to Europe 600 years ago?"
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