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SO ENDS this two weekend indulgence in the topic of plant body plan evolution. For younger readers, it is a glimpse into the thought life of botanists who are concerned with these issues, and whose life revolves around figuring out how they came about; it is a rate chance, from the comfort of your own chair, to walk in the shoes of another person in an intellectually intimate way. This is true for all these postings, in their different disciplines. View in LinkedIn

CONVERGED OR DIVERSIFIED. "This body plan classification scheme draws sharp attention to the extent to which body plans have diversified within or converged among the various plant lineages and how they have become confined in number in evolutionarily more derived groups." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/85/4/411.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

MAGNETIC FIELD LINES. “The magnetic compass of birds works in a way that is very different from our technical compass: it is an inclination compass that ignores polarity and instead relies on the course of the field lines and their inclination; it is finely tuned to the intensity of the local magnetic field in a narrow, but flexible functional window, and it requires short-wavelengths of light.” https://lnkd.in/dmczyTc View in LinkedIn

BODY PLAN IRRELEVANT. "Although a number of growing point (meristematic) characteristics collectively influence whether a variety of morphological and anatomical features are achieved in a particular body part or plan (e.g. the duration of activity and the number of cells involved at each location, as well as the extent to which cells, tissues or organs differentiate or differ in symmetry, number, etc.), none of these features is considered here to be especially relevant to the fundamental distinctions that can be drawn among the four basic plant body plans." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/85/4/411.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

MAGNETIC TRIGGERS. “In addition to direct uses for orientation and navigation, magnetic information also seems to be able to influence other physiological processes, such as fattening and migratory motivation, as a trigger for changes in behavior.” https://lnkd.in/eUbuD-a View in LinkedIn

MULTIPLICITY FROM SIMPLICITY. "Since each of these three multicellular variants can involve diffuse, trichothallic, intercalary, or apical cell divisions, or some combination of all four, a large number of multi-cellular body plan variants can be codified (i.e. 3 cell division planes, 5 meristematic locations, 15 variants de minimis), although the usefulness of doing so is questionable." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/85/4/411.full.pdf View in LinkedIn

MAGNETIC GUIDES. “It has been clearly demonstrated that birds are able to sense the compass direction of the Earth’s magnetic field and that they can use this information as part of a compass sense. Magnetic information could also be useful as part of a map sense, and there is a growing body of evidence that birds are able to determine their approximate position on the Earth on the basis of geo-magnetic cues.” https://lnkd.in/eUbuD-a View in LinkedIn

GREAT MIGRATIONS. “The monarch butterfly is able to migrate thousands of miles across the North American continent, a journey so long that it incredibly requires at least two generations to complete it! No less baffling is the migratory behavior of some other animals: for example, the Manx shearwater, a fast-flying seabird, that can glide and plane its way to breeding grounds across the Atlantic Ocean, and the Pacific salmon that returns to the very stream where it was hatched after 2 years of wandering thousands of miles at sea.” https://lnkd.in/d5Zy7J8 View in LinkedIn

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