#extinct plant

[briery]

A closer look reveals the delicate fronds of Ferula drudeana propagated at Istanbul’s Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanical Garden. The Ferula genus of flowering plants includes carrots, fennel, and parsley.

[reasonsforhope]

"During an archaeological dig in a desert area north of Jerusalem 40 years ago, a seed was discovered which was determined to be in pristine condition but had obviously seen many a year.

Now, despite falling from its parent 1,000 years ago, it has grown into a mature tree, and botanists examining it believe it may be an extinct species that was used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years—even receiving a nod in the Bible.

Neither Israeli botanists, nor Dr. Sarah Sallon, a physician who founded the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, could determine what species it was from simply from the seed covering. So they did what nature intended—they planted it.

Using a well-documented technique that saw 2,000-year-old date palm fruit pits germinate, Dr. Sallon soaked the seed in hormones, liquid fertilizer, and water, and then planted it in a pot of sterile seed; then waited.

Despite its genetic code being exposed to environmental stressors for over 1,000 years, the seed sprouted after 5 weeks. The shoot was protected by a caplike feature called an operculum. As the shoot grew, the operculum was shed—leaving something for the team to radiocarbon date. It narrowed down the age of the almost 10-centuries-old seed to between the years 993 an 1202.

Fast forward 14 years and the plant has become a 10-foot-tall tree. Dr. Sallon shared images of the tree, its bark, and its leaves with botanists around the world. One expert suggested it belonged to the genus Commiphora, found across the Arabian Peninsula and parts of Africa. A genetic analysis subsequently revealed this was the case, but a perfect match was lacking.

Pictured: The tree, now 14 years old.

Dr. Sallon and her team thought it was an extinct species known from history as Judean Balsam, but the best way to confirm that suspicion would be to have some aromatic traces similar to the resins of the myrrh tree to which it is related. However, no such fragrant compounds were detected.

Instead, the chemical analysis of the leaves identified a group of phytochemicals known as guggulterols which have been observed in a related species called Commiphora wightii that’s known to possess certain cancer-fighting properties in its resin.

A medicinal balm, the origin of which is not known, is mentioned in multiple historical texts including the Bible as ‘tsori,’ and rather than the fragrant Judean Balsam, it’s this tsori that Dr. Sallon and her team believe they have found.

They must wait until the tree, now 14 years old, produces flower or fruit to know for sure if it’s an extinct species, and if so, how to perhaps keep it alive.

Dr. Louise Colville, senior research leader in seed and stress biology at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London who wasn’t involved in the research, told CNN that it was a major accomplishment to grow a seed that old and possibly lead to a resurrection of this Biblical botanical.

“What’s surprising in this story is it was just a single seed and to be able to have one chance for that to germinate is extremely lucky,” she said.

“Working in a seed bank, seeing the potential for that extreme longevity gives us hope that banking and storing seeds that some at least will survive for very long periods of time.”"

-via Good News Network, October 8, 2024

--

Note: This is such a good demonstration of why seed banks are so important!! They give us such real and massive hope for deextinction and the revival of endangered species.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

That's so cool! And they found a few of them, and they're now growing seedlings in greenhouses for eventual replanting!

Quercus tardifolia is a relic species leftover from when the climate was much cooler and wetter in the past, and can only really live in a few high-elevation spots in Texas. It's definitely still at risk of extinction due to increasing heat and drought caused by climate change, but the discovery means this species still has a chance.

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 329

Bruce was admittedly suspicious when Talia requests a meeting, and is admittedly still upset with the entire hiding Damian’s existence from him for literal years. But he also admits that he just… has to take a moment. 

“Run that by me again please?” He had to have misheard, right? Or gotten drugged by something maybe. 

Talia sighs, sounding just as tired as he felt. “Father’s tea supplier has moved to Gotham after an argument, and he wishes to discuss the agreement of him not entering the city- to speak with said vendor.” 

[mindblowingscience]

A rare species of tree cactus has gone extinct in Florida, in what is believed to be the first species lost to sea level rise in the United States, researchers said Tuesday. The Key Largo tree cactus (Pilosocereus millspaughii) was restricted to a single small population in the Florida Keys, an archipelago off the southern tip of the state, first discovered in 1992 and monitored intermittently since then. But salt water intrusion caused by rising seas, soil erosion from storms and high tides, and herbivory by mammals placed significant pressure on the last population.

Continue Reading.

[emacrow]

Poison Ivy's little sprout

Ivy just got back to her main base after a lil three month fun vacation with Harley and Cat women. Only to see her giant plants seemingly a foot or two away from one lil growing pod sprout literally shaking as if the Fear of God was put into them.

Now she doesn't remember planting this lil bud, it was sickly green in the leaves and steam, the pod itself seem to be glowing blue that the size of a peach. The chaotic maddening whispers from the plants around her wouldn't even come close enough to where she stand right in front of the lil sprout.

They seem more afraid of this lil plant then the last time Harley accidentally brought her an invasive species plant that sass the hell out of the other plants until she secretly relocated it away.

She grab her plant shovel and replant it into a slightly bigger pot, picking it up and walking toward her lab part that didn't had much plants there, considering the big plant babies immediately took over the previous place where that tiny plant was and inched away from where she was walking to.

Maybe it was sick, with how pale and bright green the plant was and whatever fruit was growing was sucking the literal life out of the plant. She could probably add some extra nutrients and plant fertilizer to help it grow until it was ripe to be plucked. Watering it with enough to last the week after putting extra fertilizer.

Taking just one tiny bud leaf since the silent was deafening coming from this plant was completely abnormal to her to a degree that something was very wrong or this plant was alien not from earth's native plants.

Weeks of research turned to months as she watch with pure heavy fascinating interest, seeing that the leaf she cut off turn into an unstable green goopy mess of dna not even an 15 minutes off the plant. It made Ivy wonder what kind of giant peach was growing from it with how it glow so bright purple yet ominous at night. Her lab never felt so cold yet the heater was on 79 degree for her plant babies.

It was by month of September that was a surprise, when Harley came over to help pick the super sized fresh vegetables and fruits off the other plants to maks chicken salads, not noticing that Harley took the large peach fully ripe from the plant she had been observing on.

She was chopping carrots up into bite sized pieces before Harley's voice spoken out.

"Um.. Ivy? I don't know where you got this plant from that momotaro movie, but I think you just grow a boy from a peach."

Ivy turned around immediately to see Harley looking rather shocked as well, with a peach juice covered sleeping baby boy lay in a half way peeled peach. A wet curly black hair with grey eyes that she know in her gut that it will turn blue later.

Oh no.. she caught the bat-bait disease.

"We're not keeping him." Poison ivy said sternly and sharp to steel herself from that sappy adorable puppy eyed look Harley was giving her.

🥺

"Harley, we don't even have-

🥺🥺🥺

"Har-

🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

"...."

"One night and then it straight to the the good orphanage near the rich area." Poison ivy sighed, pinching her nose.

"Yessss!" Harley cheered, holding the baby up like he was simba.

It was only for the night, what the worse that could happen.

......

......

......

She was weak to that stare and she knew it.

Poison could only sighed, holding two month old Dara in the baby sling, staring sat which baby outfit to pick, the olive green that had the baby duckies or fern green with the adorable flower patterns.

(Thanks the commenters for telling me the original name. All Google gave me was the Peach boy or Jack and the Giant Peach XD)

[muffinlance]

druk gets into zukos coffee supply

"Uncle."

Uncle raised his tea cup to his lips.

"Uncle, how did he get in."

Uncle took the most delicate of sips.

"Uncle I am not turning another storeroom into tea storage."

"How unfortunate to waste the space," said Uncle. "After all, it is quite hard to keep a dragon out once they have acquired the taste!"

"Uncle."

[housecow]

the problem with me working around fossils is that when i see a mollusk my first thought isn’t “wow how did this thing live” but “holy shit that would’ve been delicious”

[shadowxamyweek]

Sonic Garden

(This has been brewing for ages in my brain and I'm actually really excited to try and get this event going. Thank you @nodulemodule for actually coming up with the name!)

This June, in celebration of our favorite Blue Blur who himself loves to slow down and smell the wildflowers every now and again, I would like to propose the Sonic Garden. The goal of Sonic Garden is to, through a united affection for the Sonic story and characters, share information about plants! Any type of plants! All types of plants! And all types of information too! If you wish to infodump about the edible, medicinal, magical, and/or symbolic background of a plant, feel free!

And you can participate in any way you wish! If you want to use a photo and some figures/props/digitally edited in aspects, sure! If you want to draw the entire thing, go for it! If you would rather just write a short piece, feel free!

For example:

Sonic and dandelions! Did you know that Dandelions can be found all over the globe? The only place they don't seem to like is Antarctica.

I guess if Sonic wants to enjoy a dandelion salad as he watches glaciers float by full of peckys and rockys, he's just going to have to bring his own.

(If you are going to use a picture of the plant, make sure there are no people in frame and nothing that would endanger or expose anyone involved! Your privacy is valuable!)

Remember to use the tag #SonicGarden when sharing! That way, we can all find it!

