1.
Nymphaea alba
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Nymphaea alba, also known as the European white water lily, white water rose or white nenuphar, is an aquatic flowering plant of the family Nymphaeaceae. It grows in water that is 30–150 cm deep and likes large ponds, the leaves can be up to 30 cm in diameter and take up a spread of 150 cm per plant. The flowers are white and they have many small stamens inside and they are found all over Europe and in parts of North Africa and the Middle East in fresh water. The red variety is cultivated from lake Fagertärn in the forest of Tiveden, Sweden, the discovery led to a large-scale exploitation which nearly made it extinct in the wild before it was protected. Nymphaea candida J. Presl is sometimes considered a subspecies of N. alba and it contains the active alkaloids nupharine and nymphaeine, and is a sedative and an aphrodisiac/anaphrodisiac depending on sources. Although roots and stalks are used in herbal medicine along with the flower. Alcohol can be used to extract the alkaloids, and it also boosts the sedative effects. The root of the plant was used by monks and nuns for hundreds of years as an anaphrodisiac, in the earliest printed medical textbooks, authors maintained this use, though warning against consuming large and frequent doses
2.
Nymphaeaceae
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Nymphaeaceae /ˌnɪmfiːˈeɪsiː/ is a family of flowering plants, commonly called water lilies. They live as rhizomatous aquatic herbs in temperate and tropical climates around the world, the family contains five genera with about 70 known species. Water lilies are rooted in soil in bodies of water, with leaves, the leaves are round, with a radial notch in Nymphaea and Nuphar, but fully circular in Victoria and Euryale. Genera with more parts, Nuphar, Nymphaea, Victoria, have a beetle pollination syndrome, while genera with fewer parts are pollinated by flies or bees. Thus, the number of relatively unspecialized floral organs in the Nymphaeaceae is not an ancestral condition for the clade. Water lilies do not have leaves in the winter time. The leftover of internal pressure is embodied by the constant streams of bubbles that outbreak when rising leaves are ruptured in the spring. Methane is still penetrating the roots and rhizome in the summer, moving fast up the petioles, the Nymphaeaceae are aquatic, rhizomatous herbs. The family is characterized by scattered vascular bundles in the stems. Hairs are simple, usually producing mucilage, stipules are either present or absent. Flowers are solitary, bisexual, radial, with a pedicel and usually floating or raised above the surface of the water. Sepals are 4-12, distinct to connate, imbricate, and often petal-like, petals lacks or 8 to numerous, inconspicuous to showy, often intergrading with stamens. Stamens are 3 to numerous, the innermost sometimes represented by staminodes, carpels are 3 to numerous, distinct or connate. Fruit is an aggregate of nuts, a berry, or an irregularly dehiscent fleshy capsule, seeds are often arillate, more or less lacking sperm. Nymphaeaceae has been investigated systematically for decades because botanists considered their floral morphology to represent one of the earliest groups of angiosperms, modern genetic analyses by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group researchers has confirmed its basal position among flowering plants. In addition, the Nymphaeaceae are more diverse and geographically dispersed than other basal angiosperms. Nymphaeaceae is placed in the order Nymphaeales, which is the second diverging group of angiosperms after Amborella in the most widely accepted flowering plant classification system, Nymphaeaceae is a small family of three to six genera, Barclaya, Euryale, Nuphar, Nymphaea, Ondinea, and Victoria. The genus Barclaya is sometimes given rank as its own family, Barclayaceae, on the basis of a perianth tube arising from the top of the ovary
3.
