Yes. The soil is indeed important for growing plants as it provides support, water, and nutrients. But if these needs can be satisfied by other means, then soil can be done away with. Some plants can grow in plain water in a vase. Their roots are able to extract oxygen dissolved in the water, while…
In the late 1880’s, the citrus orchids which produced California’s world-famous oranges were devastated by a plague of aphids and scale insects. The biggest natural enemy of the aphid is the ladybird beetle. The California fruit growers introduced ladybirds in the orchards. Within a few weeks, the number of aphids decreased dramatically. Since then, the farmers…
Mushrooms are actually a variety of fleshy, umbrella-shaped fungi (singular:fungus). They are very strange organisms because they have no stems, leaves or roots. They feed on tissues of other plants or animals, living or dead. They look like plants at first sight, but their cell walls are made not of cellulose but chitin, the…
Grasshoppers can jump up to 1 metre in distance. If humans could jump the way grasshoppers do, relative to size, then we would be able to easily leap the length of a football field!
Do you know that some ants keep ‘cattle’, small insects called aphids, which they ‘milk’ (stroke with their antennas) to feed on the sugary substances the aphids exude? Ants are social insects. That is, they live in colonies, containing from a dozen to a million individuals. They have a caste system in which some ants…
Sorry Earth.
