“Although Stylites possesses some anomalies- it lacks stomata…” This phrase made me terrified yet even more intrigued with these weird little buggers. Plants are already weird enough and then theres this one. I love it. Thank you for making your paper available to read!!
fun fact, this is actually the one species i’ve gotten to see a bisected specimen of! our herbarium’s small isoetes collection had a few sent up from Peru in the 50s, and they’d been cut in the middle and pressed open to show the anatomy. i actually ended up using the digitization setup to take some Really High Def pictures of them (we are FAAARRR from having all of the stuff in my uni’s herbarium digitized. they just got done with the microfungi, i dont even think they’ve even started on the angiosperms, forget the Strange Lads in the lycophyte lockers….but then again funding is hard to come by for herbariums and all that). anyway, behold:
look at those leaf traces!!!
i love this specimen in particular because you can really see how their roots are actually fucked up leaves. like its one of those things where you don’t really think about it until you actually take a close look, and then you’re like ‘oh, yeah, that’s definitely Not How Normal Plants Look’. compare:
she…..she just made some tubes huh…..really just Did That and gave one some chlorophyll….
through the roots. as in this genus gets all their CO2 from the soil and it gives me an existential crisis every time i think about it
PTA archive 