#kankuros

[botanyshitposts]

it's a joke mostly but 2 brand new species of Isoetes were described in the past few days in central america and i have nobody to talk to about their cambium. so i'm sending you an ask because it be like that

okay, first of all shoutout to @nauyak for linking the paper in the replies of the previous post. the article announcing the New Lads is here, published on September 5th, 2019, and seems to be open access. the two species were both discovered by reexamining some specimens in a south american herbarium; the species are Isoetes dubsii, collected from Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil in 1988, and Isoetes santacruzensis, collected from Ñuflo de Chávez, Bolivia in 1994. 

i immediately burst into tears in a public space within 2 seconds of seeing their scan of dubsii. look at this. look at this absolute chonker

the leaves are between 90 and 100 cm (between 35 and 39 inches) long. to put that in perspective, the leaves of the species native to my state, Isoetes melanopoda, can get up to 40 cm (15 inches) long on the larger side, and that’s like, impressive. i’m not sure if this is the largest species to date, but good lord, that’s literally a yard long. who allowed this to happen. this is an absolute unit.

one of the biggest things that caught my eye about this is:

 Ligula not observed in herbarium material. Velum rudimentary.

i wrote a whole ass thing about why this is freaky to me but after further Thots i have decided i need to email these people or something for clarification, like ‘hello, you don’t know me, please elaborate on this extremely specific Isoetes organ, like are you saying theres no ligula at all or like that its broken off on the specimen or…..’ 

other than that, the other lads. the squiggly boys. Isoetes santacruzensis. 

Labium present, persistent, cordate, 0.2–0.5 × 0.6–0.9 mm. Ligule not observed in herbarium material. Velum rudimentary to > 0.2 mm wide along the lateral edges of the sporangium.

so, this species has both a labium and a velum, but no ligule. which is….hm. or maybe nothing idk. anyway ive known Long Isoete™ and Ramen Noodle Isoete™ for an hour and i would die for either of them

[botanyshitposts]

"the lycophyte files " is posting quillwort memes..

oh.....thank god

[botanyshitposts]

I'm just emotionally invested in isoetes cambium in general, there is nothing special about the two new one's cambium. Just the fact that they're an ancient lineage that has a cambium and secondary growth at all, but Weird (because it's isoetes so everything is weird). You probably know more about isoetes and their cambium than me, I'm more of a Marchantia genetics kind of guy, i just love it a lot.

throwback to when i first started researching The Lads and all the stuff i was reading kept talking about like ‘the isoetid woody cambium’ and ‘Isoetes secondary growth’ and shit with all these diagrams showing cross sections describing the weird tissue anatomy, some papers going back to the late 1800s and some papers from like 3 years ago, all expressing the same confused sentiments with various degrees of comprehension, and for whatever reason i straight up did not believe it until i went to my uni’s herbarium, took out a specimen, put it down on a table and tapped the corm with a pen.

it made a loud hollow knocking sound. bc it’s wood. 

the thing is, idk what i expected, you know? even after reading all these papers sometimes straight up calling it ‘woody’ i just could not really grasp the full implications of this. like it didn’t really hit me until then that when the literature for this family says ‘Isoetes has an anomalous cambium’ (a really specific and badass term i see thrown around from time to time to encapsulate…That) what they mean is ‘this is a plant that used to be a very big woody tree several hundred million years ago. now it has reduced that very big trunk into a very tiny trunk, usually about an inch or two tall and wide, that is straight up wood despite looking like a common vegetative aquatic grass. because all it’s ancestors are extinct, there are tissues in this wood that we do not understand to this day, despite 200 years of anatomical study and our new(ish) knowledge of how the plant develops these structures on a cellular basis. this is quite literally an exceptionally old and tiny tree’. 

it’s yet another reason i really wish there was like, a single dedicated book that took all known Isoetes knowledge and compiled it all together. they always seem to get thrown to the sidelines, so you’ll only be able to find them in books titled “ferns and fern allies” or something like that where they’re lumped into the ‘fern ally’ section in a blurb lasting like, two pages, and usually that blurb carefully toes around discussing the more controversial aspects of their anatomy and just lists some very basic information. the best physical book resource i’ve found for Isoetes is “Morphology of Pteridophytes” by K.R. Sporne, which has a really nice extended chapter on the details of their anatomy complete with hand-drawn diagrams…but was written in 1962. wild

[botanyshitposts]

have you heard? they released two new brand models of isoetes...

im so distressed by this ask like i cant tell if this means like, two new species in general or two new species on the market for aquarium people or if this is just a shitpost because every new thing i learn about isoetes sounds like a shitpost.....pls if anyone has any isoetes news hmu

[kawaii-butt-crust-core]

With each note I get I will remove more of kankuros features

[thecaskofamontillado]

the best dog

thank u, she is indeed a wonderful dog child

[lesbiangunshow]

i followed just to unfollow for kyogre

THEN FUCKING GO