A woody stem is a stem or trunk that is hard and firm compared to a herbaceous stem, which is soft and flexible. Woody stems tend to last much longer and prove to be more durable than herbacous stems, and generally do not regrow annually. The best example of a woody stem is a tree trunk, akin to the cedar trunk pictured above.
List #103
Pollen is to a plant as sperm is to a mammal. Pollen is made up of microscopic grains that each carry a male gamete and are capable of fertilizing a plant’s female ovule. It is usually a yellow or orangish powder and is produced and released from a flower’s male cone, and relies on the wind and contact with insects for transport. Above we can see several flowers containing yellow pollen towards their centers.
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CAM stands for crassulacean acid metabolism. Essentially, it is a carbon-fixation version of photosynthesis certain plants have adapted to use in arid climates to conserve water. A CAM plant only takes in CO2 during nighttime (closes the stomata on its leaves in the daytime) to prevent the plant from losing water out of the stomata in the hotter dayttime (reduces evapotranspiration). The plant then stores the CO2 until the next day when its uses sunlight to photosynthesize like normal using the previous night’s CO2 supply. Above is a pineapple, which uses this process.
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A Pollinator is a bug or animal that (willingly or not) moves pollen around a flower and between plants. This movement of pollen, or pollination, allows many plants to reproduce, flower, and bear fruit. Bees, like the one pictured in the flower above, are the best pollinators as they source their food from inside flowers and so spend a lot of time brushing up against them and pollen. Butterflies and hummingbirds also make great pollinators for the same reasons.
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Tendrils are grown and used by parasitic, invasive and/or climbing plants to spread and provide anchor points for further growth. In some species, tendrils will curl around anchor points and other plants, called hosts, but interestingly never curl around themselves. Pictured above is the end of a long 15 foot blackberry tendril pulled out of a tree in the grand forest.
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“Frond” refers to a large divided leaf, especially ferns. Pictured above is a frond of a large Sword Fern found in the grand forest.
Arthropods are invertebrates that have an exoskeleton, a segmented body, paired jointed appendages, and belong in the large phylum Euarthropoda . The phylum includes insects, spiders, and crustaceans. Above can be seen a very small spider in its web. For scale, the white smudge on the left is the beak of the small blue footed booby.
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Fleshy fruits with seeds are, well, fruits with inner seeds surrounded by “flesh.” These peaches, for example, have a central pit with a seed surrounded by layers of fleshy, wet fruit. Tasty too.
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Heartwood is the oldest and hardest wood of a tree. It is the central spine of the trunk, and is nonliving. The heartwood of this chopped-down tree can be seen above, consisting of the rings closer to the center of the tree.
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Fermentation is a metabolic process that chemically breaks down/consumes sugar in the absence of oxygen using yeasts, bacteria or other microorganisms. Pictured above are bottles of beer, a drink containing alcohol produced from the fermentation of simple sugars from various grains and hops with yeasts.
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Patrick Ledoux's AP Biology Blog 