• Question: What do you think is the most interesting plant you have ever studied ?

    Asked by anon-223185 to Adam, Anastasia, Kate, Sam, Sreejita, Valerio on 11 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Anastasia Aliferi

      Anastasia Aliferi answered on 11 Nov 2019:

      I don’t know if it counts, since I didn’t actually study it, but when I was studying Biology we had a Venus flytrap in the lab. This is a plant that eat insects (usually flies)! The fun thing is that during the semester the people in the lab next door were working with fruit flies and a lot of them will escape and end up in our lab, so our plant had plenty of food. During the summer, however, we had to feed the plant with mince meat from the supermarket so it wouldn’t starve!

    • Photo: Adam Wootton

      Adam Wootton answered on 12 Nov 2019:

      I have actually done some research on rhododendrons, a type of plant that is not native to Britain. It’s often a bad idea to bring plants or animals over from a different country to live in the wild. In their own country, they will be part of a balanced ecosystem where different plants and animals compete with each other and make sure that none of them completely take over. When they are taken to a different country, they sometimes have advantages over the plants and animals in that country and completely take over, wiping out the native species.
      .
      The rhododendron is one of these plants and causes a lot of problems. The National Trust spend millions of pounds every year removing rhododendrons so that native plants are able to grow. Some of the other scientists at Keele University and I came up with a clever way of making this job easier. You can fly an aeroplane fitted with fancy cameras (the clever scientific word is ‘hyperspectral’) over an area with lots of rhododendron and then teach a computer to look at the resulting pictures and work out which plants are native species, and which plants are rhododendrons. This then saves lots of time and money, because anybody removing rhododendrons knows exactly where to go.

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