…the life of the annuals.

This blog is about the things that I know and like, which means that it is all about cooking, fashion, scouting and biology, really. And as I am doing a Master of Science, I get a lot of impulses from different parts of biology. Tomorrow there is a PhD defence at the department of biology and therefore there have been two guest lectures today by the two opponents.

The one talked about local adaptation of plants of one species which they had translocated between two locations. So plants in Sweden were picked and grown in Italy, and Italian plants were picked and grown in Sweden. And then they looked at the genetics of the plant (the world famous Arabidopsis thaliana) in the context of the plants ecology. If you know nothing of biology, don’t care about this. But the remarkable ting is; after working of this for years they did a giant genetic study and they planted over 16 000 specimens! There is a youtube video of the field work they did.

The other guy talked about perennials and annuals. Being a perennial means that you are a plant that lives for many years, while an annual is a plant that only lives for one season. Which means that they are the real rock stars of the world, they live fast and die young. The different life histories, as they are called, that organisms “choose” are interesting to study in evolutionary biology. And since evolutionary biology is my life, this has been a very interesting lecture 🙂