Bee Orchid

At 10x [magnification] the body shape of the flower was still just about legible. I could make out a covering of fine hairs. Whatever surface they were growing from looked papular and spongy. But I was drawn to the dark inverted triangle at the top, which looked as pubic as anything in a Palaeolithic fertility figure. Against my will I was already sexualising the flower, caught up in the orchid family’s famously sensual aura. At 50x the blooms were transformed into spangled landscapes. The individual hairs were clearly visible now, and tipped with iridescence, as if they carried tiny globules of dew. The whole surface of the plant had the glister of organza. And when I shifted to the dark patch, which now filled my whole field of view, I spotted two glowing crescents on either edge. They were made up of individual spots of blue, like tiny LED lights. I wondered if the light from the microscope lamp was producing these effects, but they were still there when I turned it off. A few minutes later, with the lamp back on, I noticed an extraordinary aroma rising from the blooms – musky, sweaty, meaty. I am sure this was the allomone – a chemical evolved in the plant to exactly mimic the female wasp’s sexual pheromone, and made perceptible to the human nose by the heat of the lamp.

excerpt from Cabaret of Plants by Richard Mabey

See also posts about plants including Led by the Nose on the blog of barely imagined beings. And here's a brief profile I wrote of Mabey last year.

Photo by Hectonichus

Wraenna

Murray Shanahan finishes his book The Technological Singularity like this:

As I watch a wren through the kitchen window, clinging to a hawthorn bush, I hope that we never lose sight of the things we already have that still matter, whatever the future holds.

This sends me back to Birds Britannica by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, who quote Max Nicholson:

The wren cannot adequately be described as a bird of woodlands, gardens, field, moors, marshes, cliffs or wastelands — although it is all of these — but must be looked at rather as a bird of cervices and crannies, of stems and twigs and branches, of woodpiles and fallen trees, of hedge-bottoms and banks, walls and boulders, wherever these may occur. Wrens cut across, or rather scramble under, the imaginary boundaries we are accustomed to draw between different types of country.

Cocker and Mabey also quote Jeremy Mynott on the St Kilda wren:

The bird is surely the wild spirit of the place. After all it has been there some 5000 years, whereas human occupation is thought to have lasted a 1000 years. Its piercing song can already be heard from among the rocks as you first approach the islands by boat, even above the noise of crashing waves and the cries of a million seabirds. The wren seems elemental — a tiny persistent life in these desolate landscapes governed by the huge impersonal forces of wind, tide and weather.

Image: RSPB

Omnicloakia Echolalia

The Patagonian vine Boquila trifoliolata.. is a thin-stalked woody climber which can spiral from ground level to high canopy, and is endemic to the temperate forests of South America. Its basic foliage pattern is composed of groups of three roughly spear-shaped leaves. What is not supposed to be possible is that these leaves are able to mimic the colour, shape, size and orientation of those of its host trees... Boquila’s leaves stay within the green-blue spectrum and keep their formation, but as the vine winds through the tree community over weeks and months, the leaves morph to resemble those of each new supporting species, even ones it may never have encountered before. In the space of few metres the leaves of a single vine can be as smooth as an ivy’s, more rounded like box, then bluish and deeply veined, then yellow-green, serrated, oval-ended...  

The Chilean researchers who discovered this mysterious legerdemain made a series of photographs of entwined trees, and had to insert arrows to point out which leaves belong to the vine and which to the host trees, so difficult are they to tell apart. ...They have no idea how the vine does its trick, except that, in being able to cope with unfamiliar situations, it is demonstrating the first principle of intelligence... 

from The Cabaret of Plants by Richard Mabey (2015).

See also Jerry Coyne