The Evolution of the Trichome
- Thread starter skunkushybrid
- Start date
donnieosmond
Well-Known Member
Rather than justify myself, I'll apologize for getting off topic from this thread's original point. Please continue.
skunkushybrid
New Member
When? .
skunkushybrid
New Member
No? No apology then?
traffic
Active Member
Those that are best suited to the environment survive through natural selection...
The fact that trichomes are a way to transport seed and pollen does not mean that they do not also help the plant harness light. There are probably more efficient ways for the plant to harness light, just as there are probably more efficient ways to spread seed and pollen. However, the trichome allowed for a damn good balance of the two that made plants with trichs on both the fan leaves and the buds more prone to survival.
The fact that trichomes are a way to transport seed and pollen does not mean that they do not also help the plant harness light. There are probably more efficient ways for the plant to harness light, just as there are probably more efficient ways to spread seed and pollen. However, the trichome allowed for a damn good balance of the two that made plants with trichs on both the fan leaves and the buds more prone to survival.
tahoe58
Well-Known Member
as with so many processes, somewhre along the line of change....there was a competitive advantage for a plant to have trichromes - their genes were more successful in passed along, and those with thc advanced as well. But is it not also true that cannabis sativa also evolved other individual genotypes that were not psychoactive? or is that an outcome of human intervention....the hemp plant that had only negligible amounts of thc?
jesus3
Well-Known Member
yes ruderalis have trichs on the buds.my parents grow in country side bunch ruderalis plants every year.trich amount is very low but they are there.
skunkushybrid
New Member
Yes. Thanks for stopping by jesus. god (pun intended) that feels strange calling someone that.
Yes, it's worth note too that ruderalis is not as potent as strains grown in climates where thesun is more intense.
It's a combination of things... the trich's are there to magnify light, but if there isn't much light then the trich's have no real energy to gather thc... or maybe they don't need protecting as much from the UV Radiation.
It could still all be about light... even the cannabinoids. The chemical that gives off smell is THCV (i think it's the right way round), although I can't remember my source for that information. I think it was Mr Rosenthal in his book...
So maybe some of the cannabinoids are to help protect the trich' from UV radiation... and some are there to encourage, and discourage certain types of wildlife.
Yes, it's worth note too that ruderalis is not as potent as strains grown in climates where thesun is more intense.
It's a combination of things... the trich's are there to magnify light, but if there isn't much light then the trich's have no real energy to gather thc... or maybe they don't need protecting as much from the UV Radiation.
It could still all be about light... even the cannabinoids. The chemical that gives off smell is THCV (i think it's the right way round), although I can't remember my source for that information. I think it was Mr Rosenthal in his book...
So maybe some of the cannabinoids are to help protect the trich' from UV radiation... and some are there to encourage, and discourage certain types of wildlife.
Your Grandfather
Well-Known Member
Do you think this is the sole purpose of Trich's? If we removed the Trich's_thru electrostatic_and then placed the plant back into the light.All plants need light in order to grow. All plants need to reproduce. The Trichomes start to develop after the plant enters the flowering stage. The Trichomes are there to "catch" any male pollen that happens to float by. That's why their sticky. God is good, isn't she?
Vi
Would the buds get sunburn?
donnieosmond
Well-Known Member
Now that's a good question. You should try it. If nothing else it'd rule out some possibilities.
ViRedd
New Member
If we removed trichomes from cannabis plants, I think we would lose cannabis plants. Not from sunburn though ... but from the inability to reproduce.
Vi
skunkushybrid
New Member
Ok... then why do hermies have trich's? In fact, this may go against your religous beliefs, but cannabis started out as a hermie... no need for procreation. If cannabis got trich's then, it would discount them being needed for pollenation. Also hermies are usually much bigger plants, and the natural hermies (where both chromosomes are equal) will still get trich's... abundantly so.All plants need light in order to grow. All plants need to reproduce. The Trichomes start to develop after the plant enters the flowering stage. The Trichomes are there to "catch" any male pollen that happens to float by. That's why their sticky. God is good, isn't she?
Vi
and the fact that it does happen in flower, when the sun is getting less and less intense... yet cannabis triples in height, How does it do this? During the period the plant has the most light. It stays much shorter.
Why the disc-shaped head on top of the stalk? Is it the head of the trich' that is sticky, or the stalk?