Nelumbo nucifera
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Nelumbo nucifera, also known as Indian lotus, sacred lotus, bean of India, Egyptian bean or simply lotus, is one of two extant species of aquatic plant in the family Nelumbonaceae. The Linnaean binomial Nelumbo nucifera is the currently recognized name for this species and this plant is an aquatic perennial. Native to Tropical Asia, and Queensland, Australia, it is cultivated in water gardens. It is also the flower of India, and Vietnam. The lotus is often confused with the water lilies, in fact, several older systems, such as the Bentham & Hooker system call the lotus Nymphaea nelumbo or Nymphaea stellata. Far from being in the family, Nymphaea and Nelumbo are members of different orders. The roots of lotus are planted in the soil of the pond or river bottom, the flowers are usually found on thick stems rising several centimeters above the leaves. The plant normally grows up to a height of about 150 cm and a spread of up to 3 meters. The leaves may be as large as 60 cm in diameter, researchers report that the lotus has the remarkable ability to regulate the temperature of its flowers to within a narrow range just as humans and other warmblooded animals do. Dr. Roger S. Seymour and Dr and they suspect the flowers may be doing this to attract coldblooded insect pollinators. The study, published in the journal Nature, is the latest discovery in the field of thermoregulation, heat-producing, two other species known to be able to regulate their temperature include Symplocarpus foetidus and Philodendron selloum. An individual lotus can live for over a thousand years and has the ability to revive into activity after stasis. In 1994, a seed from a lotus, dated at roughly 1,300 years old ±270 years, was successfully germinated. As mentioned earlier, the traditional Sacred Lotus is only related to Nymphaea caerulea. Both Nymphaea caerulea and Nelumbo nucifera contain the alkaloids nuciferine and aporphine, the genome of the sacred lotus was sequenced in May 2013. The distinctive dried seed heads, which resemble the spouts of watering cans, are sold throughout the world for decorative purposes. The flowers, seeds, young leaves, and roots are all edible, in Asia, the petals are sometimes used for garnish, while the large leaves are used as a wrap for food, not frequently eaten. In Korea, the leaves and petals are used as a tisane, yeonkkotcha is made with dried petals of white lotus and yeonipcha is made with the leaves
4.
Plant
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Plants are mainly multicellular, predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. The term is generally limited to the green plants, which form an unranked clade Viridiplantae. This includes the plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts, mosses and the green algae. Green plants have cell walls containing cellulose and obtain most of their energy from sunlight via photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts and their chloroplasts contain chlorophylls a and b, which gives them their green color. Some plants are parasitic and have lost the ability to produce amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize. Plants are characterized by sexual reproduction and alternation of generations, although reproduction is also common. There are about 300–315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, green plants provide most of the worlds molecular oxygen and are the basis of most of Earths ecologies, especially on land. Plants that produce grains, fruits and vegetables form humankinds basic foodstuffs, Plants play many roles in culture. They are used as ornaments and, until recently and in variety, they have served as the source of most medicines. The scientific study of plants is known as botany, a branch of biology, Plants are one of the two groups into which all living things were traditionally divided, the other is animals. The division goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who distinguished between plants, which generally do not move, and animals, which often are mobile to catch their food. Much later, when Linnaeus created the basis of the system of scientific classification. Since then, it has become clear that the plant kingdom as originally defined included several unrelated groups, however, these organisms are still often considered plants, particularly in popular contexts. When the name Plantae or plant is applied to a group of organisms or taxon. The evolutionary history of plants is not yet settled. Those which have been called plants are in bold, the way in which the groups of green algae are combined and named varies considerably between authors. Algae comprise several different groups of organisms which produce energy through photosynthesis, most conspicuous among the algae are the seaweeds, multicellular algae that may roughly resemble land plants, but are classified among the brown, red and green algae. Each of these groups also includes various microscopic and single-celled organisms
5.
