|
Babiana Ringens
''Babiana ringens'', the rat's tail, is a flowering plant endemic to Cape Province of South Africa. The foliage is long and erect with an inflorescence consisting of a sterile main stalk adapted for ornithophily, pollination by birds. The plant bears bright red, tubular flowers on side branches close to the ground. It is a perennial that grows in nutrient-poor sandy soil and flowers during the winter rains. The main stalk acts as a perch for birds, enabling birds to land within reach of the plant's flowers. The adaptation of the stalk was first noticed by Rudolf Marloth The bird that is the main pollinator of the plant is the malachite sunbird (''Nectarinia famosa''). The male sunbird is twice as likely to perch on the stalk as the female and, on average, spends four times longer on a perch. The stalk does seem to play a role in pollination as plants without a stalk produced only half as many seeds and see less cross-pollination as plants with a stalk intact. Accessing the flowe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as . Linnaeus was born in Råshult, the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden. He received most of his higher education at Uppsala University and began giving lectures in botany there in 1730. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published the first edition of his ' in the Netherlands. He then returned to Sweden where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Bellenden Ker Gawler
John Bellenden Ker, originally John Gawler, was an English botanist born about 1764 in Ramridge, Andover, Hampshire and died in June 1842 in the same town. On 5 November 1804 he changed his name to Ker Bellenden, but continued to sign his name as Bellenden Ker until his death. He was an unsuccessful claimant to the Roxburghe dukedom. His son was the legal reformer Charles Henry Bellenden Ker. He is noted for having written ''Recensio Plantarum'' (1801), ''Select Orchideae'' (c. 1816) and ''Iridearum Genera'' (1827). He contributed to Curtis's Botanical Magazine under John Sims, using the initial G. He edited Edward's Botanical Register from 1815 to 1824 and was famous as a wit and botanist as well as being the author of ''Archaeology of Popular Phrases and Nursery Rhymes'' (1837). The 2nd volume of this work was published in 1840. Robert Brown (1773–1858) named the genus '' Bellendena'' of the Proteaceae in his honour in 1810. The state of Queensland in Australia has named ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flowering Plant
Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae (), commonly called angiosperms. The term "angiosperm" is derived from the Greek words ('container, vessel') and ('seed'), and refers to those plants that produce their seeds enclosed within a fruit. They are by far the most diverse group of land plants with 64 orders, 416 families, approximately 13,000 known genera and 300,000 known species. Angiosperms were formerly called Magnoliophyta (). Like gymnosperms, angiosperms are seed-producing plants. They are distinguished from gymnosperms by characteristics including flowers, endosperm within their seeds, and the production of fruits that contain the seeds. The ancestors of flowering plants diverged from the common ancestor of all living gymnosperms before the end of the Carboniferous, over 300 million years ago. The closest fossil relatives of flowering plants are uncertain and contentious. The earliest angiosperm fossils ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endemic
Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsewhere. For example, the Cape sugarbird is found exclusively in southwestern South Africa and is therefore said to be ''endemic'' to that particular part of the world. An endemic species can be also be referred to as an ''endemism'' or in scientific literature as an ''endemite''. For example '' Cytisus aeolicus'' is an endemite of the Italian flora. '' Adzharia renschi'' was once believed to be an endemite of the Caucasus, but it was later discovered to be a non-indigenous species from South America belonging to a different genus. The extreme opposite of an endemic species is one with a cosmopolitan distribution, having a global or widespread range. A rare alternative term for a species that is endemic is "precinctive", which applies to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cape Province
The Province of the Cape of Good Hope ( af, Provinsie Kaap die Goeie Hoop), commonly referred to as the Cape Province ( af, Kaapprovinsie) and colloquially as The Cape ( af, Die Kaap), was a province in the Union of South Africa and subsequently the Republic of South Africa. It encompassed the old Cape Colony, as well as Walvis Bay, and had Cape Town as its capital. In 1994, the Cape Province was divided into the new Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Western Cape provinces, along with part of the North West. History When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, the original Cape Colony was renamed the Cape Province. It was by far the largest of South Africa's four provinces, as it contained regions it had previously annexed, such as British Bechuanaland (not to be confused with the Bechuanaland Protectorate, now Botswana), Griqualand East (the area around Kokstad) and Griqualand West (area around Kimberley). As a result, it encompassed two-thirds of South Africa's terr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe; and to the east and northeast by Mozambique and Eswatini. It also completely enclaves the country Lesotho. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World, and the second-most populous country located entirely south of the equator, after Tanzania. South Africa is a biodiversity hotspot, with unique biomes, plant and animal life. With over 60 million people, the country is the world's 24th-most populous nation and covers an area of . South Africa has three capital cities, with the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government based in Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Cape Town respectively. The largest city is Johannesburg. About 80% of the population are Black South Afri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ornithophily