Trich's are often thought of as hair, in fact I believe the literal translation is something to do with hair, if trich's are hairs... then cannabis gets them all through it's life.
skunkushybrid
New Member
According to my theory, no. The light getting to the plant would be weaker, they'd have no way of magnifying it, so shouldn't grow as big. Only for one day though... as soon as low light levels are initiated the plant will respond by producing more trichomes. also, the freshly produced trich's should contain no (to very minute, maybe) cannabinoids.
If you place a plant into 3 days dark, is the plant producing excess trich's in response to what looks like a harsh world (in other words it expects the whole season to be like this), it's reasonable to suggest that the plant produces these trich's in an effort to capture as much light as it can the next day.
If they produce all the trich's in response to the fact they believe they might be dying, then what would be the point in trying to catch pollen? They'd never be able to successfully mature the seed anyway. Is cannabis stupid?
I don't believe it is.
I also don't believe that cannabis even considers death as an option. All life wants to live, cannabis adapts to its surroundings quicker than any other plant we know.
Give it darker conditions than what it's used to, and the plant will respond in producing more trich's. Why?
skunkushybrid
New Member
I was going to write this in my own words, but the article is very entertaining, and I don't believe I could do it any justice, so here you are:
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Forget soil and fertilisers, there is one plant that needs only the air that we breathe. Darren Crayn explores the salt marshes of Venezuela in search of an incredible plant which has captivated him for over 20 years.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I had come to these salt marshes on a personal pilgrimage, to meet face to face with the tillandsias that had so entranced me in my youth. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]As I trudged across the cracked and bone-dry landscape, I remembered the day twenty years before when I saw my first tillandsia. It was just a hairy little tuft of a thing, stuck to a rock in a local plant nursery on the north coast of New South Wales. It was living, there was no doubt about that, but there was no soil and no obvious roots. Instead, it was sitting, anemone-like, in a big blob of rubbery glue, with its stiff, grey-green tentacles twitching gently in the breeze. It looked other-worldy, like no plant I had seen before. I was intrigued.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Where to get a drink?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]My companion across the salt marshes that morning was the well-known Venezuelan plant physiologist, Dr. Ernesto Medina. It was the dry season and the sustaining waters had long retreated from the marshes leaving a dry, dusty, and salty soil. But around me, groups of hardy plants appeared to be managing quite well, even under such adverse conditions. These plants have found ways to overcome the one over-riding problem with living in such arid habitats, and that is, where to get a drink. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Ernesto led me toward a large and impressive-looking Pilocereus, the dominant cactus in these coastal Venezuelan plains. At its base, sun-bleached flotsam littered the cracked soil as a testimony to this arid lands other life as a saltmarsh. The upper reaches of the cactus spiny limbs were festooned with freeloaders, their tentacle-like leaves combing the breeze like warped green anemones. These were the tillandsias, Tillandsia flexuosa to be precise. Suprisingly, they are close relatives of the pineapple. Standing there before what looked like a frayed and twisted rope of fat snakes, I couldnt help but think maybe they were closer to Medusa. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Up close & personal[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I had to get a closer look. Turning one of the leaves in my fingers I marvelled at the fine, light grey fur covering its surface. While it gives the leaves a gorgeous silvery lustre, this fur is there for more than that just aesthetics. In addition to the protection it gives to the plants tiny green photosynthesis factories (chloroplasts) against excessive sunlight, there is an even more remarkable function. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Looking carefully through my magnifying glass, I could see that this fur is not made up of simple hairs, but it is a veritable forest of tiny, fragile cups whose rims fan out into narrow, tongue-like bits (lets call them wings) on one side. I knew that these beautiful structures must be important:- why would a plant living in such a harsh environment invest so much energy to produce them if they were useless?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]While botanists have known of the existence of these curious trichomes since the pioneering work of Dr. Mez over a century ago, only recently has their role in water uptake been fully revealed. We now know that each trichome is made up of a lot of little cells, some of which are living, and some of which are dead and are just an empty shell. When a drop of rainwater falls on the surface of the leaf, it spreads very quickly into a thin film due to 'capillary action. This is a peculiar vice of many liquids that, when faced with a very narrow space (like the space in the centre of a thin needle) they want to defy gravity, and squeeze themselves up into it. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]On the tillandsia leaf, it's the gaps between the trichomes that constitute the 'narrow spaces' which result in the capillary action. When the water comes in contact with one of the dead cells in the wing of a trichome, it is drawn into it like into a sponge, swelling the cell to several times its original size. Then osmosis takes over, and the hapless water molecules are dragged by this irresistible force out of the dead cells into the living cells in the centre of the trichome. Once in the living cell, the water is caught and the plant may use it how it likes. The whole process from rain to gain is simple but effective, and it all happens, literally, in the blink of an eye. [/FONT]
Now, if a trichome can be produced to harness rainwater, could one not (at least in the terms of cannabis) be evolved to harness light?