Seawater
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Seawater, or salt water, is water from a sea or ocean. On average, seawater in the oceans has a salinity of about 3. 5% This means that every kilogram of seawater has approximately 35 grams of dissolved salts. Average density at the surface is 1.025 kg/l, seawater is denser than both fresh water and pure water because the dissolved salts increase the mass by a larger proportion than the volume. The freezing point of seawater decreases as salt concentration increases, at typical salinity, it freezes at about −2 °C. The coldest seawater ever recorded was in 2010, in a stream under an Antarctic glacier, seawater pH is typically limited to a range between 7.5 and 8.4. However, there is no universally accepted reference pH-scale for seawater, although the vast majority of seawater has a salinity of between 31 g/kg and 38 g/kg, seawater is not uniformly saline throughout the world. Where mixing occurs with fresh water runoff from river mouths, near melting glaciers or vast amounts precipitation, the most saline open sea is the Red Sea, where high rates of evaporation, low precipitation and low river run-off, and confined circulation result in unusually salty water. The salinity in isolated bodies of water can be considerably greater still, historically, several salinity scales were used to approximate the absolute salinity of seawater. A popular scale was the Practical Salinity Scale where salinity was measured in practical salinity units, the current standard for salinity is the Reference Salinity scale with the salinity expressed in units of g/kg. The density of surface seawater ranges from about 1020 to 1029 kg/m3, depending on the temperature, at a temperature of 25 °C, salinity of 35 g/kg and 1 atm pressure, the density of seawater is 1023.6 kg/m3. Deep in the ocean, under pressure, seawater can reach a density of 1050 kg/m3 or higher. The density of seawater also changes with salinity, brines generated by seawater desalination plants can have salinities up to 120 g/kg. The density of typical seawater brine of 120 g/kg salinity at 25 °C, seawater pH is limited to the range 7.5 to 8.4. The speed of sound in seawater is about 1,500 m/s, and varies with temperature, salinity. The thermal conductivity of seawater is 0.6 W/mK at 25 °C, the thermal conductivity decreases with increasing salinity and increases with increasing temperature. Seawater contains more dissolved ions than all types of freshwater, however, the ratios of solutes differ dramatically. Bicarbonate ions also constitute 48% of river water solutes but only 0. 14% of all seawater ions, differences like these are due to the varying residence times of seawater solutes, sodium and chlorine have very long residence times, while calcium tends to precipitate much more quickly. The most abundant dissolved ions in seawater are sodium, chloride, magnesium, sulfate and its osmolarity is about 1000 mOsm/l
6.
Fresh water
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Fresh water is generally characterized by having low concentrations of dissolved salts and other total dissolved solids. The term specifically excludes seawater and brackish water although it does include mineral-rich waters such as chalybeate springs, the term sweet water has been used to describe fresh water in contrast to salt water. The term fresh water does not have the meaning as potable water. Much of the fresh water and ground water is unsuitable for drinking without some form of purification because of the presence of chemical or biological contaminants. It may also be in contact with the underlying underground water. The majority of water on Earth is in ice caps. The source of almost all water is precipitation from the atmosphere, in the form of mist, rain. Fresh water falling as mist, rain or snow contains materials dissolved from the atmosphere and material from the sea, in some cases this acid rain results in pollution of lakes and rivers. In coastal areas fresh water may contain significant concentrations of salts derived from the sea if windy conditions have lifted drops of seawater into the rain-bearing clouds. This can give rise to elevated concentrations of sodium, chloride, magnesium, significant quantities of iron may be transported in this way including the well-documented transfer of iron-rich rainfall falling in Brazil derived from sand-storms in the Sahara in north Africa. Water is an issue for the survival of all living organisms. Some can use water but many organisms including the great majority of higher plants. Out of all the water on Earth, saline water in oceans, seas and saline groundwater make up about 97% of it. Freshwater lakes contain about 87% of this surface water, including 29% in the African Great Lakes, 20% in Lake Baikal in Russia, 21% in the North American Great Lakes. Swamps have most of the balance only a small amount in rivers. In areas with no water on the ground surface, fresh water derived from precipitation may, because of its lower density. Most of the fresh water is frozen in ice sheets. Many areas suffer from lack of distribution of water, such as deserts
7.
