Vascular plants = Winning!

96문장 0% 중국어 번역 0명 참여 출처 : 칸아카데미

Vascular plants = Winning!

Blonde Man: This is yarrow, a flowering plant found all over the northern hemisphere.

It's feathery leaves have natural astringent properties and it's scientific name, achillea, comes from Achilles, the Greek hero, who is said to have used it on the wounds of his soldiers.

And this is snake grass, otherwise known as horse tail, or to the kids, pop grass because you can just pop it apart and then put it back together again.

Although, on top there, it's dead now.

And this is a ponderosa pine. One of my favorite trees.

It can grow hundreds of feet tall and on a warm day if you sniff it, it smells like butterscotch.

They all have different shapes, sizes and properties, but each of these things is a vascular plant, one of the most diverse, and dare I say, important families in the tree of life.

Since their predecessors first arrived on the scene, some 420 million years ago, vascular plants have found tremendous success through their ability to exploit resources all around them. They convert sunshine into food.

They absorb nutrients directly through the soil without the costly process of digestion and they even enlist the help of some friends when it comes to reproduction.

So often, when they're doing their thing, it involves a third party, which is like, you know, good for them.

But these things alone can't explain a vascular plants extraordinary evolutionary success.

I mean, algae was photosynthesizing long before plants made it fashionable and as we learned last week, non-vascular plants have reproductive strategies that are tricked out six ways from Sunday.

So, what gives? The secret to vascular plants success is their defining trait, conductive tissues that can take food and water from one part of the plant to another part of a plant.

This may sound simple enough, but the ability to move stuff from one part of an organism to another was a huge evolutionary break through for vascular plants.

It allowed them to grow exponentially larger, store food for lean times and develop some fancy features that allowed them to spread farther and faster.

It was one of the biggest revolutions in the history of life on earth.

The result? Plants dominated earth long before animals even showed up and even today, they hold most of the world records.

The largest organism in the world is a redwood in northern California, 115 meters tall.

Bigger than three blue whales laid end-to-end.

The most massive organism is a grove of quaking aspen in Utah, all connected by the roots.

Weighing a total of 13 million pounds and the oldest living thing, a patch of sea grass in the Mediterranean dating back 200,000 years.

We spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves on how awesomely magnificent and complex the human animal is, but you guys, I got to hand it to you.

(music) So you know by now, the more specialized tissues an organism has, the more complex they are and the better they typically do, but you also know that these changes don't take place overnight.

The tissues that define vascular plants didn't evolve all at once, but today we recognize three types that make these plants what they are.

Dermal tissues make up their outermost layers and help prevent damage and water loss.

Vascular tissues do all of that conducting of materials I just mentioned and the most abundant tissue type, ground tissues, carry out some of the most important functions of plant life, including photosynthesis and the storage of left over food.

Now, some plants never go beyond these basics.

They sprout from a germinated seed, develop these tissues and then stop.

This is called primary growth and plants that are limited to this stage are herbaceous.

As the name says, they are like herbs; small, soft and flexible and typically they die down to the root or die completely after one growing season.

Pretty much everything you see growing in a backyard garden; herbs and flowers and broccoli and that kind of stuff. Those are herbaceous.

But a lot of vascular plants go on to secondary growth, which allows them to grow, not just taller, but wider.

This is made possible by the development of additional tissues, particularly woody tissues.

These are your woody plants, which include; shrubs and bark covered vines, called lianas and, of course, your trees, but no matter how big they may or may not grow all vascular plants are organized into three main organs.

All of which you are intimately familiar with, not just because you knew what they were when you were in second grade, but also because you probably eat them everyday. First, the root.

It absorbs water and nutrients and serves as a pantry of left over food and, of course, keeps the plant anchored in the ground. Next, the stem.

It contains structures that transport fluids and store nutrients and also is home to specialized cells called meristems that are responsible for creating new growth, but the most important task is to support the last organ, the leaf.

This, of course, is where the plant exchanges gases with the atmosphere and collects sunlight to manufacture food with the help of water and minerals collected through the root and sent up through the stem.

Now, each of these organs contains all three tissues, which together work to absorb, conduct and exploit one of the worlds most important molecules, water.

So, since plants are pretty much designed around water, let's follow some H2O to see how plants make the most of it.

