New answers tagged flora
1
This is semi-science based and more in the spirit of "speaking burning thing".
You need a tree that have leaves which are producing a lot of oxygen when they mature. Which is near the same time the seeds are ready to ripe.
Now the trees are seeding themself on altitudes where oxygen is scarce due to gravity. But the threes are located in pockets where ...
4
Not really an option the way you want it, where it is always on fire.
Fire takes a LOT of energy that the tree needs to build up over time.
Let's build a situation where it might make sense to exist with limited time:
On the continent of Worse Than Australia, funghi and various insects are a huge threat for plant life.
They infest trees and kill them over ...
0
Diamonds in this world would be dirt-cheap, that's one thing.
For practical uses, advance of cutting and grinding tools would happen much earlier than in rel world. People would be able to supply even the crudest saws and drills with diamond edges, which should boost productivity throughout the history and allow for faster technological development.
For ...
0
Just like some earth plants when grown indoors. They tend to bend towards their constant-position light source (e.g. window).
https://www.google.com/search?q=plants+bending+towards+light&client=firefox-b-1-e&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjTssSUv_TmAhXJAewKHSXIDTUQ_AUoAXoECAwQAw&biw=1432&bih=1186
1
Presuming trees managed to evolve on a Planet tidally locked to it's Star, and Presuming the Possibility of a 'Habitable ring' along the perimeter of the Terminus (Day / Night line), Variance could be expected in Leaf Structure according to the Amount of energy being recieved. Needle like leaves could be expected upon trees that persist in harsher environs (...
6
Most of the answers take this from a earth perspective, but they don't always go into what they would actually look like, so I'm going to suggest some very different possibilities.
Big leaves
Since there is little wind, the leaves are free to get as big as they want. I'm not a botanist, but I'd assume the size of leaves is somewhat related to how much wind ...
3
The short "horizontal" trees would be closer to the center of the sun side, while those farther away would be much taller. Here's why:
On Earth, the sun is almost never directly overhead. Even on the equator, it spends most of the day either rising or setting. This gives a distinct advantage to trees that are taller than their neighbors, as they get more of ...
19
Twilight forests would have layers like rain forests, but sideways
In the twilight ring of your planet, a band of only a few trees thick could block out most of the light coming in from the low angle. Behind them, plants would need alternate energy sources, such a parasitism or fungal-like feeding on decaying plant materials, much like the lower-light ...
26
Trees on Earth grow upwards towards the sky, where the Sun is. The leaves of trees, where photosynthesis takes place, are concentrated near the upper parts of the trees, where there is less stuff between the leaves and the sky. Plants in general like to grow towards the light (that's what auxin is for).
I imagine that some of your trees will behave ...
10
Trees on Earth have engaged in competition for light for well over a hundred million years and this has led to an arms race amongst trees to reach ever greater heights even though the sun moves across our sky. On a world where the source of light does not move and remains in a fixed position in the sky the evolutionary pressure to grow tall would be even ...
39
This is an interesting observation which I don't recall anyone making before!
A world where the sun appears to stand still in the sky (the planet is tide-locked and its orbit is circular) will indeed look very different from Earth's plants.
On nearly all terrestrial plants a leaf will remain green and healthy only if it gets enough light. A leaf that fails ...
0
fire needs three things fuel, oxygen and temperature ... so there would also be a temperature / humidity component to the excellent cycle willk describes.
unless you want to use the planet's orbital eccentricity to regulate temperatures ....
coinciding with stage 3 would be a drop in temperature and humidity but first the ash fertilisation kickstarts stage ...
1
Boom bust cycles.
Oceanic and land based plants compete for CO2 and are limited by CO2 availability.
Oceanic has an edge in that they cannot burn.
When O2 gets high enough the land burns.
Free from competition with land plants, and with all that land carbon now available as CO2, the ocean plants have a burst of growth.
Ocean plants overgrow the availability ...
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