Posted on 08/26/2019 6:45:29 PM PDT by BenLurkin
|Tumbleweeds might look soft and fluffy from a distance, but hit one with your car and you quickly learn how woody, spiky and mean they really are. Just look at what happened when Victorville, California, got buried beneath tumbleweeds in 2018.
A new species of giant tumbleweed is now thriving in the US. Salsola ryanii is a hybrid that grows bigger than its parent plants. It can top 6 feet (2 meters) in height, so it's not like those cute little rolling tumbleweeds you see in Western movies.
Researchers at University of California Riverside took a closer look at why this monster plant is thriving, and published a study in the journal AoB Plants.
Salsola ryannii is created from a cross of two invasive tumbleweed species. It has extra sets of its parents' chromosomes, a state know as "polyploidy." Polylploidy is common in plants. For comparison, almost all humans have just one set of chromosomes from each parent.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
Great Flaming Wolf Spiders!!!
“Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.”
I drove into several huge tumbleweeds when I lived in Palm Springs and Palm Desert. Those things turn into powder.
The Outer Limits predicted this time would come.
Eddie Albert was in that episode.
There is a video on youtube showing a guy driving through a sandstorm in the desert. He’s got his highbeams on and his wife is absolutely freaking out as the tumbleweeds hit the car. It looked like a drive through car wash.
CC
Really nice version of that song. I had no idea he could sing like that.
Man, I am still scared of the fire ants and the killer bees! This is JUST TOO MUCH! I can’t take any more of this.
I saw an OUTER LIMITS show on that a few days ago.
I once drove between Garden City and Liberal, Kansas.
The tumbleweeds had reached their peak and the wind was blowing around 30MPH. I was constantly being hit and I suspected they had done some damage to the pickup but when I got there, I didn’t see any.
There actually weren’t any tumbleweeds until the late 1890s. Russian immigrants brought Russian wheat into Kansas and there was some tumbleweed seeds in it.
So when you see Marshall Dillon walking the streets of Dodge City amid the tumbleweeds, it is fake.
I just saw Eddie Albert in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea episode “Eleven Days to Zero” (with color version never aired). Like the Trump fake news story today, they stopped a dangerous earthquake tidal wave by exploding a counterforce nuclear missile fired from the Seaview submarine. Not a hurricane break up but a similar idea. Worked like a charm.
Any mention of Eddie Albert makes a thread on FR a great one.
BEAT me to it!
I just finished a fascinating book about life during the Dust Bowl era. Without topsoil and rain, nothing would grow but tumbleweeds — Russian thistle — so the poor folks would pickle it and eat it.
He sang “Lili Marlene” on one of his TV shows. He really could sing.
Pickled Tumbleweed,
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What a Day.
They’d need to try a few thousand non-nuclear mega-fuel-air bombs to suck the air out of a tornado. Tidal waves, no. Totally unstoppable.
They are edible so maybe we could range out a bunch of Ca vegans to keep them from spreading.
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