Chris Martine | Plants are Cool, Too!

Always happy to talk about both of those topics — especially when I get to reflect on how incredible it’s been to teach with my Bucknell Art colleague Anna Kell and to collaborate with NYU artist/prof Erin Johnson on work inspired by #Solanum plastisexum.

#sciart #PUI #STEMeducation #STEAM

Two bald bearded bespectacled botanists

Poster for the U of Vienna E&E symposium

Appreciated the opportunity to give two talks at the University of Vienna, one on Australian spiny solanums and one on the integration of science and art in teaching/outreach — and both introduced by my brother-in-phenotype @reactionnorm.bsky.social

#sciart #scicomm #plantpeopleftw

We need taxonomists and real botanists 🪴🌱

Canopy leaf-out (green) and Erythronium flowering (yellow) both shift earlier each year, with Erythronium advancing more rapidly.

Spring ephemeral dimpled trout #lily may not be vulnerable to phenological mismatch with overstory trees

New #AJB research by Melina Schopler, Anita Simha, Rebecca Dalton, Emma Wilson, Emmeline Redick, Elsa Youngsteadt & William Petry

doi.org/10.1002/ajb2...
#botany #plantscience #climatechange

Andy Berger, Krissa Skogen, Norm Wickett

Andy

Solanum bauerianum specimen

Many thanks to Andy Berger for showing us some of the magic of the 5-million-specimen #herbarium at the Natural History Museum, Vienna — including the type of the now-extinct Solanum bauerianum … as well as their oldest accession from the mid-1600s.

#plantpeopleftw

I remember handling and mounting some of von Mueller’s specimens with their characteristic blue labels & florid handwriting - noting the curly B on a downturned corner on some which meant it’d gone all the way to Kew, been examined and signed by Bentham before being sent back to MEL #botany

So cool!

Botanist holding determination label

Upper label det. as Solanum phlomoides. Original label for Solanum ellipticum.

In the stacks

TFW when you put a new identification on a specimen handled by Ferdinand von Mueller ca. 1885.

University of Vienna #Herbarium.

#Solanum #OzPlants

Pretty fascinating

Endangered cockatoos to get new nests after West Australian bushfires Conservationists are trying to put in place a plan to rehabilitate a key nesting area for endangered black cockatoos that was ravaged by fire.

Fire is a natural part of many ecological systems, but when climate change fosters fires of unusual magnitude and intensity, human intervention is sometimes needed to repair the damage. 🌍🌰

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

Survey shows successful reintroduction of eastern quolls to mainland Australia Once dubbed the Australian "native cat", the eastern quoll was abundant before it was completely wiped out on mainland Australia.

The eastern quoll has been reintroduced into Australia's Victoria state. 🌍🌰

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

Each spring, we host our annual Torrey Botanical Society #banquet - On Saturday, March 28 at 3pm Eastern, we'll host a #lecture by Dr. Aaron Sexton on cultivating ecological novelty in cities - and we'll have the banquet after! Details & registration here: shorturl.at/nz31I

🧪🌎🌿🍄🌾 #botany

Rosemary Glos | Trapped, Poked, and Poisoned: Evidence for Defence Synergisms in a Desert Plant In this ‘Behind the Paper’ blog post, Rosemary Glos (she/her, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mi, USA) discusses her research article ‘Separate and Synergistic Anti-Herbivore E…

👀Find out more about the research behind the cover in author Rosemary Glos' 'Behind the Paper' post!

🛼Rosemary discusses synergistic interactions between plant defence traits, using a beard-trimmer in the field, and the joys of roller derby!

👉️ buff.ly/KxbZKMW

🧵2/2

🧪🌍️

starting March 1, 2026, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences are prohibited from using central government funds to pay Article Processing Charges for high-priced OA journals, specifically Nature Communications and Science Advances.

Not spending money that is appropriated for science is a tricky subject to explain, but for people in limbo (like myself, as I mentioned yesterday), it can have cause serious career harm.

