This is how a plant gets ready to disperse its seeds: in this species, windblown, using silk-like fluff to float in the wind.
This is Asclepias curassavica, a tropical milkweed plant of Mexico, Guatemala and other Neotropical countries, which I call the monarch butterfly flower. We raise this in the FLAAR Mayan Ethnobotanical Garden in Guatemala.
Every several months we at FLAAR Mesoamerica, cooperating with FLAAR (in USA), start new research themes. This week Elena suggested seed dispersal by birds and mammals. So I will add a co-project: seed dispersal techniques of plants themselves.
Here in Guatemala the giant Ceiba pentandra trees have silk-like kapok fluff to act as a floating parachute. So the seeds blow in the wind several to many meters away from the parent tree.
We will first identify all trees and bushes and plants of Guatemala which use fluff-like material to facilitate the wind blowing the seeds as far as possible. One of the obvious plants is the “monarch butterfly flower” seed: Asclepias species. We grow these in our Mayan Ethnobotanical Research Garden precisely to attract monarch butterflies.
Already five years ago we studied explosive seed dispersal in depth.
We have a video showing these pods exploding to disperse their seeds.
So season by season we will gradually add new seed dispersal themes to our research. We specialize in high-definition, well illuminated digital photography. The picture shown here is with a Nikon D810 because our Nikon D5 is mainly useful when we need super high ISO or burst-shutter setting. Erick Flores did 5X close-ups of the Asclepias seeds which we will be glad to publish as soon as outside funding comes our way.
To learn about digital camera equipment and increase your knowledge from our digital photography experience, visit www.digital-photography.org.
Posted Nov. 29, 2017
