Cnidarians

Cnidaria is a phylum containing over 10 000 species of of animals found in the water that include jellyfish, anemonies, and similar animals.
Feeding:
All cnidarians are carnivores. They can filter food particles out of the water, they can obtain food by predation, they can absorb dissolving organic chemicals. But the majority of cniderians obtain their food by predation.

Respiration:
Cnidarians do not have a respiratory system and do not use the typical trachae, gills, or lungs to respire. They absord oxygen through cell layers and expel carbon dioxide into the surronding water.

Circulation:
Firstly a circulatory system is needed to transfer oxygen and nutrients to all cells of the body. Therefore, cnideria's have no need for a circulatory system as all their cells are constantly intact with water which contains all the oxygen and nutrients the simple animals need.

Excretion
Cnidarians have one cannal-like cavity in their layered bodies that is used for ingestion and excretion. Gaseous wastes are eliminated by diffusion and solid wastes in dissolved or un-dissolved form pass out through the opening in their body.

Response
Cnidarians have no brain or even a central nervous system. Instead they have nerve nets that consist of sensory neutrons that react to stimuli like odors that tell the muscles to contract.

Movement
Hydras and anemonies can slowly creep like snails, crawl like inchworms, or somersault over top of rocks. Jellyfish on the other hand swim by jet propultion. muscles, especially inside the rim of the bell, squeeze water out of the cavity inside the bell, and the springiness of the mesoglea powers the recovery stroke.

Reproduction:
Cnidarians can reproduce both sexually and asexually. In asexual reproduction, new individuals arise from bits of tissue that are budded off from a parent, or by a parent dividing lengthwise or crosswise into two smaller individuals. In sexual reproduction larva known as planula develops from a zygote.

 

 

Snails!

Alright so a new species of the ever so lovely snail was found recently and its got a translucent shell! This new species named Zospeum tholussum is tiny and was found 3,000 feet underground and appears to be blind, which is not surprising as it was found in on of earths deepest darkest caves

Scientists only found this one alive but found shells of over snails.

The species was found in the Lukina Jama-Trojama cave system in Croatia. The snail seems to have a limited ability to move around and spends most of its time in the mud near water. As of yet scientist do not know what it even eats yet.

MORE SNAIL TALK!

Dutch designer Lieske Schreuder has made a new flexible material out of SNAIL POOP,  yes, she adopted hundreds of snails from a breeder and fed them colored paper. The byproduct is a unique and malleable material that can be used to make a variety of cool products.


This is the thread created by putting the waste into a machine and grinding it to make these colourful threads. Obviously the time it takes to make these is a while, it takes an hour just to make a meter. But still, who would have thought that snail poop could make flexible materials.

Snails? Slugs? They're both great :)

The Wise Owl

He's found a nice home perched on my wall :)

Flower Dissection

These are the lovely petals, there are 6 petals and they are neither male nor female, they are simply petals. Since there are 6 petals and 6 is a multiple of 3 it makes the flower a monocot . You can also see on the leaves that the veins run parallel which is a trait of monocot plants.

This is the stamen of the flower.The fillament supports the brown pollen producing anther. Both the anther and filament are male flower parts

The stem part of this flower structure is called the style and the small brown part at the top is called the stigma. Along with the ovary these parts make up the female part of the plant called the pistil.

This is a picture of the flower ovary under a microscope. They almost look like peas in a pod!

* This is a cross section of the stem of the flower, this just shows that the plant is a monocot as the vascular bundles are all over the place.

Here is what the flower's pollen looks like under the microscope. Funny, to me it looks like a lot of grains of rice.

 

This flower is a monocot because of its parallel veins, number of petals, and its stem.

 

Pollination:
Pollination is needed for fertilization of the plant. It occurs when pollen from the anther is transfered to the stigma of a plant. Therefore the plant parts involved in pollination is the pollen producing anther and the sticky recieving stigma. There are two types of pollination. Self-pollination, when a plants pollen pollinates its own stigma. The benefit of this is that if is easy and fast, the pollen does now have to "fly" to another plant. But there would be no variation of species this way. The other type is cross-pollination, when a plants pollen lands on another plants stigma. This benefits the species better than self pollination as it allows for more variation in the genes.

Monocots vs Dicots

This is a dicot root, you know this because the vascular bundals are lining the perimeter as aposed to the monocot root where they have a "x" formation on the centre

This is a dicot stem as the vascular bundals are clearly seen on the edge forming a circle and not randomly placed like in a monocot stem.

This is a picture of a root cross section, it is monocot. We know this because the vascular bundles are clearly visible meaning that they are running perpendicular to the cut. This means that they are running parallel down the plant leaf.

Gymnosperm Lab

This is a needle cross section under medium power 

This is a pollen cone

Death by Tree

This the strangler fig, a commen name for a number of tropical and subtropical plant species. This one in particular is a Ficus aurea. Now i'm pretty sure this plant is something out of one of my sci-fi novels as it sucks the host trees nutrients. This plant starts as a seed on top of a tree and grows its roots down descending along the tree eventually reaching the ground and soil. This tree is ruthless, it digs its roots with the host trees roots and competes for water and nutrients, it squeezes the trunk of the host tree and cuts of its flow of nutrients, and it makes a large canopy of leaves to block sunlight going to the host tree. Eventually the host tree will die an aganozing death watching this predator grow on it for dozens of years.

 

A BBC Worldwide video on strangler figs

Acorns and Pinecones

An Acorn is the nut of an oak tree and contains one seed. For the pinecone, the familiar "craft cone" is the female which produces seeds and the male produces pollen, there are both from a pine tree. On a pine tree, the female cones are located higher on the tree, this is thought to improve chances of cross-fertilization. The female cone seeds then have small "wings" that allow them to floar through the air to a likely fertilization spot. Acorns on the other hand are much to large and heavy to be carried through the wind therefore they rely on animals such as squirrals to desperse them. The small animals will pick up the seeds and carry them to other locations.

The Poisonous Pitcher Plant

The pitcher plant is a carniverous plant that lures its prey into a deep cavity filled with liquid know as a pitfall trap.

Click to watch video

A Macabre Appearance

This is the Antirrhinum, a normal looking garden variety flower. It is commently know as a Snapdragon for its resembalance to a dragons head. When laterally squeezed the flower will open and close its so called mouth. But once the flower has died it leaves behind something a bit more creepy, The dragon which is a visual metaphor seems to leave behind a skull.

Its no surprise that ancient cultures held the snapdragon to possess supernatural powers. They were though to offer protection from witches and their curses, and conceilling one on your body was suppose to make a person seem gracious and fascinating.