Botany Photo of the Day

As you can tell from this photograph taken in the Alpine Garden a couple days ago, autumn is arriving. There are, however, many flowers still in bloom locally, including this cheery 'Lemon Silver' Fremont evening-primrose.

Pollinated by hawk-moths at night, flowers of the species Oenothera macrocarpa open in the evening and begin to close the following morning, lasting only the one day (see Reproductive biology in Onagraceae (Raven, 1979) for a comprehensive examination of how plants in this family reproduce, including mechanisms that they employ to ensure outcrossing). I've added a close-up photograph of the flower, so that you can see the cross-shaped stigma, typical of many plants in the family Onagraceae (see more examples in the Oenothera Image Gallery).

I promised a BPotD announcement for users of the Macintosh Tiger Operating System (10.4). Here it is:

I'm grateful to Steve Milano (aka Do-Boy Software) and BJ Heinley (aka Built By Robots) for teaming up and producing a very slick Botany Photo of the Day Widget! (BPotD widget mirror on the Do-Boy Software site). If you are wondering what a widget is, visit Apple's site for a demo.

If you are a Macintosh Tiger user, you can download the Botany Photo of the Day Widget directly from here (UBC site - no worries about bandwidth) or here (Do-Boy Software site). The BPotD widget has been accepted by Apple in its catalogue of widgets, but right now it's listed in the “webcam” category, so the link to it is likely going to change. Still, you can download it from Apple's site by following Widget Browser -> Just Added -> Botany Photo of the Day Widget. The advantage of downloading from Apple is that the widget might find its way into the Top Ten, giving the widget a much higher profile (and frankly, it deserves to be in the Top Ten - Steve and BJ did top-notch work!). Thanks Steve and BJ!

In other news, one of the small joys of running a weblog is discovering who is linking to you. I was pleasantly surprised to see a weblog in Andorra (a country of 70500 people) linking to BPotD: La imatge del dia, where, if my translation of Catalan is correct, the poster states, “and the newest [of daily image sites], but incredible, Botany Photo of the Day”. Thanks for the compliment!

And in yet more BPotD news, I've installed a “Commenter Email Whitelist”, which is good news for frequent commenters. I have always considered comment moderation a necessary evil; although most of the over ten thousand spam comments I've received over the past five months have been blocked by the various tools I use, a few still slip through that are only caught by comment moderation. The whitelist allows me to flag known commenters as “trusted” and in no need of moderation. So, I've started to do that for some people who have commented frequently. The best way to find out if you are on the whitelist is to comment. If you're not on it and you're a frequent commenter, please don't be offended - I've certainly missed some people in the first round. If you're not on it and don't comment often, the only way to get on is to comment frequently enough that I begin to recognize your name and email address and I will eventually add you.

Photography resource link: Petteri Sulonen's Mastering Wide-Angle tutorial illustrates the different techniques required for the challenges and complications of wide-angle photography. Wide-angle photography is very alluring to me, but disheartening so far - my ratio of “keepers” to junkers is very low.