Posted on 08/21/2024 6:02:40 AM PDT by Cronos
Last month, while looking for lilies in a Colombian tributary of the piranha-packed Orinoco River, he jumped from plank to plank in the pitch dark at 4 a.m. to get to a floating pontoon.
“It’s not that I am that daring,” said Carlos Magdalena, a research horticulturalist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London. “These situations just arise, and they are not like Superman extreme. Sometimes it’s more Peter Sellers than Indiana Jones.”
..he is also known as “the plant messiah,” as anointed by a Spanish newspaper in 2010, for his work rescuing several plant species from the brink of extinction. That work has earned him enormous respect in the field of botany and made him somewhat of a celebrity in the horticulture world.
“Plants don’t speak. Plants don’t cry. Plants don’t bleed,” he said. “So I’ve decided to speak for them.”
..To help save the pygmy lily, he borrowed seeds from a botanical garden in Germany. While these seeds germinated, they quickly died. “An extinction awaiting to happen,” he said.
Mr. Magdalena tried everything, growing the seeds in acid and alkaline water, and experimenting with light and temperature. Nothing worked.
One night as he watched the water for his tortellini bubbling, he wondered if the difficulty germinating the tiny lily had to do with the amount of carbon dioxide the plants were being exposed to.
..As he prepared his dinner, he remembered that the water lilies in their native habitat in Rwanda grew in a shallow stream, and that there is much more CO2 above water than below, so he changed the depth of the water he was using in his experiment in a bid to get them more of the gas. It worked.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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I saw this movie, Anaconda, wasn’t it?
Ahem. The settled science says that CO2 is bad. A telegram needs to be sent to the lily pond so this guy can be educated properly.
Each of us has to decide what it is that provides us with a purpose driven life. Here is a Botanist who has chosen to embrace,adore and analyze a particular species of lily. He has given it value and committed himself to saving it from extinction. His efforts have evolved from finding an interesting pass time into becoming a way of life.
Decades ago,a French scientist named Jacque Cousteau did something similar while introducing the public to the many inhabitants of Neptune’s watery domain.
“obsess” is a verb, too.
I recall a movie, probably from the 30’s, where a cow or similar went into a piranha infested water. The water around it started to boil. The heavier part of the carcass with meat still on it rolled over with the other half of the carcass skeleton showing topside.
In other words, in a matter of seconds half the animal was cleaned off down to just bones.
And this clown is playing games with them?
It’s on the order of the idiot that went to live with grizzlies in a national park and got eaten.
Like most things, it is a question of quantity - and circumstances.
Exactly - I think he is to be admired for having this strong purpose and having made a difference in this life.
Exactly how has he made a difference by trying to save one type of lilly? Does this lilly have certain medicinal properties etc? I thought these people believed in evolution? Or does that just apply to non-plant entities?
When I was young, I said to God, ‘God, tell me the mystery of the universe.’ But God answered, ‘That knowledge is for me alone.’ So I said, ‘God, tell me the mystery of the peanut.’ Then God said, ‘Well George, that’s more nearly your size.’ And he told me.
George Washington Carver
And yet, we have these yahoos running around screaming about the evils of CO2 and then other yahoos using that to propose doing things like blocking sunlight.
B/c Plant Lives Matter!
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