The announcement comes from researchers at Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, who carried out an assessment of carnivorous plants in honor of the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth only to discover many potential additions to the officially recognized list. Kew's Dr Mike Fay explains:

Widely recognised carnivorous plants number some 650 and we estimate that another 325 or so are probable additions – so an increase of about 50 per cent.

Amongst that 325 are species of tomatoes, ornamental tobacco plants, potatoes and a mustard plant commonly known as "shepherd's purse." They are believed to trap and eat insects by trapping their bodies until they die, decay, fall to the ground and are absorbed by the roots of the plant... which is almost as circuitous as it is creepy. But at least we now know the danger of the salad bar.

Attack of the killer tomatoes [Independent.co.uk]

More information about the organisms, the project, and her travels is available at Sussman's blog.

The Oldest Living Things in the World [Rachel Sussman via The Long Now]

La Llareta, up to 3,300 years old
Sagole Baobab, 2,000 years old
Clonal Creosote Bush, 12,000 years old
Siberian Actinobacteria, about 400,000 years old
Jomon Sugi Japanese Cedar, 7,000 years old
Lichen R. Geographicum, about 3,000 years old
Clonal Quaking Aspens, 80,000 years old
Underground Forest, 13,000 years old
Welwitschia Mirabilis, 2,000 years old
Clonal Mojave Yucca, over 12,000 years old

Professor Paulie Panther arrives in Boney Borough, a near-future Levittown constructed after an unnamed war, after a strange plant appears near the local high school. Paulie is a rugged individualist, a poet, a botanist, and a drug-addict, a combination that qualifies him to update another professor's textbook on the hallucinogenic properties of North American plants. He soon realizes that inhaling the fumes from the plants causes him to feel the emotional and physical sensations of those around him. At first, it seems like an opportunity to make the connections that have eluded him all his life, but he soon realizes his personality could be swallowed by the town's growing hive mind. What follows is a long, strange trip into post-war nostalgia, small towns as superorganisms, and the question of whether individuality truly makes us happy.

Body World earned Shaw an Eisner nomination for best digital comic (though he ultimately lost out to the online version of Carla Speed McNeil's Finder) and, more recently, an Ignatz nomination for Outstanding Online Comic, and Pantheon plans to release a print version next year.

[Body World]

The Knotweed is also originally from Japan, and it was first introduced in Britain in the 1850s, but since then, the plant has thrived a little too well. The research team was charged with finding a way to reduce the invasive plant's foothold in Britain, and they settled on bringing in a natural predator of the Knotweed from the plant's native Japan.

The little plant-eater is called Aphalara itadori, and it works a lot like an aphid, sucking out vital juices from the plant and choking it with tons of offspring. The idea is that the itadori will not kill the Knotweed, but greatly reduce its spread and number.

Of course, when a non-native species takes over surprisingly well, it's risky bringing in yet another non-native species to control it. But the team is doing extensive research on the interaction between the insects and the Knotweed to make sure there are no surprises in store for Britain's ecosystem.

This move by the British government also echos a move by the Springfield government in The Simpsons. In the episode "Bart The Mother," a species of tree lizard takes over Springfield, but the city imports snakes to kill the lizards. When the snakes become a problem, the town plans brings in gorillas. The gorillas, they say, will not be a problem because winter will take care of them. Let's hope there aren't snake-killing gorillas wandering the British countryside by this time next year.

First Ever Use In Europe Of An Insect To Fight Invasive Plant Species [via ScienceDaily]

(Image: a member of the team with the dreaded Knotweed, from University of Leicester)

During a recent expedition to the Philippines' central highlands, a group of botanists discovered several unusual and previously undocumented plants and fungi. Among these discoveries was the Nepenthes attenboroughii, which they named for naturalist and carnivorous plant enthusiast David Attenborough. One of the largest pitcher plants ever discovered, N. attenboroughii produces pitchers up to two liters in volume, which attract and trap small animals. Like other carnivorous plants, N. attenboroughii traps and eats insects, but can also snack on rodents as large as rats.

They're attractive enough that I wouldn't mind having a couple around as organic mouse traps, but I'd certainly keep some weedkiller handy in case it pulls a Little Shop of Horrors and starts singing showtunes about killing my dentist.

Giant 'meat-eating' plant found [BBC via Reddit]

Triffids (The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham): Although the bioengineered Triffids appear sentient and have a deadly sting, humanity farms them for their oil. But when most of humanity is blinded by a meteor shower, Triffids take advantage of mankind’s sudden weakness and begin to break free and turn on their former captors. It was made into the classic 1962 film and a 1981 BBC television serial.

The Vines (The Ruins): Vines may seem like a fairly mundane feature of the ruins of a Mayan temple. But these vines are deadly, eating away at human flesh and leaving their spores to germinate inside the human body. And they’re tricky creatures, too, causing cell phones to ring and mimicking human voices.

Killer Tomatoes (Attack of the Killer Tomatoes): After years of smothering our burgers in ketchup, the tomatoes take their revenge. Giant tomatoes invade the cities of the world, chowing down on the tomato-eating populace.

The Thing (The Thing From Another World): When the US Air Force discovers the body of a plant-based alien frozen in ice, they accidentally thaw it, leaving it to wreak havoc across Alaska. The Thing needs human blood to reproduce, but fortunately, like so many killer plants, is vulnerable to electricity.

The Seeds (Doctor Who “Seeds of Doom”): Another alien lands in an icy part of the world, this time Antarctica. Scientists discover a pair of giant seed pods and bring them back to their base for study. But as they thaw, instead of eating the scientists, they sting one of them, turning him into a murderous plant creature.

The Sarlaac (Star Wars): The Sarlaac has puzzled xenobiologists with its plant and animal qualities, but it is best known for its digestive system. A humanoid could spend a thousand years in the sarlaac’s digestive tract before being fully digested, and, while it doesn’t eat frequently, it has been known to use its tentacles to grab onto its prey.

Biollante (Godzilla vs Biollante): Biolante starts life as a rose-like monster, with constricting vines and stinging teeth along her bud. But Godzilla’s atomic beam mutates her further, giving her a giant head with an enormous jaw and set of teeth, spines running down her back, and four roots for legs. In either form, she is bent on defeating Godzilla.

Lyekka (Lexx): Lyekka is a carnivorous plant who, upon encountering the Lexx, scans Stanley Tweedle’s mind and takes the form of his school crush. She is fond of Stanley, but has been known to dine on other space travelers.

The Weeds (“The Weeds” by Stephen King): When Jordy Verrill discovers a meteorite, he sees dollar signs, thinking the alien rock will pay of his bank account. But the plant-like organism living on the meteorite quickly takes over his body, covering it in tenacious extraterrestrial grass. Unable to do anything about the plant creatures transforming his body, Verrill turns to suicide, but the weeds are undeterred, running across his property and out into the world. The story was adapted for the King anthology film Creepshow.

Pod People (Invasion of the Body Snatchers): The people of Santa Mira, California notice something strange about their loved ones, who look the same but no longer display any emotions. Soon, some of the townspeople discover the truth: huge pod plants are growing exact duplicates of existing humans, duplicates that go on to kill and replace their human counterparts.

Tybo (Lost in Space “The Great Vegetable Rebellion”): When Dr. Smith arrives on a planet of sentient plants, he makes the mistake of picking a flower and incurring the wrath of Tybo the giant carrot. Though hostile, Tybo isn’t exactly murderous. He just wants to turn the Robinsons into trees and Dr. Smith into a stalk of celery.

The Trees (Evil Dead): The first Evil Dead film has one of the more disturbing sequences of attack by vegetation when Cheryl is attacked and brutally raped by a demon-possessed tree. In Evil Dead II, Bobby Jo is also attacked by trees, although in a less horrific fashion.

The Doll’s Eye (Minority Report): When John Anderton goes to visit researcher Iris Hineman, he ends up tangoing with one of her more active vines, which delivers a poison into his bloodstream. Fortunately, Dr. Hineman keeps the antidote hand.

Audrey II (Little Shop of Horrors): Downtrodden Seymour Krelborn has a change in fortune when he brings the unusual plant Audrey II (named for his beloved coworker Audrey) to the flower shop where he works. He is somewhat less delighted when he realizes the plant needs human blood to survive, though he lets himself get talked into bringing her fresh human meat. Little does he know that Audrey II is, in fact, an alien bent on world domination.

Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan (Farscape): Zhaan is a Delvian, a species of sentient, meat-eating plants. If deprived of meat for too long, Delvians emit a toxic pollen which paralyzes potential victims with sneezing, making them easy prey. Zhaan herself turned to religion while serving a sentence for murder and, while generally a patient and tolerant person, does possess a darker side.

Swamp Thing (Swamp Thing): Following an explosion in his lab, chemist Alec Holland dies in a swamp, where his personality and memories are transferred to the swamp vegetation, becoming sentient. The elemental Swamp Thing becomes a fierce defender of humanity and the environment. Some of Swamp Thing’s foes are also plant-based, such as the Floronic Man, who was once human, but has gradually transformed himself into a plant.

All the Plants on Earth (The Happening): One day, the whole of the plant kingdom apparently decides that it’s had it with humanity and decides to do something about it. The plants release a neurotoxin that causes the affected to commit suicide, stopping when an adequate proportion of humanity is killed.

You know what this means, right? If humans could do the same thing with plant genes, we could become just like Popeye, eating a can of spinach to become mega-powered. Sadly, the human digestive tract isn't suited for kleptoplasty: All those acids in our stomach would just dissolve the DNA and leave it unsuitable for incorporation. We'll just have to rely on gene therapies to turn us into half-plants.

If you want to know more about E. chlorotica, New Scientist has a cool introduction to the life of solar slugs and their strange metabolism. Researchers have only just begun to study the creatures, and nobody is entirely sure how they manage to become photosynthetic. A new study has revealed that the creatures incorporate genes that they eat, but that their genomes also contain plant genes already. So these slugs have been swapping genetic material with algae for a long time.

This is not the only kind of sea slug that can live on solar power, either. There are a few other varieties. All of them have borrowed genetic material from the plants they eat.

Solar Powered Slug [via New Scientist]

Top image by M. Rumpho with digital enhancement by R.D. Lineberger, Texas A&M University. Bottom from PNAS.

A team from UC Santa Barbara is working on this very question, and they've just published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They believe Earth is in its sixth mass extinction, which will kill off nearly 50% of all plant and animal species. Figuring out which endangered plants to save may be the key to minimizing the ecological impact of this particular extinction:

"Losing a very unique species may be worse than losing one with a close relative in the community," said [co-author Todd] Oakley. "The more evolutionary history that is represented in a plant community, the more productive it is."

[Post-doctoral fellow Marc W.] Cadotte explained that the buttercup is a very unique species, evolutionarily. Losing the buttercup, where it occurs in grasslands, would have a much bigger impact on the system than losing a daisy or a sunflower, for example. The latter species are closely related. Each could therefore help fill the niche of the other, if one were to be lost. The daisy and sunflower also have a more similar genetic make-up.

It may be a sad day for the daisy, but ensuring the survival of a genetically diverse array of plant life will help ensure a sufficient level of biomass, and could reduce the devastation a mass extinction would cause.

Image by Martin Heigan.

Current Mass Extinction Spurs Major Study of Which Plants to Save [via Science Blog]

The EDITT Tower, which represents Ecological Design in the Tropics, was designed by Malaysian architecture firm TR Hamzah & Yeang with an eye toward sustainability, adaptability, and ecological improvement. It will employ photovoltaic panels to harness solar energy as well as a plant to convert sewage into biogas and fertilizer. Like many urban areas, Singapore’s ecosystem is considered “zero culture,” an ecologically devastated site cleared of vegetation. The plant life on the EDITT Tower will improve the region’s biodiversity and bring the populace in daily contact with a variety of plant life:

Approximately half of the surface area of the EDITT Tower will be wrapped in organic local vegetation, and passive architecture will allow for natural ventilation. Publicly accessible ramps will connect upper floors to the street level lined in shops, restaurants and plant life. The building has also been designed for future adaptability, with many walls and floors that can be moved or removed. In a city known for its downpours, the building will collect rainwater and integrate a grey-water system for both plant irrigation and toilet flushing with an estimated 55% self-sufficiency.

Singapore’s Ecological EDITT Tower [inhabitat]

Tree of Life is an effort to construct a huge genetic family tree connecting all the life forms on Earth. Determining how long a species has been a species by comparing its molecular evolution to similar life forms is an important part of figuring out all those relationships. While studying this, the Yale team figured out that plants with very short generations (that is, with the shortest "seed to stem" time) had very high rates of molecular evolution. Large, woody plants that reproduced at a more stately pace were not as genetically varied from one and other. To anyone who understands natural selection, this doesn't come as a big surprise, but plants act a bit differently from animals in this regard, so patterns of plant evolutionary speed had been elusive.

What can we do with this information? For one thing, it will be a major boon to Tree of Life and other genetic cataloging projects. But jump forward 20 years. Imagine computers powerful enough to create a virtual plant based on a fully sequenced genome. Imagine running that plant through tens of thousands of generations (even plants that usually evolve slowly), with the ability to set the parameters within the virtual environment. Instead of genetically modifying a plant by tweaking a base pair here and there, you could create genomes customized to specific conditions, refined by all those iterations of natural selection. Sure, we don't have the ability to take the resulting virtual genome and make it into a living thing, but we might in 20 years.

Which is all well and good until the night janitor decides to run some virtual mice through a few million generations in an ultra-competitive environment filled with deadly predators, then manages to process the resulting MegaMice through the sequencing/cloning machine. Image by: ausiegall.

Key To Rapid Evolution In Plants: Reproduce Early And Often. [Science Daily]

Stay Out Of The Basement:
A family father/scientist, Dr. Brewer, becomes obsessed with his flora experiments in the basement. His obsession begins to affect his behavior when his kids discover he bleeds green, is eating plant food and sleeping on dirt. It is later revealed that dear old dad was growing human clones from plants and the man they've been dealing with is really his plant clone. The real Dr. Brewer then destroys all of human and plant hybrids. But who's to say that's the real Dr. Brewer?