[serpentface]

Do psychotropic drugs and/or ritual play a role in any of the blightseed cultures? A pretty broad question, lol

Yeah that’s a very broad question, the answer is about as much as it tends to play roles in real history. Alcohol is pretty ubiquitous (outside of cultures that abstain from intoxicants) and used for a variety of purposes, opioids are commonly used in some parts for pain relief or recreational purposes, stimulants (usually in mild, natural forms) are used to provide extra energy, and hallucinogens are most commonly used as part of a larger religious framework (rather than for recreational purposes). Any more elaborate answer kinda has to be case by case in a certain culture or part of the setting.

I'll just take this as an opportunity to talk about the one established sect that pretty much REVOLVES around psychoactive use. This is the Scholarly Order of the Root, which is a sort of mystery religion + elite community of scholars who currently occupy the Ur-Tree and its forest in the far southern Lowlands (southeast of Imperial Wardin, on the same land mass).

The Ur-Tree is the obligatory Huge Fucking Fantasy Tree (and its surrounding forest). It’s a mass of vegetation about a mile tall and almost as old as Plant Life Itself, its upper branches are primeval plants, which become more modern the nearer they get to the ground (and each 'level' holds tiny ecosystems, some containing descendants of LONG-extinct arthropods/other small animals). Its lowest branches and the surrounding forest are contemporary plant life, and all is connected and protected by an incomparably MASSIVE fungal mycelium network (which is itself a living god).

A lot of the Scholars' more secretive practices revolve around experimentation with substance use with the goal of expanding the Mind and transcending the body to fully connect to the Dreamlands, and they have a supply chain of traders and mercenaries called Rootrunners who traffic substances into the Lowlands. Most of their psychoactive use is in a very intentional capacity and not just like, for fun, but a LOT of them are just straight up addicted to cocaine (in the form of alchemically refined bruljenum, which is used for practical purposes of its stimulant effect during long hours of work).

All known psychoactives are desirable for experimentation (particularly hallucinogens), with each having properties that either allow expansion of the Mind, transcendence of the body, or outright divine communion. Their effects are logged in great detail and interpreted to form the basis of the Scholars' understanding of the natural world and reality itself.

The most important substance is Ur-Root, which is root matter from subterranean levels of the Ur-Tree that have both their own intrinsic psychoactive substances and a very, very high concentration of living god mycelium. The tree root contains DMT and the mycelium has its own wholly unique effects (being an actual living god). They alchemically refine it into a purer, more potent form, and use it to expand beyond the body and directly commune with the Giants, a group of entities they have identified as the only true gods.

An Ur-Root trip starts off with minor visual distortion, which turns into shifting fractals that slowly obscure the vision. Eventually the senses are entirely taken over by a 'tunnel' of rapidly shifting fractals and geometries. In a complete trip, the experiencer gets a sense that they have been pushed through a membrane and entered another realm, finding themselves in a distinct experiential Space.

At this point they may encounter entities which communicate to them in a language impossible to describe but wholly understood. These beings are understood to be the Giants, or at least aspects of the Giants that mortals are capable of comprehending (they often take familiar tutelary forms of the Mantis or the Snake, or appear resembling the same type of sophont that the experiencer is, all composed of ever-shifting geometries). The experiencer often feels a sense of unconditional and endless love from these beings, though the Giants may be more hostile and may appear in the form of the Trickster (usually a cultural figure regarded as malicious, be it an animal or otherwise) in a bad trip.

(^Up until this point, this has mostly just been a DMT 'breakthrough' experience ft. 'machine elves' and the like).

They are then removed from this space and returned to something that feels like the real world, but is nearly unrecognizable. They have a sense of rapidly moving through time, and will usually see 'the spires' towards the beginning, which just so happen to look like this:

(source + some context via Implication- the spires are exactly what this art is depicting)

The experiencer continues to move across an unfathomable amount of time, occasionally 'seeing' other such flashes of unfamiliar landscapes and creatures, and yet also being devoid of all their senses, the 'seeing' is pure, unfiltered experience. There is a sense of interconnectedness with all life, and that one has become the forest (or even Life) itself. The sense of time is wildly distorted, the trip lasts only about 5 minutes but feels like an eternity and is understood as literal hundreds of millions of years.

The experiencer has usually lost any remaining sense of Self and individual consciousness during this phase (in which case this time distortion is usually a neutral or even peaceful experience), but some retain a fraction of their identity, and find themselves trapped and conscious while experiencing what feels like eternity (which can be LIFE-CHANGINGLY distressing, even after the fact).

