Hello, my name's Lindsay Turnbull and I'm an associate professor in the Department of Plant Sciences
at the University of Oxford, and we're right in the middle of this very serious corona virus crisis right
now. And my students are all stuck at home and we want to keep them in touch with biology
and keep in touch with us. And so we're going to make a new series of videos and they're going to be called back garden
biology.
Hello, welcome to this week's episode of Back Garden Biology. I'm down by the shed and where
we have the garlic mustard. And this time I'm looking at another plant that I've just allowed to grow if
I haven't planted either of these plants here. The most obvious thing you can see here are Spanish bluebells
and that I haven't planted those. They were just here in the garden when I arrived, as was this strange
thing with a very large green sort of arrow shaped leaves.
And with the thing at the bottom like that, it's like a big Irish shape. This
is Arem Macchi Lartin. It's a very common native British plant
that grows in woodlands and can often be found in gardens and again, normally treated as a
weed. But here at the back of the garden, I like to leave things like that and just let them do
their thing. What I do to get out when it comes up in my flowerbeds, I have to admit. Let's have a closer
look at one of these plants. What's interesting about it now is its flowering. So you can see the extraordinary
looking structure appearing in the middle. That is the Infra-Red essence. It's all closed
up tight at the moment. And as it opens, you can see it change. I'll just
cut off an open one now and we'll have a look at it. So unfortunately, the only ones that are open are facing away
from us. So I'm going to cut one off right at the base and show you what
it looks like. And it's this extraordinary looking thing. So you can see that this part opens.
And in the middle there you have this extraordinary structure called a spandex. This is spandex or
a spade axe, actually. And it is said that this
on the day it opens. It's supposed to start producing a stench.
Well, I can still smell it on that one, actually. And it's a stench and it is a stench. Not a lot
of delightful aroma. It is a stench of stale urine. That's how hard it is. And it's trying
to attract pollinators. Believe it or not, tiny little things called moth midges.
And in there is where the business end of the flower. So the inflorescence,
the pollen and the and the female flowers that need to have pollen transferred onto them are tucked away
inside here. We're going to dissect one and have a better look. But what's interesting, what we're trying
to do at the moment is on the day this opens and this smell starts
to appear, the spade X here is supposed to start heating up and you're supposed
to measure that. So we're out here with our thermometer trying to measure
does this heat up? Can we measure it? And just how hot does it actually get?
So what I'm going to try and do now is we've brought a little temperature measuring device. So
it has a screen that displays the output and connected to our two thermocouples,
which can make reasonably accurate measurements of the temperature. And we're going to see whether that Spayd
X inside the Spayd the brands by Cuba, whether it really does heat up. Now
we've actually been trying all through the day to measure this on one that we thought was a newly opened flower and not
measuring anything very convincing. It's now six o'clock in the evening. We came down to have one last
go because this is the time when they're really supposed to be heating up to the maximum. And we realised
that a new one had just opened. And the smell from that was incredible. So that's
the one we're going to try and measure now. We think actually they have almost a little bit too old. So let's focus
on the screen. You can see you've got a top measurement there of nineteen point one and a bottom
one of nineteen point two, ninety point three. So they're both giving a very similar measurement.
And this is the this is T2. So this is the lower one. So this should be the lower
reading. I'm going to place it against this newly open space X and see if we can see
the temperature climb. So.
Let me have a look then. Oh, my goodness, I was trying to try hard to keep it in contact
with the speed X, so it is around 25 degrees when ambient
temperature is only around 19. So it's managing about five degrees C above ambient.
And I think that's pretty impressive. You know, this is a plant. It's not a mammal.
It's very unusual to have a plant. They can heat itself up like that. And it's no coincidence, of course, that
the smell off there is now so powerful. That's why it's heating up so it can disseminate
that smell as widely as possible. So let's go inside and dissect one of those flowers
and see exactly what's bothering to go to all this effort. So we cut off this
inflorescence. I'm going to have a go at dissecting it after. I've never done it before. And I've got
a little a little paper, scientific paper next to me, which describes what I should be finding
inside here. But I'm going to see whether I could find that or not. So this is the space.
And the brown thing is the spade X. Now, I didn't say what this plant is called in English. I gave you
its Latin name, Air Immaculata, and it has a lot of common
English names, some of them, frankly, far too rude for me to reveal in this film,
but it's often called now either Lords and Ladies, which all sounds very clean or
cuckoo Pynt. And when I tell you that patent is a shortening of an old of
the old English word pencil, which means penis. Then you can see why a lot of these names are,
well, not fit for family consumption, though, because mediaeval people were much more robust and bawdy than
we are now. Okay. This whole thing is a trap. It's a trap for those
moth matches or our images. They are attracted by the smell. They then go
down into here where they are trapped for the night and forced to pick up pollen and move pollen
around. And as the thing withers away, then they're released again. So I don't know what state this one's in.
I don't think it's been open for very long. But it didn't just open today. Okay, let's open it
up and see what we can see. So I'm going to peel
this away. See if I don't have to cut it. But if I can just get it by peeling it
to unfold there, I'm going to unfold here.
