A rainforest vine has evolved dish-shaped leaves to attract the bats that pollinate it

Tests revealed that the leaves were supremely efficient at bouncing back the sound pulses the flying mammals used to navigate.

When the leaves were present the bats located the plant twice as quickly as when these echoing leaves were removed.

A team of scientists in the UK and Germany reported its findings in the journal Science.

The study is the first to find a plant with "specialised acoustic features" to help bat pollinators find them using sound.

Most bats send out pulses of sound to find their way around; the way they sense objects in their environment by sensing how these pulses bounce off them is known as echolocation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14328999

Thank a genius

The Biomimicry Institute started a biodiversity conservation initiative to help protect the organisms and ecosystems helping humanity on its path towards sustainability.
Help protect the organism that inspires you, mentors you, that resulted in a breakthrough innovation. Afterall, shouldn't we honor the organisms and ecosystems that evolved these ingenious, sustainable ideas, and thank them for showing us the way?


http://www.asknature.org/article/view/thank_a_genius

Fish suction feeding vs Carnivorous bladderworts

...don't you see any similarities?

Meadow Salsify

Carnivorous bladderworts

Utricularia are carnivorous plants and capture small organisms by means of bladder-like traps.
High-speed cameras give scientists the chance to see carnivorous bladderworts suck in their prey — all in about half a millisecond.

Credit: Interdisciplinary Physics Lab/CNRS and Joseph Fourier University, Plant Biomechanics Group/University of Freiburg

Love this!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragopogon_dubius

How computer science meets plant world

It is interesting to see how biologist and computer scientists share their expertise to study the complex world of the early responses of higher plants to abiotic stresses such as drought, flooding, heat, cold, ozone, and salt. 

The key to understanding the stress responses is signal transduction pathways, and the way researchers of  the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech are addressing the problem is quite unusual:

They will archive signaling pathways for abiotic stress responses in a database, ”Beacon",  a new systems biology tool that allows the plant biologist to construct and edit signaling pathways. With this information, it will be possible to integrate current and future data over multiple scales of a cell’s organization and across species.

Their work should allow the computational and statistical means to assess if the activity of one molecule causes a response in a second molecule. Innovative components of the Beacon system allow the possibility of simulating particular environmental conditions in order to identify potential new connections in these networks.

Let's wait and see how things will go!


http://www.eng.vt.edu/news/plant-biology-meets-computational-wizardry