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26/11/2021

See the World's Driest Desert Covered in Wildflowers
An unexpected rain has caused the world's driest nonpolar desert to burst into bloom.

Chile's Atacama Desert typically gets a mere 0.6 inches (15 millimeters) of rain every year. But unusual rains that fell during the winter in northern Chile led the barren landscape to blossom in August.

Typically, the Atacama becomes an endless field of wildflowers once every five to seven years due to rains from El Niño, a climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean. This rare transformation is known as a "super bloom" and has earned the desert the nickname "desierto florido" ("flowering desert" in Spanish) from locals. [Photos: Colorful Blooms Sprout Across the World's Driest Desert]
The desert holds millions of dormant seeds in its soils. When rain waters these seeds, they can open and take root, eventually growing into flowers that are red, orange, yellow, purple and white.
The last super bloom happened in 2015, and the next one wasn't expected for several more years. But the unexpected rains delivered a rare treat: fragrant flowers ahead of schedule.

The Atacama Desert sits on a 600-mile-long (1,000 kilometers) plateau in northern Chile that borders Peru, Bolivia and Argentina. The harsh, arid land is sparsely populated, but thousands of tourists flock there during super blooms to see the more than 200 floral and wildlife species, Live Science previously reported.

26/11/2021

The Oldest Butterflies on Earth Had No Flowers to Feed On
That's what scientists found after analyzing 70 fossils of wing scales and scale fragments unearthed in northern Germany. These 200-million-year-old fossils, which date to the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, are the oldest evidence on record of insects in the order Lepidoptera, the researchers said.

Some of the fossils share features with modern moths in the suborder Glossata, which have a straw-like proboscis that can suck up fluids like nectar. Given their complexity, and the time it would've taken to evolve to have such complex features, these fossils push the calculated age of glossatan moths back by about 70 million years to the Late Triassic "refuting ancestral association of the group with flowering plants," the researchers wrote in the study. [In Photos: Beautiful Butterflies of the American Deserts]

These days, glossatan moths depend on flowering plants, known as angiosperms, for food. But the world's first flower likely sprouted about 140 million years ago, according to a 2017 study in the journal Nature Communications. If angiosperms didn't exist when early lepidopterans did, it's likely that these flying insects instead fed on gymnosperms — flowerless, seed-producing plants, such as cycads — the researchers said.
If these ancient glossatan moths had proboscises, as their modern-day relatives do, perhaps they used these tubes to suck up pollination drops that gymnosperms produced, the researchers said.

"Similar to angiosperm nectar, the [gymnosperm] sugary droplets offered a high-energy nutritional source, which could attract adult glossatan moths and other Mesozoic proboscate flying insects," the researchers wrote in the study.

The lepidopterans appear to have changed their menu to angiosperms once flowering plants developed, the researchers added.

In addition, the researchers hypothesized why lepidopterans evolved to have a sucking proboscis in the first place, which replaced chewing mouthparts in earlier lineages. The Late Triassic was hot and arid, and lepidopterans may have developed proboscises as an "efficient technique to replenish lost moisture and survive desiccation stress," the researchers wrote in the study.

26/11/2021

Stunning 'Superbloom' of Flowers Is Set to Arrive in Southern California
The hills of Southern California will soon be alive with a massive "superbloom" of wildflowers, thanks to an unusually rainy fall and winter, news sources report.

Southern California has been parched by drought in recent years, but Mother Nature served up the perfect recipe for a spectacular mid-March superbloom. First, heavy rains since October have saturated the typically dry ground; second, a cold winter locked that moisture in the dirt, which will help wildflower seeds sprout, according to The Mercury News.

Once the superbloom emerges, visitors should expect to see thousands of wildflowers, including poppies, verbenas, desert sunflowers and evening dune primroses. [Stunning Images of a California Superbloom]
The seeds of these flowers have been lying dormant all winter, but now that temperatures are rising, they'll soon burst into colorful plants, the Mercury News reported.
One of the flower hotspots is Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, located northeast of San Diego in the Colorado Desert. "It's going to be better than it's been in the last dozen or so years," Mike McElhatton, the educational program director of the Anza-Borrego Desert Natural History Association, told AccuWeather.

Southern California's last superbloom happened in 2017, but this one may be even more expansive.

"The rain has hit us nearly perfectly," McElhatton told AccuWeather. "We are going to have a really widespread bloom; in the past, we have seen only small concentrations in select valleys. This year, it already appears that a vast majority of the ... park will be in bloom."

But flowers are always fleeting. So plan ahead if you're going to visit the blooming hills to get that Instagram-perfect photo of blue arroyo lupines, purple Canterbury bells and periwinkle forget-me-nots.

Flower Photos: Beautiful Begonias
In Images: Stunning Flower Fields of the Atacama Desert
In Photos: Beautiful Cactus Flowers Signal Spring Is Here

26/11/2021

26/11/2021