Eight strange tricks of flowers and seeds · Deep Cuts

The sacred lotus keeps its flower warm-blooded

A blooming sacred lotus holds its flower at 30 to 36 degrees Celsius for two to four days, even as the surrounding air swings between 10 and 45, turning up the heat as the night gets colder. It burns sugar through a special branch of respiration to make the warmth, producing up to a watt of heat. The warm bloom rewards its beetle pollinators with a heated shelter and helps lift its scent into the cool night air.

A dandelion seed flies on a ring of spinning air

When a dandelion seed drifts off, its crown of about 100 fine bristles does not work like a parachute. Air slipping through the gaps spins up a doughnut-shaped whirl of recirculating air, a separated vortex ring that floats detached just above the seed and steadies its fall. Discovered in 2018, the trick makes the bristly tuft roughly four times more efficient at staying aloft than a solid canopy of the same size would be.

This plant dries to a dead ball, then revives

The resurrection plant can lose almost all of its water and survive. As it dries it curls its stems into a tight brown ball that may sit dormant for years, looking utterly dead. Add water and within hours it uncurls, greens up, and resumes photosynthesis. The secret is sugars such as trehalose that turn the inside of its cells into a protective glass, holding delicate structures intact until the rains finally return.

The squirting cucumber fires its seeds like a cannon

The squirting cucumber loads its fruit like a hydraulic gun. Pressure inside the spongy oval fruit climbs to nearly one full atmosphere, and when the ripe fruit snaps off its stalk it blasts a jet of slime and seeds straight out the hole left behind. The launch lasts about 30 milliseconds, hurling seeds at up to 20 meters per second and as far as 10 meters, roughly 250 times the length of the fruit itself.

The bee orchid disguises itself as a female bee

The bee orchid grows a furry, patterned lip that mimics a female bee in look, texture, and scent, even copying her sex pheromone. Male bees try to mate with the flower, a behavior called pseudocopulation, and leave dusted with pollen to carry to the next decoy. No nectar reward is offered at all; the whole strategy runs on deception. Where its particular bee is absent, the flower simply pollinates itself instead.

Two leaves, up to two thousand years old

Welwitschia, of the Namib Desert, grows just two strap-shaped leaves in its entire life, the same pair it sprouted as a seedling, never shed, growing endlessly from the base while their tips fray and split in the wind. Many plants live 500 to 600 years, and the oldest are estimated near 2,000. Across a single millennium one plant can grow up to 150 meters of leaf, drinking coastal fog in one of the driest places on Earth.

A flower with no green that feeds through fungi

Ghost pipe is a waxy, translucent-white plant with no chlorophyll at all, so it never photosynthesizes. Instead it taps the underground fungal threads that link forest trees, siphoning off sugars the trees made and the fungi were ferrying. It is a three-way arrangement in which the ghost pipe quietly cheats, parasitizing fungi that behave as if they are trading fairly. That is how it can bloom in deep, dark shade where green plants cannot.

Hold a match near this flower and it flashes alight

The gas plant, nicknamed burning bush, weeps a lemon-scented oil rich in volatile compounds such as isoprene. On a hot, still evening enough vapor can gather around the flower spikes and old seed pods that a match held nearby ignites a brief puff of flame, a quick flash that flares and vanishes without harming the plant itself. The same fragrant oils can blister skin that is later exposed to sunlight.