My new dietary regimen excludes bananas, but such fruits can find other fields of application besides being eaten
Some of my Duckweed cultures are grown in enclosures with slices of banana or apple inside; this to generate ethylene gas. I do this to trigger formation of gibbous fronds of some species (such as Fat Duckweed
Lemna gibba, which unfortunately can exist in a non-gibbous form since these plants don't read the Flora description ...). Ethylene, being a gaseous growth hormone, is claimed to induce gibbosity if the culture can produce such growth form.
After about 5 weeks sure enough. some fronds tend to be more swollen, so that's fine as I already have identified them as
Lemna gibba on other criteria. However, with these morphologically reduced and highly plastic aquatic species, there is always a question about their identity unless true differential criteria are observed. Hence my culture experiments.
What I hadn't thought of beforehand is that ethylene apparently can trigger flowering as well. The putative
L. gibba culture started flowering yesterday, many weeks or even months before any flowering would have occurred in the wild. The Duckweed flower is truly minuscule, comprising 1-2 stamens and a style all of which is enclosed in a basal, hyaline spatha.
Here is a UV capture of one such flower, shot at 4X magnification with a reversed Coastal 60mm f/4 on my UV-only modified Nikon D3200. The small object on the left, looking like a minute apple, is in fact a pollen grain of a Scots Pine
Pinus sylvestris. That pollen grain is 65 µm (0.065mm) so sets the overall impression of scale here. The complete stamen with filament and anther is around 400 µm. A normal human hair is around 75 µm (Europe) to 100-120 µm (Asia). Not much size-wise for this flower, but it does have what is required to ensure a future seed set. Because the Duckweeds have such efficient vegetative multiplication and dispersal, one might wonder why the plant bothers to flower at all. Maybe a fall-back option to ensure a tiny chance of genetic recombination? Nature as usual answers with more questions.