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Forget soil and fertilisers, there is one plant that needs only the air that we breathe. Darren Crayn explores the salt marshes of Venezuela in search of an incredible plant which has captivated him for over 20 years.
[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Tillandsia like to live perched up high on cactus.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It was a perilously hot morning. I could just make out the ghostly visages of cactus plants, tall and elegant, through the shimmering heat waves rising from the dusty plain. I knew that out here in the seasonal salt marshes of the Venezuelan carribean coast there grew a plant that had a much harder life than these tall cacti. A plant that never knew the luxury of a quick drink from the sodden soil after a rainstorm. It was out here somewhere, all I had to do was find it. And I knew where to look, because in this parched landscape the little plant lives perched on top of the cacti![/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I had come to these salt marshes on a personal pilgrimage, to meet face to face with the tillandsias that had so entranced me in my youth. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]As I trudged across the cracked and bone-dry landscape, I remembered the day twenty years before when I saw my first tillandsia. It was just a hairy little tuft of a thing, stuck to a rock in a local plant nursery on the north coast of New South Wales. It was living, there was no doubt about that, but there was no soil and no obvious roots. Instead, it was sitting, anemone-like, in a big blob of rubbery glue, with its stiff, grey-green tentacles twitching gently in the breeze. It looked other-worldy, like no plant I had seen before. I was intrigued.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]My companion across the salt marshes that morning was the well-known Venezuelan plant physiologist, Dr. Ernesto Medina. It was the dry season and the sustaining waters had long retreated from the marshes leaving a dry, dusty, and salty soil. But around me, groups of hardy plants appeared to be managing quite well, even under such adverse conditions. These plants have found ways to overcome the one over-riding problem with living in such arid habitats, and that is, where to get a drink. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Plants in the tillandsia family include this Bromeliad[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The cacti have adopted one common approach to this problem. They drink heartily from the soil when water is available, and store in their fleshy stems what they dont immediately use, to get them through the dry periods. But the tillandsias, living high up on the cactus thick, fleshy arms, dont get the opportunity to drink from the soil. Their roots are highly modified and are good only to anchor them, limpet-like, to their spiny hosts. They are not parasites: the roots dont penetrate the cactus thick skin, so the reservoirs of vital water within are off-limits. There they sit, high up in the dry, wilting air. You could hardly think of a less hospitable place. But tillandsias manage to thrive, so where do they go for a drink?[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Ernesto led me toward a large and impressive-looking Pilocereus, the dominant cactus in these coastal Venezuelan plains. At its base, sun-bleached flotsam littered the cracked soil as a testimony to this arid lands other life as a saltmarsh. The upper reaches of the cactus spiny limbs were festooned with freeloaders, their tentacle-like leaves combing the breeze like warped green anemones. These were the tillandsias, Tillandsia flexuosa to be precise. Suprisingly, they are close relatives of the pineapple. Standing there before what looked like a frayed and twisted rope of fat snakes, I couldnt help but think maybe they were closer to Medusa. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I had to get a closer look. Turning one of the leaves in my fingers I marvelled at the fine, light grey fur covering its surface. While it gives the leaves a gorgeous silvery lustre, this fur is there for more than that just aesthetics. In addition to the protection it gives to the plants tiny green photosynthesis factories (chloroplasts) against excessive sunlight, there is an even more remarkable function. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Looking carefully through my magnifying glass, I could see that this fur is not made up of simple hairs, but it is a veritable forest of tiny, fragile cups whose rims fan out into narrow, tongue-like bits (lets call them wings) on one side. I knew that these beautiful structures must be important:- why would a plant living in such a harsh environment invest so much energy to produce them if they were useless?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Trichomes, the ' little cups' which make living on air possible.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I knew that these little cups, or trichomes (pronounced try-combs), allow tillandsias to do something quite amazing and unparalleled in the plant world. Rather than absorb water through their roots like other plants, tillandsias use their trichomes to drink through their leaves. This astounding feat led the great botanist Carl Mez to coin for tillandsias the name atmospherics, but to gardeners and hobbyists they are simply air plants.[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]While botanists have known of the existence of these curious trichomes since the pioneering work of Dr. Mez over a century ago, only recently has their role in water uptake been fully revealed. We now know that each trichome is made up of a lot of little cells, some of which are living, and some of which are dead and are just an empty shell. When a drop of rainwater falls on the surface of the leaf, it spreads very quickly into a thin film due to 'capillary action. This is a peculiar vice of many liquids that, when faced with a very narrow space (like the space in the centre of a thin needle) they want to defy gravity, and squeeze themselves up into it. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]On the tillandsia leaf, it's the gaps between the trichomes that constitute the 'narrow spaces' which result in the capillary action. When the water comes in contact with one of the dead cells in the wing of a trichome, it is drawn into it like into a sponge, swelling the cell to several times its original size. Then osmosis takes over, and the hapless water molecules are dragged by this irresistible force out of the dead cells into the living cells in the centre of the trichome. Once in the living cell, the water is caught and the plant may use it how it likes. The whole process from rain to gain is simple but effective, and it all happens, literally, in the blink of an eye. [/FONT]
Now, if a trichome can be produced to harness rainwater, could one not (at least in the terms of cannabis) be evolved to harness light?
