Alice in the Land of Plants: Biology of Plants and Their Importance for Planet Earth

✍ Scribed by Yiannis Manetas (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 384
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Why is it that plants do not need to move? How does a nonmotile organism have sex or defend itself? Why are some plants virtually immortal? What is the mechanism that allows plants to exploit a practically inexhaustible extraterrestrial energy source? How do plants regulate the composition of our planet’s atmosphere? Why have there not been mass extinctions among plants as there have been among animals? How do plants communicate with one another? In the end, are plants intelligent organisms?

These are some of the questions the author discusses to demonstrate that plants are wrongly considered to be simple organisms lacking specific behaviour and intelligence. This book promises to be as pleasant a surprise as Alice’s experience in the white rabbit’s warren, in which she encountered a world very different from ours.

The author explains the biology of plants following Einstein's maxim that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xviii
Introduction....Pages 1-16
Basic Plant Organisation: How it Differs from that of Animals....Pages 17-44
Why Trees are Almost Immortal and Other Related Issues....Pages 45-111
Short Evolutionary History of Plants....Pages 113-160
Sex in Nonmotile Organisms....Pages 161-207
The World through the Eyes of Plants....Pages 209-241
The Defence of a Stationary Organism....Pages 243-284
Symbioses Galore....Pages 285-310
Deviations from the Basic Biological Type....Pages 311-321
Are Plants Intelligent Organisms After All?....Pages 323-342
Back Matter....Pages 343-372

✦ Subjects

Plant Sciences; Popular Science in Nature and Environment