mr-damon/nature

"As you start this year's yard work and lawn care and are dreading the thought of mowing grass and applying fertilizer and weed killer, take a step back and think of the native possibilities. There are countless ways to incorporate native vegetation into your home landscape. Start one plant at a time--or create a whole new flower bed.

"Why native plants? Native prairie and woodland plants evolved in this climate and can handle the cold deep freeze, the spring rains and the hot drought conditions that we experience here in northern Illinois. Once they are established, generally after the first growing season, they rarely need to be watered and they do not require any fertilizer."

When animals and plants die, they decompose and become nutrients for new forms of life. Why should we deny ourselves of Mother Earth's beautiful cycle? Modern cemeteries separate the deceased from natural cycles by embalming them in toxic chemicals, boxing them in steel caskets and concrete burial vaults, and drenching the funeral grounds with pesticides.

Natural cemeteries are resisting these modern trends by bringing back simpler and traditional 'dust to dust' burials. These sites do not permit embalming, or caskets made of steel or precious hardwoods like rainforest woods. Instead people are buried closer to the earth, inside shrouds, cardboard or pine coffins. The body's decomposition can therefore nourish the earth, creating nutrient-rich soil for trees, wildflowers, and native vegetation. Instead of large headstones, the graves are marked with small fieldstones or with native trees or bushes. Grave sights are plotted with GPS to make sure loved ones can always find the proper sight if the natural landscape eventually grows to look entirely different.

The sea rocket, researchers report, can distinguish between plants that are related to it and those that are not. And not only does this plant recognize its kin, but it also gives them preferential treatment.

If the sea rocket detects unrelated plants growing in the ground with it, the plant aggressively sprouts nutrient-grabbing roots. But if it detects family, it politely restrains itself.

The finding is a surprise, even a bit of a shock, in part because most animals have not even been shown to have the ability to recognize relatives, despite the huge advantages in doing so.

If an individual can identify kin, it can help them, an evolutionarily sensible act because relatives share some genes. The same discriminating organism could likewise ramp up nasty behavior against unrelated individuals with which it is most sensible to be in claws- or perhaps thorns-bared competition.

"I'm just amazed at what we've found," said Susan A. Dudley, an evolutionary plant ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who carried out the study with a graduate student, Amanda L. File.

"Plants," Dr. Dudley said, "have a secret social life."

"This site originated in 1999 as a way to put all the plant photos and information I was gathering into one place for my own personal reference and understanding. Hypertext is magical because you can go off in any direction you want, which is sort of how my research projects tend to go, so it seemed like the perfect medium. It lived just on my computer for some time before it occurred to me that it would be really simple to put it on the internet."

Around 10 varieties of luminescent mushroom are believed to grow in Japan, and many more exist in other parts of the world. The variety of luminescent fungus that Otsuki studies is called Mycena lux-coeli, or "heavenly light mushrooms," a variety that glows a bright greenish-white. In daylight, the 1- to 2-cm-wide mushrooms resemble Japan's well-known brown enoki mushrooms, and for a long time they were thought to exist only on tiny Hachijo-jima Island 300 km south of Tokyo, where they were known to locals as hato-no-hi, which translates as "pigeon fire" -- as they were officially named in 1954.