An interesting issue for me will be how gene trees align to the species trees from the nuclear genome sequencing data. The technical paper below lays out the issues quite well. Copetti, Dario, et al. "Extensive gene tree discordance and hemiplasy shaped the genomes of North American columnar ca...

You can expect to see a lot more trees in the near future! Not least because there are a number of very big initiatives across the world aiming to sequence a huge number of different species see for example https://www.earthbiogenome.org/affiliated-project-networks. Not all C&S and no need to re...

For fungus gnats, I thought these traps were supposed to be great for monitoring but not really effective for control? For fungus gnats you might catch some of the adult flies but it is the larvae in the soil that do the damage. To interupt their lifecycle you'd have to catch all the adults before t...

Do you think they can catch really small things like mealy bug crawlers or RSM moving from plant to plant?
Or if the card was low down around the plants would you just wipe out lots of spiders?

Thanks Tony, that's a good tip! The first thing I do when I want to grow a new type of plant from seed is to get hold of a mature plant (even a related species) and then work out the best conditions to grow this plant (compost, light, humidity etc). I wouldn't put the plant in a seed raising area to...

You have to decide for yourself whether or not you think it is safe to use vermiculite. In the UK we can download the safety data sheets and you can read the health and safety assessment that accompanies the product. This is very helpful. It then makes it easy to take the appropriate precautions to ...

I'd swap out the builders sand as it might contain lime/limestone which would cause problems for some plants. Washing would get rid of salt but lime/limestone is not very soluble and so could remain in the sand. You should consider adding Vermiculite - it tends to hold water and this stops rapid dry...

Thanks for posting this. It seems plausible that you would see expansion of C4 grasslands in a period with low atmospheric C0 2 . But if the paper is mainly about succulent plants then why would you not focus the paper more on CAM photosynthesis? This is thought to also give an advantage in low Co2 ...

Sorry thrip is just too tempting a false singular.

Looks like a thrip of some kind?
The larval stages look like the adults but without wings.