Author: Benjamin Blonder
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A world without mosquitoes
This is a very small orchid I had the good fortune to see while working in Costa Rica earlier this year. The full scale on the image is no more than an inch – you are looking at a very very small flower! Do you like it? You’ll be dismayed, then, to find out that…
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How to measure CO2 flux
How do we actually measure gas (carbon dioxide, water) flux for a plant, an animal, or an ecosystem? The answer relies on something called an IRGA, or an infrared gas analyzer. Different molecules absorb certain wavelengths of light. That means that if we shine the right kind of light on some molecule, we can measure…
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Layers of diversity
Leaves emerge through the fog as we drive through cloud forest. Visibility is no more than a few meters, and the road is mud beneath our wheels. The change is remarkable – just a few hours earlier we were in the sunny and sticky warmth of a moist tropical forest. It’s amazing how quickly plant…
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Like a soap bubble
I just returned from three weeks of botanical surveying in the forests of Costa Rica. I’ll write more about the trip – and what we found – in my next post, but for now I just want to share this lovely image. The plant you’re looking at was described to me as ‘una hoja plastica’,…