Isabella Armour
Aspiring botanist and ecologist with a passion for science communication. The door to learning about the natural world is always open; let’s go outside and play
No Illusion of Knowledge Here
Heteroblasty
- have you ever noticed that sometimes leaves on one plant vary in shape and size?
- this phenomenon is called heteroblasty
- and occurs to some degree in almost all plant species
- the plants that display the most abrupt changes in form are considered heteroblastic
- the term heteroblasty can apply to any drastic change in a plant’s physical form between it’s earliest stages and maturity
- but the thing is
- that even though we think it happens in most plant species
- it is still unclear what these developmental changes have to do with evolutionary trajectories
- and how frequent they actually are in the plant kingdom
The reason this post is so short is because this topic is still being heavily researched (and because I really should go to bed). It was only 100 years ago that botanist Karl Goebel observed this phenomenon and gave it a name. Since then more and more research has been done, but it’s pretty hard to make distinct claims about a phenomenon that occurs to varying degrees throughout an entire kingdom of organisms.
Onward we march, into the scientific unknown.
Source
Zotz, Gerhard, Kerstin Wilhelm, and Annette Becker. “Heteroblasty — a review.” The Botanical Review 77.2 (2011): 109–151.
