Fragments From Floyd

This week's lab (as received from headquarters) involved sampling one tall weedy plant called Wingstem for some statistical comparisons of populations. To get to them, the students would have had to trample a dozen other species of things in flower with interesting tie-ins to class: shared family characteristics, variability within a species, means of attracting insect pollinators, seed dispersal mechanisms and the like. So, I bucked the system and created my own lab.

Realizing that Thursday's two labs would likely be flooded out by Frances, I went yesterday to get pictures of as many of the class plant "UNKNOWNS" as I could, even though there was heavy overcast and 20 mph winds blowing everything around in the viewfinder. I managed to get a few posted to a "gallery" (an overall view, then a close up) for our indoor lab this week; then next week, if the hurricane brewing in the Atlantic will have the good manners to stay at sea, we'll go do the fieldwork part of the lab and hope some of the things are still in bloom.

How many of these could you identify?

So, the image above was one of the more interesting from my wind-blown recon mission. If you squint your eyes just a little, it looks like a google-eyed Muppet character, don't you think? (The green "head" is the seedpod of a mallow of some sort.)