First, as with most organisms, nothing can get in or out of a plant without getting past the skin.

In this case, the dermal tissue.

In smaller, non-woody plants, most of this is just a thin layer of cells called fittingly, the epidermis.

Naturally, this is great for keeping the outside out and the inside in, but the epidermis can also sport some snazzy features in different parts of the plant.

In leaves and stems for example, it often has a waxy outer layer called a cuticle that helps prevent water loss.

On some leaves or on pods that hold those valuable seeds the epidermis can sprout hair like structures called trichomes that help keep insects at bay and secrete toxic or sticky fluids.

It's the same secretions that make the yarrow useful for first-aid, for instance, are also what discourage ants for using it for lunch.

Finally, in the roots the epidermis has similar features called root hairs that maximize the root surface area for absorption, just like we've seen in our own organ systems.

This, of course, is where the plants generally absorb the water they need.

By the way, the cells that make up this dermal tissue are the most basic essential building blocks of vascular plants called parenchyma or visceral flesh cells.

These are the most abundant plant cells found not just in roots, but also in stems, leaves, and flowers.

They are thin and flexible and can perform all kinds of functions depending on their location.

Now, after passing through the skin of the root and through a starchy cortex, or outer layer, water arrives in the first of two kinds of vascular tissue, the xylem.

The xylem's main function is to carry water and dissolved minerals from the root up to the leaves, but like how?

How by Zeus' beard, can plants make water defy gravity?

Well, a lot of the reason is that up top the plant is continuously evaporating water through a process called evapotranspiration.

As water evaporates from the leaves, which I'll explain in greater detail when we get up there, it creates negative pressure inside the xylem, which draws more water upward.

Plants can transpire truly staggering amounts of water and it's because of this that our atmosphere is habitable.

A single acre of corn gives off about 3000 gallons of water every day.

A large oak tree, just one tree can transpire 40,000 gallons in a year.

Only 1% of the water that plants absorb is actually used by plants, mostly in photosynthesis.

The rest is slowly and invisibly released providing one of earth's most crucial functions, transporting water from the soil into the atmosphere where it then returns to the surface as rain, making all life possible.

Yeah. Chew on that as we continue up the xylem and as we get higher in the plant we begin to encounter a greater diversity of cells designed not only for moving stuff around, but also for providing structural support.

For instance, elongated cells with thicker cell walls called collenchyma, help hold up the plant body, especially in herbaceous plants and young structures like new shoot celery is mostly made up of these cells, so you already know what they taste like and in larger, woody plants you also find sclerenchyma cells, especially in the xylem.

These have even thicker cell walls made from lignin, a super strong polymer that makes wood woody.

What's weird about sclerenchyma cells though is that most of them, when they reach maturity, they die.

They just leave behind their hardy cell walls as a support structure and new cells from a fresh layer during the next growing season push the old dead layer outward.

In warm, wet years these layers grow thick while in cold, dry years they're light and thin.

These woody remains form tree rings, which scientists can use, not only to track the age of a tree, but also the history of the climate that it lived in.

Now, at the top of the xylem, water arrives at it's final destination, the leaf.

Here water travels through an increasingly minuscule network of vein-like structures until it's dumped into a new kind of tissue called the mesophyll.

As you can tell from it's name, meso meaning middle and phyll meaning leaf, this layer sits between the top and the bottom epidermis of the leaf, forming the bacon in the BLT that is the leaf structure.

This, my friends, marks our entry into the ground tissue.

I'm sure you're as excited about that as I am.

Despite it's name, ground tissue isn't just in the ground and it's actually just defined as any tissue that's either not dermal or vascular.

Regardless of this low billing though, it's where the money is and by money, I mean food.

And the mesophyll is chalk full of parenchyma cells of various shapes and sizes and many of them are arranged loosely to let CO2 and other materials flow between them.

These cells contain the photosynthetic organelles, chloroplasts, which as you know, host the process of photosynthesis, but where is this CO2 coming from?

Well, some of the neatest features on the leaf are these tiny openings in the epidermis called stomata.

Around each stoma are two guard cells connected at both ends that regulate it's size and shape.

When conditions are dry and the guard cells are limp, they stick together, closing the stoma, but when the leaf is flush with water the guard cells plump up and bow out from each other opening the stoma to allow water to evaporate and let carbon dioxide in.

