Posts tagged flora
Could a world with no animals whatsoever (not even insects, no humans, etc) still have plant life? These plants do not have to include all the plants in our world, or even any of the same plants. I...
Let me clarify on that title, because this question focuses specifically on vegetables that have not been cultivated for their fruits--like tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers and pumpkins--or ...
My character kills a goat in the mountains and eats some of it for dinner. What kind of plant or mineral could he use to preserve the meat to carry with him so that it stays fresh and doesn't becom...
I need you guys to help me out here. I'm developing clothing ideas and I need to understand what animals and plants may be used to create such clothes. Part of a story that I'm creating is a wate...
The Wold (Forest) is one vast, interconnected, possibly digital mind. The mind is primarily built of one cloned individual of a single plant species, but there are over a dozen 'helper' sub-minds a...
In my fantasy story, elves live high up in giant trees (or at least something similar to a tree). These trees are so massive, that entire cities can be built on their branches. The branches have fl...
So there is a Minecraft mod that includes various oreberry bushes. One for gold, one for silver, etc. Now I know that various plants can extract specific minerals in higher quantities that what w...
So this question, Designing a Carnivorous Plant, talks about animals being attracted to a plant, at first by a sweet scent, and then being drugged by an unspecified toxin which renders them 'euphor...
I'm working on a space story in which an astronaut is travelling to Neptune to validate our CurrentEarth™ corporation's findings regarding our Solar System. The setting is a moving ship similar to ...
So, after some advice in narrowing down the topic (used to be what kind of characteristics do animals need in different environments or something like that) I have decided to start a series! Starti...
In a large varied environment where strong winds are the norm and every few weeks or so a huge hurricane sweeps through, how would large land animals (horse- to elephant-sized) evolve to cope? I u...
In the (relatively new) Star Trek movie Into Darkness, we see Dr. Bones and Captain Kirk in a world composed mainly of red plants. Obviously these are just eye candy with no real basis behind it, b...
Bobby, a human space traveler from Theta, and has been in space for a couple of centuries. He's been kept alive either through his own biology or some feat of technology. Having no contact with his...
My question is: Could a macroscopic (e.g. visible) plant grow on a living human, provided that the human is completely immobilized?
I was reading a question and had a follow-up question with a story idea that I'd like to develop more fully. The idea is a HUGE maze, thousands (or more) of square miles, that has small clearings ...
In many scenes you see something like this: If I was designing a world for a culture living in a rain-forest and their land was cut through by many vast ravines then what sort of spans could the...
How realistic is it that in the future someone invents plants that can live on top of the Antarctic ice sheet or are floating on ice like in the Arctic?
Question: Could a planet contain all of its (vast) oceans underground? I imagined a planet with no surface oceans - and no water cycle above ground - but where life was still possible. My initia...
Within my desert landscape--in which the climate is similar to the Sonora Desert--there are many canyons, one of which sports large, clustered growths of Elbaite Tourmaline crystals, averaging out ...
As part of a series on plant animals, plantimals if you will, I am now asking about the digestive system, that is the mouth, stomach and intestines. All known animal life has some kind of digestive...
I am currently writing a story where natives are discovered in a jungle smoking a plant that depending on the variety will release different colored smoke when burned. The visuals in this story are...
In my fantasy pre-industrial world pollen production and plant reproduction has been disabled by some sort of curse. The curse has a limited geographical span, but the region affected is very larg...
We have Venus flytraps which move by closing their 'mouth' to trap prey. There are currently few identified plants with a 'quick' reflex like this. Blooms of course open and close through the cou...
Previously, I asked several questions about living in a massive banyan tree whose branches were about 600 feet up. Though I can't find the comments, I was informed that there would be very high win...
Chlorophyll as we know it on earth is estimated to be between 3% and 6% efficient in converting light energy to useable biomass. This support slow growth and no movement of plants like that observ...
