Plant Hairs
Plant Hairs
Backyardnature.com
When you begin looking closely at plants with your magnifying glass, you'll be amazed at how hairy many (but not all) plants are! For example, at the right you see the hairy calyx of a flower of the Common Chickweed, Stellaria media -- a weedy plant found around nearly everyone's homes. The entire flower is only ¼-inch long (6 mm) and the hairs themselves only 1/32-inch long (0.8 mm), so most people never see this, despite its being everywhere!
Why is the calyx so hairy? Maybe it's to keep insects from eating the flower (notice how sharp the hairs are), maybe they help keep the flower's sexual parts warm during cold weather, or cool when sunlight hits the flower, maybe the hairs do both things, maybe they do something else, or maybe they accomplish nothing important at all. However, when you see how many plants are hairy, you just have to figure that hairs like these must do something important.
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