This is what allows evapotranspiration to take place, as well as photosynthesis.

And you remember photosynthesis through a series of brain-rackingly complicated reactions sparked by the energy from the sun, the CO2 combines with hydrogen from the water to create glucose.

The left over oxygen is released through the stomata and the glucose is ready for shipping.

Now, if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that earlier I said that there are two kinds of vascular tissue and here the circle is made complete as the sugar exits the leaf through the phloem.

The phloem is mostly made of cells stacked in tubes with perforated plates at either end.

After the glucose is loaded into these cells called sieve cells or sieve-tube elements, they then absorb water from the nearby xylem to form a rich, sugary sap to transport the sugar.

This sweet sap, by the way, is what gives the ponderosa it's delicious smell.

By way of internal pressure and diffusion, the sap travels wherever it's needed to parts of the plant experiencing growth during the growing season or down to the root if it's dormant like during winter, where it's stored until spring.

So, now that you understand everything that it takes for vascular plants to succeed, I hope you see why plants equals winning and I'm not just talking about them sweeping the contest for biggest, heaviest, oldest living things, though again, congrats on that guys.

Plants are not only responsible for like making rain happen, they're also the first and most important link in our food chain and that's why the world's most plant rich habitats like rain forests and grasslands are so crucial to our survival.

When those habitats change, everything changes; weather, food supply, even incidence of natural disasters.

So I, for one, welcome our plant overlords because they've done a great job so far making life on earth possible, but I know you're curious.

How do different kinds of plants make more plants?

That's all about the birds and the bees, which is what we will be talking about next week.

번역 0%

Vascular plants = Winning!발음듣기

Blonde Man: This is yarrow, a flowering plant found all over the northern hemisphere.발음듣기

It's feathery leaves have natural astringent properties and it's scientific name, achillea, comes from Achilles, the Greek hero, who is said to have used it on the wounds of his soldiers.발음듣기

And this is snake grass, otherwise known as horse tail, or to the kids, pop grass because you can just pop it apart and then put it back together again.발음듣기

Although, on top there, it's dead now.발음듣기

And this is a ponderosa pine. One of my favorite trees.발음듣기

It can grow hundreds of feet tall and on a warm day if you sniff it, it smells like butterscotch.발음듣기

They all have different shapes, sizes and properties, but each of these things is a vascular plant, one of the most diverse, and dare I say, important families in the tree of life.발음듣기

Since their predecessors first arrived on the scene, some 420 million years ago, vascular plants have found tremendous success through their ability to exploit resources all around them. They convert sunshine into food.발음듣기

They absorb nutrients directly through the soil without the costly process of digestion and they even enlist the help of some friends when it comes to reproduction.발음듣기

So often, when they're doing their thing, it involves a third party, which is like, you know, good for them.발음듣기

But these things alone can't explain a vascular plants extraordinary evolutionary success.발음듣기

I mean, algae was photosynthesizing long before plants made it fashionable and as we learned last week, non-vascular plants have reproductive strategies that are tricked out six ways from Sunday.발음듣기

So, what gives? The secret to vascular plants success is their defining trait, conductive tissues that can take food and water from one part of the plant to another part of a plant.발음듣기

This may sound simple enough, but the ability to move stuff from one part of an organism to another was a huge evolutionary break through for vascular plants.발음듣기

It allowed them to grow exponentially larger, store food for lean times and develop some fancy features that allowed them to spread farther and faster.발음듣기

It was one of the biggest revolutions in the history of life on earth.발음듣기

The result? Plants dominated earth long before animals even showed up and even today, they hold most of the world records.발음듣기

The largest organism in the world is a redwood in northern California, 115 meters tall.발음듣기

Bigger than three blue whales laid end-to-end.발음듣기

The most massive organism is a grove of quaking aspen in Utah, all connected by the roots.발음듣기

Weighing a total of 13 million pounds and the oldest living thing, a patch of sea grass in the Mediterranean dating back 200,000 years.발음듣기

We spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves on how awesomely magnificent and complex the human animal is, but you guys, I got to hand it to you.발음듣기

(music) So you know by now, the more specialized tissues an organism has, the more complex they are and the better they typically do, but you also know that these changes don't take place overnight.발음듣기