Imagine a world much like Earth, except it is nearly tidally locked to its star, making a complete revolution every few thousand years. The planet is far enough away that there is a band of livable...
Setup: Earth is the same (somehow, minus the tides -- don't overthink this bit) Moon is 2x the mass Moon is 2x closer Moon contains the derelict fissile fuel-dump of a hyper-advanced civil...
From this chart it appears that the star types closest to our own are K-type (oranger, a little cooler, and less than half as bright) and F-type (bluer, a little warmer, and much brighter). If I w...
Could an alien underground macroscopic ecosystem including human sized plant-like organisms evolve around lava as an energy source? These organisms could use heat and/or light from the lava to synt...
This is the classic winter picture of a boreal forest, or taiga. This habitat exists only on subpolar latitudes, where the climate is too extreme for broad-leaved angiosperms to take root, thus ...
On Earth, we use taxonomy to organize biological organisms into an identifiable hierarchy in which organisms that are evolutionarily related are placed in close proximity. This evolutionary approac...
I'd like to make a sentient plant species that can perform tasks such as communication and problem solving. My Definition of Sentience When asking this question, I mean sentient as in able to...
Chlorophyll-a (the primary one), chlorophyll-b, and(?) beta-carotene (plus other accessory pigments / carotenoids) dictate which portions of the EM spectrum are used as energy by plants. Pla...
Yes, the title is strange, but hear it out. The inhabitants of my earth-like planet live high up in the atmosphere - living on giant trees. However, I don't want them to be able to see the surface ...
Planet Swamp. As the name suggest, it is a planet fully covered with swamps. A new kind of carnivorous plant has been discovered on this planet: when its leaves are touched by an animal or moved b...
A hypothetical organism alternates between plant and animal stages over its life cycle. The organism exhibits equally extreme sexual dimorphism. The generations are diplobiontic a la some species ...
Lichen are a symbiotic organism that involves algae or cyanobacteria living inside a fungus. The algae produce energy through photosynthesis, while the fungus protect the algae from the environment...
The tree small giant creatures resembling people usually with beards are present in many fantasy stories, but that's it... it is fantasy. From a scientific viewpoint how would such creature even ...
Let's say it's sometime in the future, and humanity has expanded outwards into the solar system, and we've genetically engineered some really big plants that can for some unimportant reason, surviv...
As fas as I know, there isn't a single plant on Earth that (naturally) produces any sort of luminescence. But it is seen in science-fiction worlds, especially Avatar. From an evolutionary point of...
Ecologically, when you're within the latitudes of 23.5 degrees, you'd find yourself in rainforests rich in diversity but poor in nutrition. The forest floor is a barren mess simply because the can...
Without magic, is it possible for a plant to channel light (all colors) to/through its roots? What I'm thinking is having a giant cavern with a bunch of these plants above. The roots go down and ...
I'm trying to work out the kinks of an ecosystem on a planet that is rather similar to Earth, but with some species of animal (both carnivores and herbivores) we aren't familiar with in our world. ...
In my fantasy world I want fantastically large trees, particularly in the height category. The tallest trees on earth grow just over 100 meters tall. Why can't they get taller? What circumstances w...
Based on an answer of mine from a few months ago, I've been inspired to adapt the concept to my own Life Ball. Fair warning- this question and some of its links are not for the squeamish. May con...
There have been many questions of moving, floral animals, most of these focus on their intelligence, but what about their sense of sight. I fail to understand how a botanic based alien would be abl...
There have been a few questions on mobile plants on this site and even more on their intelligence, but one that has not been asked so far is related to the lifeblood of creatures: blood. Inside of ...
A plethora of previous questions have queried the existence of botanic (plant) intelligence and they all have created good solutions, but their still remains a even bigger problem to even the dumbe...
To elaborate on the title, can alien plant life on an Earth-like planet look similar to ours, or would plants on an alien planet be radically different, unrecognizable, or incomparable to Earth pla...
