“So Batman came up to me & he hit me over the head with a vase & he went ‘T’PAU!’ I said ‘Don’t you mean KAPOW?’ He said ‘No, I’ve got china in my hand. “So this bloke says to me, ‘Can I come in your house and talk about your carpets?’ I thought ‘That’s all I need, a Je-hoover’s witness.'” “I bought some Armageddon cheese today, and it said on the packet ‘Best Before End…'” I said ‘Do you earn a living doing that?’ He said ‘Yes, this is my livelihood.'” “And the back of his anorak was leaping up and down, and people were chucking money to him. I thought ‘That’s a turn-up for the books.'” “He said ‘I’m going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library’. “My next door neighbour worships exhaust pipes. “You know, I’m not very good at magic – I can only do half of a trick. I said, ‘Can I buy a goldfish?’ The guy said, ‘Do you want an aquarium?’ I said, ‘I don’t care what star sign it is.'” Or you can check out the science paper from Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra that started it all.“I went in to a pet shop. To find out more about Boquila trifoliolata, you can start where I did, with Ed Yong’s wonderful post from a couple of years ago, then go on to geneticist Jerry Coyne’s post, which asks a barrage of provocative and stimulating questions, and finish up with Richard Mabey’s short essay in The Cabaret of Plants. I can’t wait to find out what it’s doing, because whatever it is, it’s whispering that plants are far more talented than we’d ever imagined. This little vine is sitting on a gigantic secret. A knock, knock, knocking on the animal kingdom’s door? Or do plants have their own secret ways of reckoning, totally unknown to us? If Boquila can do this, surely there are others. Intellect, we like to think, requires a nervous system like our own, which is an animal thing, except that, as Mabey writes, “n being able to cope with unfamiliar situations, is demonstrating the first principle of intelligence.” It’s against the rules to call a plant “smart” the way we might call a dolphin smart brainless beings aren’t properly called intelligent. “It’s hard for us to grasp that there are … ‘scents’ that we cannot smell, but which plants, noseless and brainless, can,” writes science journalist Richard Mabey in his new book The Cabaret of Plants. The signal could be written in light, in scents, or perhaps in a form of gene transfer. How the vine translates chemicals into shapes and then into self-sculpture nobody knows. They imagine that the bush or tree may be emitting airborne chemicals (volatiles) that drift across, like so … If you do not wish to receive further emails from Off The Vine Day Spa (647 Camino De Los Mares Suite 224, San Clemente, CA 92673). Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra think perhaps something is going on in the space between the two plants. But this plant can hang-literally hang-alongside a host tree, with empty space between it and its model, and, with no eyes, nose, mouth, or brain, it can “see” its neighbor and copy what it has “seen.” How Does It Do This? in Riverstone offers a unique small plate dining and wine bar experience. Most mimicry in the animal kingdom involves physical contact. Vine & Olive Eatery and Wine Bar on Main St. When it glides up a bush or tree that it’s never encountered before, it can still mimic what’s near.Īnd that’s the wildest part: It doesn’t have to touch what it copies. Boquila feels more like a cuttlefish or an octopus it can morph into at least eight basic shapes. There are some-orchids for example-that can copy other flowers, but their range is limited to one or two types. No plant known to science has been able to mimic a variety of neighbors.
But what’s really intriguing about this vine is how it does what it does: It’s been called the “stealth vine” because, like the classified American spy plane, its inner workings are still a secret. Gianoli and his co-author, Fernando Carrasco-Urra, reported that when the vine is mimicking its neighbors higher up, it gets chewed on less. Whatever the reason, mimicry seems to work. This is called Batesian mimicry, when a harmless species tries to look like a very bad meal. Or maybe the vine is assuming the shape of leaves that are toxic to the caterpillar. But if our vine is hiding among the many, many leaves of the tree, each vine leaf has a smaller chance of being chewed on.
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