Oh, yes. And look what we can see inside here,
that is rather marvellous. So you can see I'll try and hold it still as I
can at the bottom of the space. X is a first ring of has. That
is the trap. So here is if you can see a that that is one of these tiny little
moth images or our midges crawling out and crawling up and away up the
speed X. So that is what the plant was trying to do. And it succeeded.
So you've got this ring of hands. These are the male flowers, then the little brown ones that
produce the pollen. And this cluster at the bottom are the female flowers.
And there is some nectar down there to keep our little owl alive. And there's a second
sparse row of has there, which also helps to keep the insects in. So isn't this amazing?
You know, I always think that we pay a lot of attention to, you know, pitcher plants
and exciting plants that you can find that you go to go a long way to find them. But this is something in your
back garden as clever a thing as you could ever hope to find in the Galapagos Islands
or anywhere else. And what's even more amazing is that there is just a single
species of moth, Midge. That is that this plant depends on only one species
basically pollinate this plant. And it just goes to show how fragile a lots of
the connexions are, the ecological connexions out there. And that's why it's really important to preserve
as much as we possibly can, because most things are doing something, even if we're not always
clear exactly what it is all to think for a minute about how that Aaron produces
that incredible heat. And when you see something like that, you know that there must be something going on in the cells
that underpin it. So I want to think about a plant cell for a moment and how it works.
So this tray on the table here is going to represent my plant cell. Plant
cells are square, rectangular because they have a rigid cell wall, which we're not going to focus on this
time. And here are some of the main components of a cell. This is supposed to represent the nucleus.
And inside that, we have the genome. That's all the information that cell needs to carry out all of
its activities. But an instruction manuals, no good if there's no one to carry out the instructions.
So the cell also has what we can think of as key workers. The key workers are called ribosomes.
We're hearing a lot about. He works at the moment and an inside cell. The key workers are ribosomes. This is not
to scale. They would be incredibly tiny. It's their job is to translate
messages. So from the genome, messages come out and the ribosomes
will clamp on to it. They look a bit like a little snowman, small bit and a large bit. And the message goes in between
May well then read the message and they will build the component that the cell needs. And all those
components are made out of something called protein. And it's their job to build the proteins by sticking
together. Individual building blocks called amino acids. Now, that
process, which we call protein synthesis, demands a lots of energy. So the cell
needs to produce energy. And the way it does this is to provide little the
equivalent. It's a molecule is the equivalent of a battery. And that molecule is called
ATP. And those little batteries can be plugged in here is that zap zap to fuel
this process. But once they've been used, they have to be recharged. And that goes
on somewhere else in a cell. So in an animal cell, we'd have a lot of these things called mitochondria.
And those are where the batteries are recharged and the animal eats sugar, its food and
the glucose is sent here. And that glucose has lots of energy stored in the bonds.
And if you rip glucose apart, you can release that energy. And in the mitochondria,
the energy that's released by destroying glucose is used to recharge the ATP
batteries. Now, plant cells also have these mitochondria. Her plant
cells, of course, are famous for being green. And that's because, unlike animal cells, they have an extra
structure in the cell and that's called a chloroplasts. And these harness the sun's energy
and produce glucose. So they didn't have to eat anything. They're making their own food, but they still
have to recharge ATP batteries. Some of that can be done here by the chloroplast itself.
But a lot of it is done here. And, of course, in the dark, the cell has to keep running, has to keep making things.
And it has to rely on these mitochondria. Now, this process of ripping apart
glucose and recharging ATP, ATP batteries is called respiration.
And all cells do that. Now, what's interesting in the area
is it's got to generate a huge amounts of heat. And as we said, normally the mitochondria,
the plants are not running at really full tilt. They don't need to recharge billions
of ATP batteries all the time because the plant is not nearly is not expanding as much
as. She as an animal cell word. So these are just ticking over, if you like,
what we arem wants, that is to produce a huge amounts of heat. And although that process of
respiration will produce small amounts of heat, it has decided to do something
different. So what it does when it sends the glucose to the mitochondria
is it's got a different pathway that it can send them down. So instead of the energy being harnessed
to recharge ATP batteries to do normal cell stuff, all that energy
is just wasted as heat. So they uncoupled the process of destroying the glucose
and normally that energy being harnessed to something productive, to just letting it all be generated as heat.
And for a couple of hours only, that plant cell is blasting through
glucose at a similar rate to the muscles in the wings of a hummingbird.
So just for a couple of hours in its life, once the year, that
arem really takes flight. So we're just finishing this video where we
began at this little patch of our immaculate home. You can see this one here
compared to even 24 hours ago in fluorescence, the swelling up a bit more and
I suspect six o'clock this evening. But that is going to open and the smell is going to start
heating up. Process is going to begin. So I really hope that you get a chance to have a
look at this. I mean, it's really one of the most amazing things I've seen I know about or knew about
it, but I've never actually gone out and had a really close look myself. I've never tried to measure the temperature
myself. It just goes to show how all of us, even professional biologists, have become
more and more disconnected from the real organisms. And we spend far too much time
indoors. So good luck with your Arum lilies. And I hope you can get some temperature
measurements yourself if you don't have an accurate thermometer. Apparently you can, even just by holding
the spade. You can feel the heat from them and six o'clock in the evening. That's the time to go and do it
and try to find a newly opened space X. You'll know it is because of the smell
coming from it. So good luck with that.