#botanists

[mysharona1987]

[kedreeva]

Hey, botany side of tumblr... What is this thing? Wood stem is wood, it doesn't have any feelers like a vine, and it's growing branches at the top now.

The wire is 2x4 fencing for scale, and I'm in southeast Michigan, USA.

[lichenaday]

I am attending Botany Con (aka One World Botany 2023 on Boise, ID) and will be giving a talk Tuesday July 24 at 8:15 in the Bryology and Lichenology session. So if you are here and interested in my work come check it out!

I will also be GMing the Botany & Dragons game on Wednesday night. Be there or be square.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

Researchers in Indonesia recently captured a surprising event on video: A wild orangutan named Rakus, with a deep gash on his cheek, harvested liana leaves, chewed them up, and rubbed them on his wound. His cheek healed without infection. As it turns out the plants have anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antifungal, and other chemical properties that help heal wounds.

The great ape saw the plant, recognized the plant, and valued the plant because he knew something about a subject that few humans do anymore: botany.

At a time when our net knowledge about plants keeps growing, our individual understanding of plants is in decline. This is unsurprising, because while we still depend on plants for life, few of us need to know much about them in our daily lives — as long as someone else does. We rely on botanists to identify plants, keep them alive, and in so doing help keep us alive as well.

It’s a lot of responsibility for a group of scientists that isn’t getting any bigger. And that has some people in the field worried.

The National Center for Education Statistics triggered the first alarm about the future of botany in 2015. According to data released that year, the number of annual undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees awarded in botany or plant biology in the United States had dropped below 400 for the fifth time since 2007. In 1988 the number of degrees was 545.

The number soon rose again and so far has stayed above 400. In fact it rose to 489 in 2023 — the highest in decades. (By comparison, American universities gave out more than 45,000 marketing degrees last year.)

The definitive downward trend, though, remains in the number of U.S. institutions offering botany or plant biology degrees — from 76 in 2002 to 59 in 2023.

“Botany Ph.D.’s are disappearing,” says Kathryn Parsley, who got her Ph.D. in biology, not botany, even though her dissertation focused on plants. “The number of botanists is declining rapidly and the people filling those spaces are not botanists.” When a biology department has a job vacancy, she says, they tend to hire a professor who has “nothing to do with plants. The department will have all kinds of scientists in it, with only one or maybe two botanists, sometimes only one or two plant scientists at all.” Because she attended one such school, “a botany degree was out of the question,” Parsley says.

While nobody has tracked the average age of botanists in the United States, students of “pure botany” do seem to be waning, according to Kristine Callis-Duehl, the executive director of education research and outreach at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. “Skills are shifting away from old-school botany. A lot of that’s being driven by funding sources,” she says. “More and more, just being a botanist is not enough in academia.”

Experts agree that in recent years, most botany professors aren’t being replaced once they retire. But why?

Money is one reason. The National Science Foundation, for instance, has shifted its funding away from natural history at herbariums and other museums, Callis-Duehl says. “It’s harder to convince Congress that that work — pure botany — contributes to the economy. They prefer basic science that can lead into more applied science, where they can make a case that it fuels the U.S. economy.”

Applied plant science has more NSF options than botany. For example, agriculture is more likely to be funded by USDA, Callis-Duehl says.

[onocleopsis]

Yeah, we're best friends, of course I'd find you and hang out with you in every universe and every lifetime

@zygomorphous

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Ada Hayden

Botanist and preservationist Ada Hayden was born in 1884 near Ames, Iowa. In 1918, Hayden became the first woman to earn a doctorate from Iowa State College, now known as Iowa State University. She an Instructor in Botany, and later became an Assistant Professor of Botany at the university and curator of the herbarium. During her time at Iowa State, Hayden added over 40,000 specimens to the herbarium. She also researched Iowa's prairies and advocated for their preservation. Hayden was on the conservation committee of the Iowa Academy of Science, and was ultimately responsible for the formal preservation of 26 remnant prairies.

Ada Hayden died in 1950. The Hayden Prairie State Preserve was named in her honor.

[assbazooka]

was having a bad tic day today, so instead of doing my socio work, i decided to scroll on instagram - fun, right? WRONG.

it was in this time where i discovered something truly malicious - a comic describing a tomato..as a berry.

being a devout seeker of TRUTH, i went searching, PRAYING the comic was incorrect!

my friends…i so, so dearly regret to inform you all that it is, in fact, true…

Botanically Speaking, a Tomato is a Berry.

[mossinformed]

MOSS FACTS

Some moss leaves have a costa, a thickened structure running down the center of the leaf that provides support and has some capacity to transport water. This is just one of many adaptations bryophytes developed when they decided to move from water to land ~500 MILLION years ago. Half a billion.

Coastal seaweed communities were developing around the same time, and some have a midrib, which is a structure along the blade with a similar purpose.

Images used with permission: leaves of Tortula brevipes (possibly muralis) under the microscope and close-up of the costa.

[hearth-and-home13]

Just got this ring this past weekend and am curious what flowers are on it? Does anyone know?

[fieldsparrowstudio]

jewels of opar

traditional ink, digital color. 2024

[mysharona1987]

[artkaninchenbau]

People keep on asking for more Baby Robin and Papadile so here is more Baby Robin and Papadile. Now never ask anything from me ever again

[hinamie]

thank u canon plant nerd megumi for my life

bonus:

[gaynaturalistghost]

I did some experimenting with a vertical comic format! And I got a copy of The Eat Bang Kill Tour and absolutely loved it.

[empiireans]

random assembly kids lineup (idk what got me to do this)

and a stupid bonus from april