The hot and the classic.

One of the drawbacks of our current preoccupation with model organisms and our inveterate focus on crop plants is that our natural curiosities about some of the more bizarre plants in the world go largely unsatisfied. I suspect that many readers of this journal were inspired to become plant physiologists when they first observed time-lapse images of a climbing tendril, or touched a Mimosa pudica plant, or, usually with disappointing results, fed their first fly to Dionaea muscipula. Plant movements and plant carnivory are two examples of plant functions that, in a grand and anthropocentric view of life, are in themselves not terribly important. Their fascination to us (and to the minds of children) lies in the fact that these seemingly animallike behaviors challenge our preconceived notions of what plants are capable of doing, and make us appreciate, often for the first time, that the plant and animal kingdoms have more in common than they do differences. A third plant function that the uninitiated often expect is limited to the animal world is thermogenesis. The most dramatic examples of plant thermogenesis occur in certain types of flowers, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Araceae. Although most studies of plant thermogenesis have examined Araceae, it must be borne in mind that thermogenesis has been measured in the flowers of members of eight other angiosperm families as well as in the cones of various species of cycads (Thien et al., 2000). There is some evidence that thermogenesis, albeit at rates much less than those observed in thermogenic flowers and cones, may be a property of most plants. It should also be noted that some plants, including Philodendron selloum (Nagy et al., 1972), eastern skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) (Knutson, 1974), the sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) (Seymour and Schulze-Motel, 1996, and Rhizanthes lowiiMDNM (Patino et al., 2000) can thermoregulate: They can alter their thermogenic properties to maintain a surprisingly constant temperature even under fluctuating environmental temperatures.