UW Greenhouse, WA 4/3

Today during the class period we toured the greenhouse on campus to learn about different ways plants around the world have adapted to their environment and protect themselves from predators.

Miracle berries: the first stop was sampling a berry that changes your tastebuds to make a lemon wedge taste as sweet as candy after only sucking the juice out of one berry. It takes advantage of an organism's sensory reactions to help in an effort to become pollinated through the animal's digestion and then spreading seeds through their waste.

Ghost Chili's: the 'hotness' sensation from eating this chili stimulates the same neurons that resemble touching a hot surface with your hand. However, there is no actual spiciness to it because the heat is not a taste and is only a simulation of eating a real chili. When you consume this chili your taste buds tell the body that tissue damage is occurring, causing the hot sensation, when in fact nothing is happening. An interesting fact about birds is they can not feel the heat so they are high pollinators of the plant.

One of the plants we saw had holes covering its leaves in order to discourage adult butterflies from laying their eggs to hatch there because there would snot be enough food for their offspring.
Some highly evolved plants, usually living in areas of scarce water, created a 'window' in order to implement the process of photosynthesis without losing any water.

The most interesting plant I saw in the greenhouse was a very large, almost six foot tall round shaped plant that added layers onto the outside of its structure while inside it decomposed the old layers for nutrients. This shocked me because plants are so innovative in how they acquire their resources even in low-nutrient environments.

Posted on May 1, 2012 02:18 PM by karavanslyck