(^This latter part of the trip is the effects of the Ur-Tree fungus).

The trip ends with a sense of rushing through the ground and back up into one's body, at which point they will abruptly return to their senses and consciousness. The details are then immediately retrieved via interview and recorded in immense detail. The whole experience is understood as having been full comprehension of the Dreamlands, communion with the Giants, and then a tour through the act of creation.

This is done as part of the initiatory practice into the inner mystery-religion of the scholars, and as needed for study by high scholar-priests. It is not taken lightly, both as it is absolute communion with the gods and reality, and in that it can be a very, very difficult experience. People who have gone through this often walk away with a permanently shifted perspective, often in a positive and/or comforting way- a sense of interconnectedness with all life, a peace with the concept of death, seeing less of a point in individual ego and the concept of Self, and comfort in the sense of divine love they (may have) experienced. This heavily influences the philosophy of the Scholars and has had effects by proxy in the religious worldviews of the region.

Details of this experience are closely guarded, and initiates are given absolutely no prior knowledge and expectations for their trip. This is seen as a necessity- their naivety will allow for a true, unfiltered experience, and can be used to gauge whether they should or should not be accepted. Those that have a distinctly bad trip upon initiation may be assumed to have been 'rejected' by the giants and thus denied full priesthood, though this largely depends on How they interpret their distressing trip- those who identify this as a test and harsh lesson in a journey to enlightenment may be accepted (as this is how fully initiated scholar-priests interpret and handle their bad trips).

This inner priesthood is only a small fraction of the Scholarly Order, and its greater function is as a hub of education and repository of knowledge, and Scholar-trained doctors can provide some of the best medical care available in the setting ('best medical care in this setting' only means so much but it's pretty solid, relatively speaking). Only a chosen few Scholars ever get to commune with the Ur-Root, and most of the divine secrets revealed in the process are kept hidden (though they indirectly influence the politics and worldview of the entire order).

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Archaeopteris 🤝Humans

Single Handedly Causing a Mass Extinction with Rapid Climate Change, *mostly* by accident

(the mostly is for humans, who eventually started realizing what we were doing and yet have continued doing the thing, rendering it On Purpose)

(I am assuming Archaeopteris never realized what they were doing but I guess I could be wrong)

[wachinyeya]

CBD from Hemp Kills Mosquitoes, Inflicting 100% Mortality Rate on Pesticide-Resistant Insects https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/cbd-from-hemp-kills-mosquitoes-inflicting-100-mortality-rate-on-pesticide-resistant-insects/

[he-who-needs-to-be-silenced]

Euramerica submission 1

These two goobers are for the rhodophyte forest

If you wanna participate you can check my account you’ll probably find the post if you scroll a bit

Or you could join the discord here:

[rebeccathenaturalist]

So this is a really creative solution to a pernicious ecological problem! The short version is that arid ecosystems like deserts are quite fragile. For example, many have soil that is covered in a thin biocrust that can be damaged just by walking or driving on it. And because life needs water to grow and recover, these super-dry ecosystems may not be able to repair a footprint or tire track for over a century.

However, arid ecosystems are often some of the least understood because they can be difficult to access. And they suffer from P.R. issues because deserts are often seen as "bad" ecosystems full of death and nothingness, and because we do legitimately want to avoid the desertification of other native habitats.

In order to raise awareness and appreciation of these landscapes, biological surveys that tally the living beings found there help show how biodiverse they can be. And when we know more about how abundant or scarce a given species there is, it gives us more impetus to protect them, especially those that are at risk of extinction.

These paramotorists were able to fly across Peru's lomas (coastal fog deserts), which primarily receive scant amounts of moisture from mist. They collected plant samples to take back to scientists, carefully recording where they were found. And because they were able to fly long distances, they could minimize the amount of time their feet were on the ground and therefore minimize their impact on the local ecology.

At a time where it seems every interaction between motorized technology and nature is a negative one, this is a pleasant departure. yes, of course we wish we weren't in a place where we have to be worried about increasing extinction and other ecological woes. But let's take the wins where we can; the morale boost is crucial to being able to keep looking toward a better future.

[son1c]

Moths or butterflies, which is better. What's your stance on the topic that plagued my elementary school for 3 years it got to the point where they had to hold a school wide vote to shut up us students

i think they're girlfriends and should kiss

[mindblowingscience]

More than one in three species of trees are at risk of extinction worldwide, threatening life as we know it on Earth, according to a report published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. The report published on Monday has warned that over 16,000 tree species are at risk of extinction. More than 47,000 species were assessed for the IUCN study, out of an estimated 58,000 species thought to exist in the world.

Continue Reading.