Many celebrated the NIH budget bill. It’s not supporting science when an unchecked bottleneck still remains.

My department at CSU Northridge is hiring a vertebrate functional morphologist! We've got a great EEB group, and we're looking for someone to carry forward a tradition of enriching organismal courses and community-engaged research. App review starts March 15

csucareers.calstate.edu/mob/cw/en-us...

So effing great

And they’re off!! 800 seed bombs loaded up with native seeds coming to an abandoned lot near you 😘

Macro photograph, in top view, of two insects standing on a cluster of small, 4-petalled white flowers. Both insects have a red head and thorax and black at their back ends. The beetle on the right is slightly broader, and has a narrow white line separating the red and black parts of its body, as to suggest a narrow ant waist.

Model and mimic: a clever longhorn beetle (Euderces reichei, at right) tries its best to look like a local carpenter ant, Campontous decipiens, as they both feed on a spring dogwood flower. Brackenridge Field Laboratory, Texas.

iNaturalist-facilitated rediscovery of Monarda mexicana (Lamiaceae) in high-elevation habitats of Durango, Mexico | Phytotaxa

the "lost" species Monarda mexicana is still out there! Known from just 2 historical collections (most recent from the 1950s). Imagine my joy in stumbling on a picture of it on @inaturalist.bsky.social !!! We've now documented the first known modern populations and revived the species name:

Pictures of two faucet snails from different angles to show identification features on a ruler to show scale with the following text: Invasive Species Spotlight: Faucet Snail / Mud Bithynia (Bithynia tentaculata) Key Identification Features: Small shell approximately 12-15 mm at full size with a rounded spire of 5-6 whorls and the shell opening (aperture) less than half the total height of the shell Shell color can vary from shiny light brown to black “Right-handed” (dextral) shell opening with covering called an operculum that is whitish and calcified with a pattern of concentric rings

Species spotlight for National Invasive Species Awareness Week. Invasive faucet snails are a growing concern in the Champlain Basin and Great Lakes region and can outcompete native snails, clog drain and intake pipes, and spread parasites to birds.
🌍🧪

#NISAW #InvasiveSpecies #Wildlife #Ecology

Yellow four-petal flower with red spots at petal bases

Eulobus californicus, the California Primrose, blooming in Anza-Borrego today #nativeplants 🌿

Beneroff wins best student presentation — Martine Botany Lab Rebecca Beneroff MS ‘27 has been announced as winner of the Best Student Poster in botany at the 2026 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) conference in Portland, OR. Her poster, “Co...

Big congrats to Bucknell's Rebecca Beneroff for winning Best Student Presentation for a Poster in the Division of Botany at the #SICB2026 conference!! @botanicalbecks.bsky.social

www.chrismartine.com/lab-news/ben...

Devani Jolman in a Bucknell sweatshirt

Excited to launch the new lab website, including the announcement that Devani Jolman will be joining us as the new Burpee Postdoc!

www.chrismartine.com

Hooray for herbaria!

14 people posing in the herbarium, with mounted specimens in the foreground

Very happy to host almost 40 folks in the Manning Herbarium today through the Bucknell Institute for Lifelong Learning. So many excellent questions and lots of genuine interest in why collections matter. #iamabotanist

It's time to gear up for #Botany2026 and submit an abstract!

We’ve gathered over 4000 literature records on Rhododendron 🤯 👏🏼

References span 459 years of investigation and discovery 🌸💡

Topics range from ecology, reproductive biology, horticulture, medical chemistry, physiology, evolution and even some materials science 👀
🧪🍁🌏

www.zotero.org/groups/47355...

Celebrating @kheyduk.bsky.social’s big day.

#coffeepotramen

Students from the Herbarium Curation course in Bucknell’s herbarium

Pleasure to host Donald McClelland’s Lycoming College students in the Manning Herbarium this afternoon. Central PA PUI botany powers, unite!

#iamabotanist #plantpeopleFTW