Tambarikosy

This post was originally published under the title  "Water Worlds"  in the December 2016 issue of  The Biologist , the Royal Society of Biology's magazine. If you're a member of the RSB you can also view the  article on their website here . Tropical rainforests are known for being full of life. Whether you're captivated by the calls of colourful birds, mesmerised by hypnotically patterned cats, or fascinated by the apparently infinite variety of invertebrate life, you still have to acknowledge that what makes a rainforest are the plants. A forest is by definition a collection of trees, but there is a whole lot more to plant life in a rainforest. Coating every surface, including the trees themselves, are more plants. Some of these we would as surface-covering vegetation in temperate environments as well, like the mosses and liverworts that coat stone walls or the dandelions that poke their sunny faces out between cracks in the concrete. However, there are

Past the sandy beaches and rocky shores, beneath the lapping of breaking waves, coasts around the world are (were) carpeted with green underwater meadows of seagrasses. Contrary to what you may be thinking, seagrasses are not a form of seaweed or even vaguely related, though they do often co-occur. Seagrasses are in fact angiosperms , flowering plants whose ancestors adapted to life in salt water back when dinosaurs roamed on land. Is anybody else picturing an plesiosaur gliding over a bed of seagrass? The ancestors of seagrasses took many biochemical and physical shifts in order to adapt to a wet and salty lifestyle. However, amazingly, an important feature that seagrasses have retained despite millions of years of evolution under the sea is their ability to flower. Turtlegrass flowering shoot ©Dawn Witherington

The name of my blog tends to bewilder people, and things don't seem to become much clearer to them when I translate it.