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Nipomo Mesa Lupine
''Lupinus nipomensis'' is a species of lupine known by the common name Nipomo Mesa lupine. It is endemic to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes on the California Central Coast. Specifically, the plant is limited to the Guadalupe Dunes at the southern border of San Luis Obispo County. There are five to seven colonies growing in a strip of sand dunes measuring less than three square miles in area. These colonies are generally considered to make up a single population.USFWSFinal Rule for Endangered Status for Four Plants from South Central Coastal California ''Federal Register'' March 20, 2000. The number of individual plants remaining has been observed to vary between 100 and 1,800, its abundance is not correlated to precipitation, is highly variable and exact mechanisms driving abundance unknown. This is a California state and federally listed endangered species. Nipomo Mesa lupine is a small, spreading annual herb with a stem reaching 10 to 50 centimeters in length. Each palmate leaf is ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alice Eastwood
__NOTOC__ Alice Eastwood (January 19, 1859 – October 30, 1953) was a Canadian American botanist. She is credited with building the botanical collection at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco. She published over 310 scientific articles and authored 395 land plant species names, the fourth-highest number of such names authored by any female scientist. There are seventeen currently recognized species named for her, as well as the genera ''Eastwoodia'' and '' Aliciella''. Biography Alice Eastwood was born on January 19, 1859, in Toronto, Canada, to Colin Skinner Eastwood and Eliza Jane Gowdey Eastwood. When she was six her mother died. The children were cared for by various relatives, and for a time, Alice and her sister were placed at the Oshawa Convent in Toronto. The family reunited with their father and moved to Denver, Colorado, in 1873. In 1879, she graduated as valedictorian from East Denver High School. For the next ten years, Eastwood would teach at h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthropod
Arthropods (, (gen. ποδός)) are invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton, a Segmentation (biology), segmented body, and paired jointed appendages. Arthropods form the phylum Arthropoda. They are distinguished by their jointed limbs and Arthropod cuticle, cuticle made of chitin, often Mineralization (biology), mineralised with calcium carbonate. The arthropod body plan consists of segments, each with a pair of appendages. Arthropods are bilaterally symmetrical and their body possesses an exoskeleton, external skeleton. In order to keep growing, they must go through stages of moulting, a process by which they shed their exoskeleton to reveal a new one. Some species have wings. They are an extremely diverse group, with up to 10 million species. The haemocoel, an arthropod's internal cavity, through which its haemolymph – analogue of blood – circulates, accommodates its interior Organ (anatomy), organs; it has an open circulatory system. Like their exteriors, the internal or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Endemic Flora Of California
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 s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lupinus
''Lupinus'', commonly known as lupin, lupine, or regionally bluebonnet etc., is a genus of plants in the legume family Fabaceae. The genus includes over 199 species, with centers of diversity in North and South America. Smaller centers occur in North Africa and the Mediterranean. They are widely cultivated, both as a food source and as ornamental plants, but are invasive to some areas. Description The species are mostly herbaceous perennial plants tall, but some are annual plants and a few are shrubs up to tall. An exception is the ''chamis de monte'' (''Lupinus jaimehintoniana'') of Oaxaca in Mexico, which is a tree up to tall. Lupins have soft green to grey-green leaves which may be coated in silvery hairs, often densely so. The leaf blades are usually palmately divided into five to 28 leaflets, or reduced to a single leaflet in a few species of the southeastern United States and eastern South America. The flowers are produced in dense or open whorls on an erect spik ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Habitat Fragmentation
Habitat fragmentation describes the emergence of discontinuities (fragmentation) in an organism's preferred environment (habitat), causing population fragmentation and ecosystem decay. Causes of habitat fragmentation include geological processes that slowly alter the layout of the physical environment (suspected of being one of the major causes of speciation), and human activity such as land conversion, which can alter the environment much faster and causes the extinction of many species. More specifically, habitat fragmentation is a process by which large and contiguous habitats get divided into smaller, isolated patches of habitats. Definition The term habitat fragmentation includes five discrete phenomena: * Reduction in the total area of the habitat * Decrease of the interior: edge ratio * Isolation of one habitat fragment from other areas of habitat * Breaking up of one patch of habitat into several smaller patches * Decrease in the average size of each patch of habitat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Botta's Pocket Gopher
Botta's pocket gopher (''Thomomys bottae'') is a pocket gopher native to western North America. It is also known in some sources as valley pocket gopher, particularly in California. Both the specific and common names of this species honor Paul-Émile Botta, a naturalist and archaeologist who collected mammals in California in 1827 and 1828. Description Botta's pocket gopher is a medium-sized gopher, with adults reaching a length of , including a tail of . The overall dental formula is . Males are larger, with a weight of , compared with in the females. Male pocket gophers are widely believed to continue growing throughout their life. However, size variation would indicate that some males are predisposed to be larger than others, and the largest male may not be the oldest. Coloration is highly variable, and has been used to help distinguish some of the many subspecies; it may also change over the course of a year as the animals molt. Both albino and melanistic individuals have al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Herbivore
