Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Life Sciences - Botany

Mushrooms magically spew forth from the earth in the hours that follow a summer rain. Fuzzy brown molds mischievously turn forgotten peaches to slime in the kitchen fruit bowl. And in thousands of other ways, members of the kingdom Fungi do their part to make life on Earth the miracle that it is. In this lively book, George Hudler leads us on a tour of an often-overlooked group of organisms, which differ radically from both animals and plants. Along the way the author stops to ponder the marvels of nature and the impact of mere microbes on the evolution of civilization. Nature's ultimate...

This book maintains that higher plants manifest some degree of sexual selection, and it begins to build a framework that unifies many features of plant reproduction previously considered unrelated. Reviewing evidence for sexual selection in plants, the authors discuss possible male-female interactions, concluding with an extensive set of hypotheses for testing.

Mechanisms that could be employed in sexual selection in plants include various cellular mechanisms, such as both nuclear and cytoplasmic genetics, B chromosomes, and paternal contributions to the zygote, as well as...

Although ecologists have long considered morphology and life history to be important determinants of the distribution, abundance, and dynamics of plants in nature, this book contains the first theory to predict explicitly both the evolution of plant traits and the effects of these traits on plant community structure and dynamics. David Tilman focuses on the universal requirement of terrestrial plants for both below-ground and above-ground resources. The physical separation of these resources means that plants face an unavoidable tradeoff. To obtain a higher proportion of one resource, a...

Aquatic Photosynthesis is a comprehensive guide to understanding the evolution and ecology of photosynthesis in aquatic environments. This second edition, thoroughly revised to bring it up to date, describes how one of the most fundamental metabolic processes evolved and transformed the surface chemistry of the Earth. The book focuses on recent biochemical and biophysical advances and the molecular biological techniques that have made them possible.

In ten chapters that are self-contained but that build upon information presented earlier, the book starts with a...

White settlers did learn a few plant-based remedies from the Indians, and a few prairie plants were prescribed by frontier doctors. A couple dozen prairie species were listed as drugs in the U.S. Pharmacopeia at one time or another, and one or two, like the Purple Coneflower, found their way into the bottles of patent medicine.

But in both the number of species used and the varieties of treatments administered, Indians...