Why I'm Afraid Of Bees:
Gary Lutz's is a fan of computer role playing games. His computer games lead him to a company that advertises a real-life role playing game, where clients can switch bodies with other clients. Similar to The Fly, Gary accidentally gets stuck in the body of a bee that enters the machine during the switch. While his body has the mind of his partner, his partner's body is stuck with the mind of a bee, and Gary has the body of a bee.

Attack Of The Mutant:
Comic book fan Skipper Matthews is in fan-fantasy world when he discovers his favorite comic book characters have come to life in his town. Together he helps to defeat the villainous Masked Mutant. But unfortunately (or fortunately) Skipper gets sucked into their world (via ray gun) and becomes a real life comic book character as well, who bleeds ink.

Egg Monsters From Mars:
Dana (boys name) finds a mysterious egg and discovers that it's really from some crazy scientist. The egg hatches and the little monster becomes a pet to him. Of course the scientist will stop at nothing to get his eggs back, and the monster protects Dana, who later gets knocked up by one of the aliens.

The Cuckoo Clock of Doom:
This book was every siblings dream. Michael's bratty sister Tara is ruining his life and causing him embarrassment and beat downs from local bullies. For his birthday Michael receives a cuckoo clock that has the power of time travel. Michael figures out the switch and jumps back into time. Unfortunately for Michael he is stuck on a backwards loop that jumps him back year by year until he is a little baby. He figures out a way back, but manages to erase his sisters existence in the process.

Let's Get Invisible:
A mirror connected to a light switch allows a group of kids to turn themselves invisible. They all experiment on how long they can change back and forth until the connection fizzles and one child gets stuck in the mirror. The mirror world is another dimension where their evil twins have been trying to break out into the real world. By the end of the book you don't know who is the original character and who is their doppelganger.

Invasion of the Body Squeezers/ Revenge of the Body Squeezers (Part One And Two):
Very close to invasion of the body snatchers, but the aliens get into your body via hugs. In the second part though you get introduced to a whole host of new aliens that are trying to set off a bomb that would squeeze all humans into a tiny size.

Piano Lessons Can Be Murder:
This book straddles the scifi fence a little. Jerry is a little boy taking piano lessons from the deranged Dr. Shreek. The piano teacher is fascinated by Jerry's hands, and it's later revealed that Dr. Shreek is a large robot that harvests hands for his master. Granted Jerry gets saved by the ghosts of it's past victims...so not entirely scifi, but the still hand stealing robot helps.

Seeds that spread on the wind in cities mostly wind up dead on the concrete, while seeds that fall usually find a spot to grow in the same street plots or concrete cracks where their parents grew. (You can see the two kinds of seeds at left.) Because seeds grew up so close to home, the plants evolved super quickly — sort of an urban Galapagos Islands effect. (One of the ways that Darwin first observed natural selection was on a trip past the tiny, isolated Galapagos Islands, each of which had evolved its own unique types of finches that interbred quickly and in isolation from finches on other islands.)

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the researchers' study today, noting:

The authors took Crepis sancta seeds from several locations in the city of Montpellier, France, and grew the plants in a greenhouse, observing what fraction of seeds produced were of the light, easily dispersed type. Compared to plants from the countryside, plants from urban patches consistently produced fewer light seeds. Based on a mathematical model of breeding, the researchers estimate that the current version of urban Crepis sancta took approximately 12 years to evolve. They report that plants in a fragmented urban setting thus become doubly isolated, as reduced seed dispersal would likely lower gene flow and hence chances of species survival.

Rapid evolution of C. sancta [PNAS]

We're still on the fence about this flick, but it looks marginally like Signs 2. Only this time the aliens are the plants that we've been sharing the planet with all these years. Looks like they finally got pissed off about all the pollution and the vegetarians. Watching this reminds us that Shyamalan's Unbreakable was a great movie that got slammed for being too slow and unexciting, but in retrospect is well worth a second (and third) viewing. However, Signs never stops us from asking why aliens would come to a world coated in something that is severely lethal to them. We hope The Happening doesn't have similar plotholes in it.

Apparently the Earth's plants begin rebelling against mankind, and start releasing neurotoxins that cause everyone to go wacky and turn into lemmings. So all of that animal love and peace and harmony that vegetarians have been preaching to us for years will come back to bite them on the ass. Marky Mark takes his family on the run, runs into Zooey Deschanel while avoiding suicidal drivers, and there's undoubtedly some big twist at the end, like plants are sentient and have been screaming at us to stop eating salad for years. We just haven't heard them.

The strawberry was there, along with a photograph of the "jungle canopy" in a flower pot.

You can take the full tour, including tiny flowers, trees, and insects via Hails' miniature forest gallery.