A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage or marine algae, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouthparts adapted to rasping or grinding. Horses and other herbivores have wide flat teeth that are adapted to grinding grass, tree bark, and other tough plant material. A large percentage of herbivores have mutualistic gut flora that help them digest plant matter, which is more difficult to digest than animal prey. This flora is made up of cellulose-digesting protozoans or bacteria. Etymology Herbivore is the anglicized form of a modern Latin coinage, ''herbivora'', cited in Charles Lyell's 1830 ''Principles of Geology''.J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, eds. (2000) ''The Oxford English Dictionary'', vol. 8, p. 155. Richard Owen employed the anglicized term in an 1854 work on fossil teeth and skeletons. ''Herbivora'' is derived from Latin ''herba' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ehrharta Calycina
''Ehrharta calycina'' is a species of grass known by the common names perennial veldtgrass and purple veldtgrass. Distribution It is native to southern Africa; from South Africa (within the Cape Provinces, Free State and KwaZulu-Natal), Lesotho and Namibia. It grows in Veld grassland habits and on low-lying sandy areas. Description ''Ehrharta calycina'' is a highly variable perennial grass, often but not always rhizomatous. It usually reaches in height, but is known to grow much taller in favorable conditions. The inflorescence is a narrow to wide open array of spikelets light in color when new and becoming darker and tinted purple to reddish with age. Taxonomy The Latin specific epithet of ''calycina'' is derived from ''calycinus'' meaning like a calyx or with a prominent calyx. It was first described and published in Pl. Icon. Ined. on table 33 in 1789. Introduced / invasive species The grass is an introduced species, including places such as; California, Egypt, Hawaii, I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Invasive Species
An invasive species otherwise known as an alien is an introduced organism that becomes overpopulated and harms its new environment. Although most introduced species are neutral or beneficial with respect to other species, invasive species adversely affect habitats and bioregions, causing ecological, environmental, and/or economic damage. The term can also be used for native species that become harmful to their native environment after human alterations to its food webfor example the purple sea urchin (''Strongylocentrotus purpuratus'') which has decimated kelp forests along the northern California coast due to overharvesting of its natural predator, the California sea otter (''Enhydra lutris''). Since the 20th century, invasive species have become a serious economic, social, and environmental threat. Invasion of long-established ecosystems by organisms is a natural phenomenon, but human-facilitated introductions have greatly increased the rate, scale, and geographic range of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gall
Galls (from the Latin , 'oak-apple') or ''cecidia'' (from the Greek , anything gushing out) are a kind of swelling growth on the external tissues of plants, fungi, or animals. Plant galls are abnormal outgrowths of plant tissues, similar to benign tumors or warts in animals. They can be caused by various parasites, from viruses, fungi and bacteria, to other plants, insects and mites. Plant galls are often highly organized structures so that the cause of the gall can often be determined without the actual agent being identified. This applies particularly to some insect and mite plant galls. The study of plant galls is known as cecidology. In human pathology, a gall is a raised sore on the skin, usually caused by chafing or rubbing. Causes of plant galls Insects and mites Insect galls are the highly distinctive plant structures formed by some herbivorous insects as their own microhabitats. They are plant tissue which is controlled by the insect. Galls act as both the habitat a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthomyiidae
The Anthomyiidae are a large and diverse family of Muscoidea flies. Most look rather like small houseflies, but are commonly drab grey. The genus ''Anthomyia'', in contrast, is generally conspicuously patterned in black-and-white or black-and-silvery-grey. Most are difficult to identify, apart from a few groups such as the kelp flies that are conspicuous on beaches. The name Anthomyiidae was derived from Greek ''anthos'' (flower) plus ''myia'' (a fly). Some species are commonly called "root-maggots", as the larvae are found in the stems and roots of various plants. As larvae, some also feed on decaying plant material. The well-known grey "seaweed flies" or "kelp flies" (''Fucellia'') are examples. Others are scavengers in such places as birds' nests; yet other species are leaf miners; the family also includes inquilines, commensals, and parasitic larvae. Some species in the family are significant agricultural pests, particularly some from the genus '' Delia'', which includ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trigonoscuta
''Trigonoscuta'' is a genus of broad-nosed weevils in the family of beetles known as Curculionidae. There are at least 60 described species in ''Trigonoscuta''. Species These 67 species belong to the genus ''Trigonoscuta'': * '' Trigonoscuta anacapensis'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta arenicola'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta baileyae'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta blaisdelli'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta brunneotesselata'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta carneyi'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta catalina'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta clemente'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta coxcombi'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta cronise'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta cruzi'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta curviscroba'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta dalei'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta deserti'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta dorothea'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta franciscana'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta gualalae'' Pierce, 1975 * '' Trigonoscuta hendryi'' Pierce, 1975 * ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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