Ornithophily or bird pollination is the pollination of flowering plants by birds. This sometimes (but not always) coevolutionary association is derived from insect pollination (entomophily) and is particularly well developed in some parts of the world, especially in the tropics, Southern Africa, and on some island chains. The association involves several distinctive plant adaptations forming a "pollination syndrome". The plants typically have colourful, often red, flowers with long tubular structures holding ample nectar and orientations of the stamen and stigma that ensure contact with the pollinator. Birds involved in ornithophily tend to be specialist nectarivores with brushy tongues and long bills, that are either capable of hovering flight or light enough to perch on the flower structures. Plant adaptations Plant adaptations for ornithophily can be grouped primarily into those that attract and facilitate pollen transfer by birds, and those that exclude other groups, primaril ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Babiana Ringens2
''Babiana'' ()''Sunset Western Garden Book'', 1995:606–607 is a genus of geophytes in the family Iridaceae with 93 recognized species . The leaves consist of a stalk and a blade that are at an angle to each other. The leaf blades are entire, laterally flattened and pleated, and often hairy. Each individual flower is subtended by two hairy or smooth bracts that are green in most species. The outer bract is often the largest of the two. In most species the bracts have a dry, brown tip, but in a few species it is entirely green or entirely dry when flowering or the outer bract is translucent and has a papery texture. The inner bract (between the flower and the stem) is forked or split all the way to its base. Each flower is without a pedicel, with six tepals that are merged at their base into a tube and form a perianth that is mirror-symmetrical in most species, with three anthers implanted where the perianth tube widens and that are, in almost every species, clustered at one side o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rudolf Marloth
Hermann Wilhelm Rudolf Marloth (28 December 1855 Lübben, Germany – 15 May 1931 Caledon, Cape Province) was a German-born South African botanist, pharmacist and analytical chemist, best known for his ''Flora of South Africa'' which appeared in six superbly illustrated volumes between 1913 and 1932. This botanist is denoted by the author abbreviation when citing a botanical name. Biography Early life Marloth studied pharmacy in Lübben from 1873-1876. after which he worked at various pharmacies in Germany and Switzerland, then formally qualified as a pharmacist at the University of Berlin. In 1883 he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis "''The protective mechanisms employed by seeds against harmful agents''". He arrived in Cape Town on 30 December 1883 after being urged to do so by a schoolfriend who had already settled there. During his first year there he worked as a pharmacist for the firm of Wentzel and Schleswig. He was enthralled by Cape Town and Table Mountain and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pollinator
A pollinator is an animal that moves pollen from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma of a flower. This helps to bring about fertilization of the ovules in the flower by the male gametes from the pollen grains. Insects are the major pollinators of most plants, and insect pollinators include all families of bees and most families of aculeate wasps; ants; many families of flies; many lepidopterans (both butterflies and moths); and many families of beetles. Vertebrates, mainly bats and birds, but also some non-bat mammals (monkeys, lemurs, possums, rodents) and some lizards pollinate certain plants. Among the pollinating birds are hummingbirds, honeyeaters and sunbirds with long beaks; they pollinate a number of deep-throated flowers. Humans may also carry out artificial pollination. A pollinator is different from a pollenizer, a plant that is a source of pollen for the pollination process. Background Plants fall into pollination syndromes that reflect the type o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malachite Sunbird
The malachite sunbird (''Nectarinia famosa'') is a small nectarivorous bird found from the highlands of Ethiopia southwards to South Africa. They pollinate many flowering plants, particularly those with long corolla tubes, in the Fynbos. Taxonomy The sunbirds are a group of small Old World passerine birds, and are placed within the family Nectariniidae, which is found across Africa, the Middle East and into South-east Asia. Also called green sugarbird. The malachite sunbird has two subspecies. The nominate ''N. f. famosa ''occurs mainly in South Africa, Lesotho and western Eswatini, although its range just extends into southern Namibia and Zimbabwe. ''N. f. cupreonitens'' breeds in the highlands from Ethiopia south to northern Mozambique. Description The breeding male malachite sunbird, which has very long central tail feathers, is 25 cm long, and the shorter-tailed female 15 cm. The adult male is metallic green when breeding, with blackish-green wings with small y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pollination
Pollination is the transfer of pollen from an anther of a plant to the stigma of a plant, later enabling fertilisation and the production of seeds, most often by an animal or by wind. Pollinating agents can be animals such as insects, birds, and bats; water; wind; and even plants themselves, when self-pollination occurs within a closed flower. Pollination often occurs within a species. When pollination occurs between species, it can produce hybrid offspring in nature and in plant breeding work. In angiosperms, after the pollen grain (gametophyte) has landed on the stigma, it germinates and develops a pollen tube which grows down the style until it reaches an ovary. Its two gametes travel down the tube to where the gametophyte(s) containing the female gametes are held within the carpel. After entering an ovum cell through the micropyle, one male nucleus fuses with the polar bodies to produce the endosperm tissues, while the other fuses with the ovule to produce the embr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
_and_his_brother_John_Bellenden_Ker_(1765-1842)_holding_a_portfolio%2C_as_children_with_their_dog_by_Henry_Bone.jpg "Click for more on -> John Bellenden Ker Gawler")
.JPG "Click for more on -> Flowering Plant")
.jpg "Click for more on -> Endemic")
_(8317250191).jpg "Click for more on -> Babiana Ringens2")
_2.jpg "Click for more on -> Malachite Sunbird")
