As terrible as an angel, be afraid

this post:

well, there are actually multiple families basal to all flowering plants; they’re referred to as being ‘ANITA grade’ or ‘ANA grade’, standing for the orders (and i’m gonna link their wikipedia pages here for Strange Plant Enjoyment) Amborellales, Nymphaeales, and Austrobaileyales. the ‘ANITA’ acronym refers to the first three plus the (supposed) order Illiciales and the family Trimeniaceae; their positioning in this is a bit spicy and contested as i take it, though, so i should note that the first three are the major ones, with most of the plants we call ‘lily pads’ resting in the Nymphaeales. 

BUT. fun fact that got me a bit riled up when i first learned about it last month: ‘lily pads’ as a concept have apparently evolved a couple times in flowering plants, so the order Nymphaeales (containing the traditional lily pad family Nymphaeaceae as well as a couple other non-lily pad aquatic plant families) is a basal group, but Nelumbonaceae– the family that consists of the two species of sacred lotus that are out there– is not (instead it belongs to the order Proteales; this was only figured out in the past couple decades with the innovation of molecular research). 

anyway. that aside, yeah, these guys are pretty prehistoric. like idk why i’m so impressed with how innovative ‘hm….leaf float’ as an idea ended up being, but i am; that being said, like, the flowers on these are one of those plant things where upon further inspection it’s like…….oh man this is definitely a dinosaur plant. like look at this thing

you may be wondering why she is like this. the answer is that she has specially evolved to heat up and open/close in a ploy to trap beetles overnight for Sex Purposes:

weird lemon from @/dabi-hawks on twitter??? what happened here (submitted by @allgreenisgoodgreen)

—————

ah yes…..the citrons strike again….i can only offer vaguely that it looks like a lemon that started turning into a buddha’s hand citron halfway through. another option would be that the plant got damage/an infection in it’s growing tip, which messed up the hormones, confused it, and made it grow like this (usually referred to as ‘fasciation’ in plants; it usually looks a bit more crest-like when it happens tho). 

Guess who’s here?! It’s the skunky bois! (Submitted by @leviintheskywithdiamonds)

—————

a couple days ago there was a video on twitter of a couple disease control people debunking some coronavirus myths and at the end of it one of them was like ‘if youre interested in more virus stuff like this, you might want to check out promedmail.org’ and it turns out it’s just a reporting service run by the international society of infectious diseases that gets phoned in/submissions about outbreaks and stuff all over the world, and they track a ton of stuff and send out email updates, so naturally i signed up. it’s kind of like, raw scientific data reporting the coronavirus and lassa fever and all those things, including ongoing investigations and stuff (which may result in dead ends– it’s like watching the science as it happens instead of just seeing the results, which is important to keep in mind), but what i wasn’t expecting was that they also report like, extremely niche outbreaks of things i have never heard of, which is how i received this email

me when the promedmail website notifies me, a plant person, that citrus greening disease spread to el salvador: