Questions tagged [flora]
For questions related to plants and vegetation in general.
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Can land plants absorb carbon dioxide into their leaves without the need for sunlight?
We all know by now that plants need light to absorb carbon dioxide--whether it be sunlight, moonlight or even artificial cave light.
But what about total darkness, like a cave or a forest floor ...
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How would the color of the sun effect the color of the plants [duplicate]
For example, what would plants look like under a red giant? something like that. thanks
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Nuclear Armageddon comes! Can Bob's plants survive?
Bob loves plants. More specifically, he loves terrariums.
Bob's magnum opus is a large terrarium made from a 5-gallon glass water jug. Inside is a miniature ecosystem: plants grow, detritivores feed ...
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Lava overgrown by plants
The problem:
I want to have a volcanic island with an everlasting lava outflow completely overgrown by (jungle) plants. It therefore follows that plants should also grow above the lava.
I know that ...
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What is the altitude limit at which plants can grow on a low gravity planet?
(My Universe Sandbox Almost Terraformed Mars)
How high can plants grow on a low gravity planet like Mars?
Since lower gravity planets tend to have a greater height differences in terms of geography ...
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How can plants reliably intentionally poison those that eat their fruit?
For sake of metaphor, I want to include a plant that bears fruit that is poisonous, with the intent that when an animal eats it, it will walk away and die within a few hours, such that their corpse ...
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Extreme cold resistant flora
My world has no axial tilt. Therefore instead of having seasons from axial tilt it gets its seasons from actually moving farther away from its parent star. In the mid latitudes the temperature ...
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Can this town gain ecological advantage from their limnic explosion region?
I want a war between two iron-age cultures, Town A and Town B, based on the "haves" and the "have nots" where they both exist in the same exact climate and geography, however, Town ...
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How tall can trees get if water transport limitations are bypassed?
The setting is Earth, millions of years in our future. In this setting a species of tree has made an evolutionary leap, allowing it to bypass the water transport constraints currently thought to be ...
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Is this sort of life cycle on a megamangrove feasible?
Point of departure--56 million years ago, in which the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum lasted three to four times longer than it did in our timeline. Today, on this alternate Earth, the twilight ...
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How would a community of people living in densely packed treehouses receive food to their treehouse?
In my novel, the characters live in treehouses that are practically piled on top of one another, so there is little room to climb down to pick up food, and it would be a challenge trying to take it ...
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A dragon flash-heats a forest, how long does it take the forest to recover?
A closed-off dell ringed entirely by mountains is smothered in smoke at 900°F from a dragon. After suffocating the forest, a magical barrier seals them in. It is invisible but doesn't allow airflow ...
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How would iron and alkaline-rich soil affect plant life?
In one of the solar systems I've created for my fictional universe, there is a small planet within the habitable zone between the size of Mercury and Venus. It's an incredibly rocky planet, with high ...
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Would it be possible for a pre-industrial society to construct islands?
I am envisioning a scenario in which, probably for reasons of persecution or overpopulation, a people would begin to construct islands in the sea. Each island would be fairly close to the others and ...
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A symbiotic bark beetle: how does it work?
In our world bark beetles can bring serious damages to forests which they infest, by killing the tree which they attack when they feed and breed between the bark and the wood of their host.
I am ...
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Could Cacti Become Suited for an Arctic Environment?
The arctic is, essentially, a cold desert. Dry, doesn't rain much, little to no vegetation, but cacti persist in desert environments. Could they adapt their skills in a hot desert to survive in a cold ...
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How could a plant mimic sound?
The Context
I am developing a tree, called a Wailing Willow, that in times of stress and famine would become predatory. A Wailing Willow can lure in its prey by mimicking the sounds of animals and ...
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How would plants evolve into motile organisms? [closed]
I want to build a speculative future world where the majority of animals on Earth are gone and have been replaced by plants due to convergent evolution. I want to know how these creatures might evolve ...
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Is this method of “burial” possible?
Now that colonization of Mars and The Moon is starting to pick up, lots more people will start dying. LifeHarbor Burials™ says that they will provide a way to dispose of the dead for free.
They claim ...
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UBER-BAMBOOs: The Baobab Bamboo
I want a tall tree. But I also want a fat tree. And I want a fast tree.
Now, tall and fast are covered by one plant that I have in mind: bamboo.
Fat is covered by another: Baobabs.
I want a tree/grass ...
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What is fastest believable growth rate and reproduction cycle for a 150-300-meters-tall tree?
The trees in question are 150-300-meters-tall, 18 meters in diameter and have no branches except at the very top where each branch has a single leaf that takes up the whole branch. Its bark is thick ...
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Would "empathetic" plants dominate over other plants?
I've been digging into some very interesting, related questions from the past (the one I found the most useful was this one) and I don't think anything covers my question. So if I missed it, please do ...
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How would using trees as sarcophagi affect the forest?
Long story short the people of the forest use trees to 'bury' their dead instead of actually burying them into the ground. They use plant-manipulation magic to accomplish this, making the tree open up ...
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Plants or something else that enriches distilled water
I'm writing a story in a world very similar to our Earth, but with few differences.
In this world, the "human" beings have to deal with the shortage of drinkable water. But they have plenty ...
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Would grass still be able to thrive if it grew into being like green shards of glass?
There is a field of grass that is so green and fresh and untouched by the grazing of animals. Throughout the entire day it glistens in the sun as if it is still covered in the morning dew. But beware, ...
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How much would this alien parasite increase crop yields?
It is a bizarre prokaryotic flowering plant parasite which has graphene reinforced cell walls and is so distinct from all other organisms to warrant placement in its own domain of life (indeed it only ...
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Will nature after millennia create a temperate rain-forest in my structure?
I am making a weird space that can not exist in the real world. It is made up of bubbles made from an indestructible material. The material is smooth as steel plate on the inside. One can go from one ...
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what kind of star would a planet need to sustain blue and pink flora and what effect would it have on ocean color? [duplicate]
The ecosystem on this planet, which I call Crilorix is thriving and I was hoping I can make the flora on the surface blue and pink? such as having blue leaves and pink bark on most trees and such, so ...
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Could a plant capture a person?
Could a plant, with the right adaptations, have the right speed and strength to capture an unprepared human without harming them? The plants would be bound by real rules of biology, and couldn't use ...
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Giant realistic Prototaxites like fungi in a hot climate
My planet is very similar to earth around 359 to 299 million years ago. years ago. It’s mostly covered in deserts, jungles, swamps, temperate forests, and their variants.
(The Carboniferous period
The ...
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Predatory plants on a seeded world
I imagined that in the far future, humanity has become space-faring and is running experiments with seeded worlds. One of these planets would be an earth-sized moon with almost identical atmosphere to ...
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What would happen if the wind stopped blowing? [closed]
Assuming that the wind stopped blowing suddenly, regardless of the mechanisms involved that cause the wind to blow, how would it affect the world, with a specific focus on nature? I can imagine that ...
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can a planet be in the habitable zone of a blue star be the best option or a star that gives off more blue light
My planet originally was in a system with a blue star, but I think they are unstable and so it's not the best. So what type of stars give off more blue light in order for plants to be yellow or blue. ...
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how do plants evolve to eat creatures
I have a idea for a plant on my world Chlorea. It is inspired by Venus fly traps and the plant that smells like rotten meat that attract bugs, but I want to know why and how did they evolve this way ...
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Concerning Earth plants on an alien world, how much "sunlight" would "too much" and "too little" be compared to our sunlight?
In a binary system of artificially immortal stars, each one orbited by a ring of mirrors, a whole line of Earthlike planets orbits the binary within its habitable zone, from 400 to 800 AUs. While ...
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Can a plant or alien plant have fruit and shoot seeds as well?
On my planet Chlorea there are desserts and in them is a tree-like plant. During the dry season nothing really happens; the plant saves water, they lose leaves to save water etc. But in the wet season ...
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How would Blue/Yellow colored plants change during different weather seasons
My planet basically revolves around a blue star or a star that gives off more blue wavelengths, and the color of the plants are either blue or yellow or both because they are trying to absorb the most ...
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Could floating trees lead to floating islands?
Trees with their roots and everything basically hold on to a section of land(dirt/stone/whatever) if one thinks about it.
A certain species of tree has fibrous roots and a poisonous, flexible, vine-...
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Can we Build a World Where Cooking is Difficult?
I want to build a world that satirizes the modern cult of cooking. The cult has a long list of infractions that will ruin a dish and render it inedible. For example:
Chopping an onion the wrong way
...
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Why do my humongous cliff ledges have cultivable soil on them?
This world is basically a huge vertical cliff wall, hundreds of kilometers high. Some of the crevices and ledges in that wall are large enough to build cities on (up to kilometers in length and up to ...
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Lions and their natural habitat, and biomes
First time here in a few years. I remember that the last time the questions had to be specific to what I was looking for but I don't wanna swamp anyone with too much info, so I'll endeavour to be lean ...
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How can I make my underwater crops more aquatic in nature?
In my fantasy novel, I'm writing about a society of merfolk. They're well developed and have city states, but they don't have very good farming practices. As part of the story focuses on this, I am ...
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The best shape for a piezoelectric tree that harvests energy from rain?
This question is the second part of my previous question about piezoelectric plants. In summary: The plants on my world generate electricity from kinetic energy (piezoelectricity) instead of or paired ...
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Could a plant have soft cells?
Are there any issues with a plant (specifically a multicellular organism that gains energy solely through photosynthesis) having soft cells with no cell walls, similar to animal cells?
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Geometric magic in the wild
Magic comes from shapes. For example, when you inscribe a regular octagram in a circle you get a heat effect, and the right straight line atop that summons a creature from beyond the mortal plane. ...
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How plausible would apple-sized raspberries be?
In one of my settings, the people have domesticated the wild raspberry plant, and selectively bred it for larger and larger berries. Would it be plausible for these berries to reach the sizes of ...
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Flora in permanent twilight/night
Im trying to write a story which takes place on tidal locked planet in permanent twilight/night zone. Im interested in zone where "time of day" gradually changes between twilight and night. ...
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How would a "Tesla tree" work?
At some point I heard about the concept of a "Tesla tree" - a tree or plant-like thing which is able to produce tension arcs strong enough to generate and hit nearby objects with artificail ...
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Vegetation on medieval farmland abandoned for 40-80 years
What kind of vegetation may I expect to encounter on a farmland that was abandoned partially about 80 and completely some 40-50 years prior?
This is medieval-style farmland, so it is not wheat for ...
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Could a genetically modified plant become a house?
I was checking out art made by Hyrotrioskjan on Deviantart and found his Nea project. One art piece features large genetically modified plants that are able to essentially house a community. These ...
