Plant and soil

What powder is that? One of these days, I got these pictures from a friend, the guy has a very nice blog about health ( Portal esfera humana ), and he had a doubt: Medina, we've lost 2 orange trees here, what is this powder, what is it? It is a pest, a larva of a beetle (family Cerambycidae) that makes galleries inside the trunk and the branches of the plants, causing death to the plant when not controlled (and produces the sawdust). In addition to attacking the citrus (orange, lemon and etc.) it also attacks plants of avocado, plum, pear, peach, cherry, fig, guava and others. When it attacks the branches ( Diploschema rotundicolle ), one of the main control measures is basically to cut off these branches and burn them. So focus on the plants, if you have any branch drying, showing those holes and saw dust falling, eliminate them by burning them. Beware that the smoke produced by the burning of citrus plants can cause allergy in some people, as...

Producing food is not easy Probably many of you have seen this yellow triangle with this T inside, well, it is a product made with some transgenic ingredient (probably corn or soy). Have you heard anyone say anything about these foods? Did they good things or bad things about them? Better yet, have they told you why these plants are transgenic? To return to the subject, as it is in the heading of this text, to produce food is not easy and is expensive, there are diseases that attack the plants in the field, pest insects that cause enormous damages, there are also the invading weeds and many other factors they play against. Believe me, there is a lot that hinders the production of food. Many of the transgenic plants have artificially inserted genes that give them tolerance to diseases, reduce the attack of insect pests and make these plants tolerant to herbicides. Why tolerant to herbicides? Think of the extraordinarily simple scenario, there are 2 plants, one I want because...

Photo taken in the Australian outback in the Pilbara region of Western Australia in June 2016. We don't need to go very far to see soils with this coloration but what makes that soils here of Brazil and for example from the other side of the planet are so red? The answer lies in the presence of a mineral in the soil, the hematite (mineral rich in iron). Hematite is a mineral of red coloration and that when present in large amounts in the soil gives it the same strong coloration. Okay, but what makes the soil so rich in hematite? This question is deeper but I will try to be brief. Soils are formed by the degradation of pre-existing rocks. In this case, some soils may be formed of rocks already rich in hematite and other minerals (olivines, pyroxene, biotite, mica, etc.) that are rich in iron (mafic rocks). On the other hand even soils that are formed by rocks not so rich in iron can become very red as well. With the passing of geological ages some minerals are degraded (m...

Analysis of GCMS (gas chromatography with mass spectrometry) in different eucalypt clones in southern Bahia. These analyzes are time-consuming and sometimes complex, but they are very interesting because they show how the body's metabolism is in relation to some experimental treatment, natural event or etc. In the case it was studied how different clones of eucalyptus behave against very humid soils. This analysis is also used in studies even in humans. In a next post, I'll tell you a bit more about the technique used (GCMS), in few words this technique separates the molecules present in a sample, in case the samples were leaves. Examples of molecules present in the leaves are sugars (glucose, futose, sucrose and etc.), amino acids (tryptophan, alanine, phenylalanine and etc.), organic acids (Krebs cycle compounds) and other molecules (Some day in the future I'll talk about them). As for eucalyptus clones, there are many differences between plants that make them mo...

Ant preying on a white fly. #bugs #biologicalcontrol #entomology This photo shows how rich can be the relationships between insects and plants. In this case it is a leaf of orange tree (bonsai). There were cochineals and ants that stay there feeding on the sugared secretions of the cochineals. In the same plant there were white flies, apparently it seems that one of the ants did not like the company of the flies and went up and got something more protein for the colony.