The tissues that define vascular plants didn't evolve all at once, but today we recognize three types that make these plants what they are.발음듣기

Dermal tissues make up their outermost layers and help prevent damage and water loss.발음듣기

Vascular tissues do all of that conducting of materials I just mentioned and the most abundant tissue type, ground tissues, carry out some of the most important functions of plant life, including photosynthesis and the storage of left over food.발음듣기

Now, some plants never go beyond these basics.발음듣기

They sprout from a germinated seed, develop these tissues and then stop.발음듣기

This is called primary growth and plants that are limited to this stage are herbaceous.발음듣기

As the name says, they are like herbs; small, soft and flexible and typically they die down to the root or die completely after one growing season.발음듣기

Pretty much everything you see growing in a backyard garden; herbs and flowers and broccoli and that kind of stuff. Those are herbaceous.발음듣기

But a lot of vascular plants go on to secondary growth, which allows them to grow, not just taller, but wider.발음듣기

This is made possible by the development of additional tissues, particularly woody tissues.발음듣기

These are your woody plants, which include; shrubs and bark covered vines, called lianas and, of course, your trees, but no matter how big they may or may not grow all vascular plants are organized into three main organs.발음듣기

All of which you are intimately familiar with, not just because you knew what they were when you were in second grade, but also because you probably eat them everyday. First, the root.발음듣기

It absorbs water and nutrients and serves as a pantry of left over food and, of course, keeps the plant anchored in the ground. Next, the stem.발음듣기

It contains structures that transport fluids and store nutrients and also is home to specialized cells called meristems that are responsible for creating new growth, but the most important task is to support the last organ, the leaf.발음듣기

This, of course, is where the plant exchanges gases with the atmosphere and collects sunlight to manufacture food with the help of water and minerals collected through the root and sent up through the stem.발음듣기

Now, each of these organs contains all three tissues, which together work to absorb, conduct and exploit one of the worlds most important molecules, water.발음듣기

So, since plants are pretty much designed around water, let's follow some H2O to see how plants make the most of it.발음듣기

First, as with most organisms, nothing can get in or out of a plant without getting past the skin.발음듣기

In this case, the dermal tissue.발음듣기

In smaller, non-woody plants, most of this is just a thin layer of cells called fittingly, the epidermis.발음듣기

Naturally, this is great for keeping the outside out and the inside in, but the epidermis can also sport some snazzy features in different parts of the plant.발음듣기

In leaves and stems for example, it often has a waxy outer layer called a cuticle that helps prevent water loss.발음듣기

On some leaves or on pods that hold those valuable seeds the epidermis can sprout hair like structures called trichomes that help keep insects at bay and secrete toxic or sticky fluids.발음듣기

It's the same secretions that make the yarrow useful for first-aid, for instance, are also what discourage ants for using it for lunch.발음듣기

Finally, in the roots the epidermis has similar features called root hairs that maximize the root surface area for absorption, just like we've seen in our own organ systems.발음듣기

This, of course, is where the plants generally absorb the water they need.발음듣기

By the way, the cells that make up this dermal tissue are the most basic essential building blocks of vascular plants called parenchyma or visceral flesh cells.발음듣기

These are the most abundant plant cells found not just in roots, but also in stems, leaves, and flowers.발음듣기

They are thin and flexible and can perform all kinds of functions depending on their location.발음듣기

Now, after passing through the skin of the root and through a starchy cortex, or outer layer, water arrives in the first of two kinds of vascular tissue, the xylem.발음듣기

The xylem's main function is to carry water and dissolved minerals from the root up to the leaves, but like how?발음듣기

How by Zeus' beard, can plants make water defy gravity?발음듣기

Well, a lot of the reason is that up top the plant is continuously evaporating water through a process called evapotranspiration.발음듣기

As water evaporates from the leaves, which I'll explain in greater detail when we get up there, it creates negative pressure inside the xylem, which draws more water upward.발음듣기

Plants can transpire truly staggering amounts of water and it's because of this that our atmosphere is habitable.발음듣기

A single acre of corn gives off about 3000 gallons of water every day.발음듣기

A large oak tree, just one tree can transpire 40,000 gallons in a year.발음듣기

Only 1% of the water that plants absorb is actually used by plants, mostly in photosynthesis.발음듣기

