Ferns as House Plants

Efficacy of essential oils from edible plants as insecticides against the house fly, Musca domestica L.

The compositions of 12 essential oils (EOs) obtained by hydrodistillation of edible fruits and herbs were analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (GC/MS). The insecticidal activity of each oil against the house fly Musca domestica was evaluated by placing flies in a glass jar with a screw cap that held a piece of EO-treated cotton yarn. The dose necessary to kill 50% of flies (LC(50)) ...

Biomechanical and leaf-climate relationships: a comparison of ferns and seed plants.

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Relationships of leaf size and shape (physiognomy) with climate have been well characterized for woody non-monocotyledonous angiosperms (dicots), allowing the development of models for estimating paleoclimate from fossil leaves. More recently, petiole width of seed plants has been shown to scale closely with leaf mass. By measuring petiole width and leaf area in fossils, le...

Preface to “Linear sequence, classification, synonymy, and bibliography of vascular plants: Lycophytes, ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms”

Organizing knowledge of the natural world into a system aids communication and helps us to understand better the organisms that surround us and upon which we depend. These classifications are often embedded in cultural and social systems, and in the past such “folk taxonomies” have been absorbed into scientific taxonomy. The basic function of words is that of naming (Lyons 1977), and in the hum...

BLOSSOMING TREASURES OF BIODIVERSITY 35. Mosquito Ferns (Azolla species) – tiny ‘super plants’

Biodiversity is threatened by humankind’s continuing usurpation of our planet’s physical space and resources, and the associated damage to the landscape and atmosphere. Food production is widely acknowledged to be the most important human activity that needs to be addressed in order to mitigate the current biodiversity and environmental crises. In this contribution we feature obscure plants cal...

Broiler-house litter as feedstuff for cattle in khuzestan