tahoe58
Well-Known Member
you know Skunk....there is a huge point in my mind that I can't shake.....if trichs were for gathering pollen.....how does the pollen make it to the pistil if its caught on the trichs? that does not seem to be an effective reproductive (and therefore competitive) advantage?.....now I'm gonna go back and read this other stuff you put here....thanks!
skunkushybrid
New Member
Yes, this is a good point, which is why I wanted to know which part of the trichome is sticky.
Trich's could be used, and most likely are used, for all the things mentioned in this thread.
A male plant does not need sticky resin... it's pollen is all too easily dispersed. It has less trichomes because it doesn't need to live as long or draw as much energy from the sun to flower. Maybe this is also a reason that cannabis plants with the dominant male chromosome will have a tendency to stretch taller, in a quicker time than the females.
Trich's could be used, and most likely are used, for all the things mentioned in this thread.
A male plant does not need sticky resin... it's pollen is all too easily dispersed. It has less trichomes because it doesn't need to live as long or draw as much energy from the sun to flower. Maybe this is also a reason that cannabis plants with the dominant male chromosome will have a tendency to stretch taller, in a quicker time than the females.
closet.cult
New Member
very interesting read on trics of the Tillandsias.
With regards to male hieght and trics:
Cannabis plants are Anemophily or wind pollinated. This is a form of pollination whereby pollen is distributed by wind. Unlike entomophilous and zoophilous species, whose pollen is spread by insects and vertebrates respectively, anemophilous species do not develop scented flowers, nor do they produce nectar. -Wiki
So, this suggest that males are taller because the tallest were more successful at spreading their pollen farthest by wind. And males seem to have less functions requiring trics.
Also, interestingly, if these statements are entirely correct, the smell of the cannabis plant does not come from the flower, per say. Because ordinary flowers developed smell to attract a pollinating insect. Rather, the smell is in the secreted chemicals. This falls in line with one of your previous posts, Skunk. Though I have not researched this any further.
I have found no information that the sticky trics have anything to do with catching pollen for pollination. I know this seems elementary, but it is the stamin and pistol that carry the pollen into the flower for pollenation. how would it help the plant to have pollen caught on sticky leaves? Maybe I haven't read enough. Still looking...
With regards to male hieght and trics:
Cannabis plants are Anemophily or wind pollinated. This is a form of pollination whereby pollen is distributed by wind. Unlike entomophilous and zoophilous species, whose pollen is spread by insects and vertebrates respectively, anemophilous species do not develop scented flowers, nor do they produce nectar. -Wiki
So, this suggest that males are taller because the tallest were more successful at spreading their pollen farthest by wind. And males seem to have less functions requiring trics.
Also, interestingly, if these statements are entirely correct, the smell of the cannabis plant does not come from the flower, per say. Because ordinary flowers developed smell to attract a pollinating insect. Rather, the smell is in the secreted chemicals. This falls in line with one of your previous posts, Skunk. Though I have not researched this any further.
I have found no information that the sticky trics have anything to do with catching pollen for pollination. I know this seems elementary, but it is the stamin and pistol that carry the pollen into the flower for pollenation. how would it help the plant to have pollen caught on sticky leaves? Maybe I haven't read enough. Still looking...