The rest is slowly and invisibly released providing one of earth's most crucial functions, transporting water from the soil into the atmosphere where it then returns to the surface as rain, making all life possible.발음듣기

Yeah. Chew on that as we continue up the xylem and as we get higher in the plant we begin to encounter a greater diversity of cells designed not only for moving stuff around, but also for providing structural support.발음듣기

For instance, elongated cells with thicker cell walls called collenchyma, help hold up the plant body, especially in herbaceous plants and young structures like new shoot celery is mostly made up of these cells, so you already know what they taste like and in larger, woody plants you also find sclerenchyma cells, especially in the xylem.발음듣기

These have even thicker cell walls made from lignin, a super strong polymer that makes wood woody.발음듣기

What's weird about sclerenchyma cells though is that most of them, when they reach maturity, they die.발음듣기

They just leave behind their hardy cell walls as a support structure and new cells from a fresh layer during the next growing season push the old dead layer outward.발음듣기

In warm, wet years these layers grow thick while in cold, dry years they're light and thin.발음듣기

These woody remains form tree rings, which scientists can use, not only to track the age of a tree, but also the history of the climate that it lived in.발음듣기

Now, at the top of the xylem, water arrives at it's final destination, the leaf.발음듣기

Here water travels through an increasingly minuscule network of vein-like structures until it's dumped into a new kind of tissue called the mesophyll.발음듣기

As you can tell from it's name, meso meaning middle and phyll meaning leaf, this layer sits between the top and the bottom epidermis of the leaf, forming the bacon in the BLT that is the leaf structure.발음듣기

This, my friends, marks our entry into the ground tissue.발음듣기

I'm sure you're as excited about that as I am.발음듣기

Despite it's name, ground tissue isn't just in the ground and it's actually just defined as any tissue that's either not dermal or vascular.발음듣기

Regardless of this low billing though, it's where the money is and by money, I mean food.발음듣기

And the mesophyll is chalk full of parenchyma cells of various shapes and sizes and many of them are arranged loosely to let CO2 and other materials flow between them.발음듣기

These cells contain the photosynthetic organelles, chloroplasts, which as you know, host the process of photosynthesis, but where is this CO2 coming from?발음듣기

Well, some of the neatest features on the leaf are these tiny openings in the epidermis called stomata.발음듣기

Around each stoma are two guard cells connected at both ends that regulate it's size and shape.발음듣기

When conditions are dry and the guard cells are limp, they stick together, closing the stoma, but when the leaf is flush with water the guard cells plump up and bow out from each other opening the stoma to allow water to evaporate and let carbon dioxide in.발음듣기

This is what allows evapotranspiration to take place, as well as photosynthesis.발음듣기

And you remember photosynthesis through a series of brain-rackingly complicated reactions sparked by the energy from the sun, the CO2 combines with hydrogen from the water to create glucose.발음듣기

The left over oxygen is released through the stomata and the glucose is ready for shipping.발음듣기

Now, if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that earlier I said that there are two kinds of vascular tissue and here the circle is made complete as the sugar exits the leaf through the phloem.발음듣기

The phloem is mostly made of cells stacked in tubes with perforated plates at either end.발음듣기

After the glucose is loaded into these cells called sieve cells or sieve-tube elements, they then absorb water from the nearby xylem to form a rich, sugary sap to transport the sugar.발음듣기

This sweet sap, by the way, is what gives the ponderosa it's delicious smell.발음듣기

By way of internal pressure and diffusion, the sap travels wherever it's needed to parts of the plant experiencing growth during the growing season or down to the root if it's dormant like during winter, where it's stored until spring.발음듣기

So, now that you understand everything that it takes for vascular plants to succeed, I hope you see why plants equals winning and I'm not just talking about them sweeping the contest for biggest, heaviest, oldest living things, though again, congrats on that guys.발음듣기

Plants are not only responsible for like making rain happen, they're also the first and most important link in our food chain and that's why the world's most plant rich habitats like rain forests and grasslands are so crucial to our survival.발음듣기

When those habitats change, everything changes; weather, food supply, even incidence of natural disasters.발음듣기

So I, for one, welcome our plant overlords because they've done a great job so far making life on earth possible, but I know you're curious.발음듣기

How do different kinds of plants make more plants?발음듣기

That's all about the birds and the bees, which is what we will be talking about next week.발음듣기

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