Marsh
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A marsh is a wetland that is dominated by herbaceous rather than woody plant species. Marshes can often be found at the edges of lakes and streams and they are often dominated by grasses, rushes or reeds. If woody plants are present they tend to be low-growing shrubs, Marshes provide a habitat for many species of plants, animals, and insects that have adapted to living in flooded conditions. The plants must be able to survive in wet mud with low oxygen levels, many of these plants therefore have aerenchyma, channels within the stem that allow air to move from the leaves into the rooting zone. Marsh plants also tend to have rhizomes for underground storage and reproduction, familiar examples include cattails, sedges, papyrus and sawgrass. Aquatic animals, from fish to salamanders, are able to live with a low amount of oxygen in the water. Some can obtain oxygen from the air instead, while others can live indefinitely in conditions of low oxygen, Marshes provide habitats for many kinds of invertebrates, fish, amphibians, waterfowl and aquatic mammals. Marshes have extremely high levels of production, some of the highest in the world. Marshes also improve water quality by acting as a sink to filter pollutants, Marshes are able to absorb water during periods of heavy rainfall and slowly release it into waterways and therefore reduce the magnitude of flooding. The pH in marshes tends to be neutral to alkaline, as opposed to bogs, Marshes differ depending mainly on their location and salinity. Both of these factors influence the range and scope of animal and plant life that can survive. The three main types of marsh are salt marshes, freshwater marshes, and freshwater marshes. These three can be found worldwide and each contains a different set of organisms, saltwater marshes are found around the world in mid to high latitudes, wherever there are sections of protected coastline. They are located close enough to the shoreline that the motion of the tides affects them and they flourish where the rate of sediment buildup is greater than the rate at which the land level is sinking. Salt marshes are dominated by specially adapted rooted vegetation, primarily salt-tolerant grasses, salt marshes are most commonly found in lagoons, estuaries, and on the sheltered side of shingle or sandspit. The currents there carry the fine particles around to the side of the spit. These locations allow the marshes to absorb the nutrients from the water running through them before they reach the oceans. Coastal development and urban sprawl has caused significant loss of these essential habitats, although considered a freshwater marsh, this form of marsh is affected by the ocean tides
8.
Bud
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In botany, a bud is an undeveloped or embryonic shoot and normally occurs in the axil of a leaf or at the tip of a stem. Once formed, a bud may remain for some time in a dormant condition, buds may be specialized to develop flowers or short shoots, or may have the potential for general shoot development. The term bud is used in zoology, where it refers to an outgrowth from the body which can develop into a new individual. The buds of many plants, especially in temperate or cold climates, are protected by a covering of modified leaves called scales which tightly enclose the more delicate parts of the bud. Many bud scales are covered by a substance which serves as added protection. When the bud develops, the scales may enlarge somewhat but usually just drop off, leaving on the surface of the growing stem a series of horizontally-elongated scars. By means of these one can determine the age of any young branch, since each years growth ends in the formation of a bud. Continued growth of the branch causes these scars to be obliterated after a few years so that the age of older branches cannot be determined by this means. In many plants scales do not form over the bud, the minute underdeveloped leaves in such buds are often excessively hairy. Naked buds are found in shrubs, like some species of the Sumac and Viburnums. In many of the latter, buds are more reduced. A terminal bud occurs on the end of a stem and lateral buds are found on the side, a head of cabbage is an exceptionally large terminal bud, while Brussels sprouts are large lateral buds. Since buds are formed in the axils of leaves, their distribution on the stem is the same as that of leaves, there are alternate, opposite, and whorled buds, as well as the terminal bud at the tip of the stem. In many plants buds appear in unexpected places, these are known as adventitious buds, often it is possible to find a bud in a remarkable series of gradations of bud scales. Such a series suggests that the scales of the bud are in truth leaves, buds are often useful in the identification of plants, especially for woody plants in winter when leaves have fallen. Buds may be classified and described according to different criteria, location, status, morphology, buds The term bud is used by analogy within zoology as well, where it refers to an outgrowth from the body which develops into a new individual. It is a form of asexual reproduction limited to animals or plants of relatively simple structure, in this process a portion of the wall of the parent cell softens and pushes out. The protuberance thus formed enlarges rapidly while at time the nucleus of the parent cell divides
9.
Fish
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A fish is any member of a group of animals that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. They form a group to the tunicates, together forming the olfactores. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous, tetrapods emerged within lobe-finned fishes, so cladistically they are fish as well. However, traditionally fish are rendered obsolete or paraphyletic by excluding the tetrapods, because in this manner the term fish is defined negatively as a paraphyletic group, it is not considered a formal taxonomic grouping in systematic biology. The traditional term pisces is considered a typological, but not a phylogenetic classification, the earliest organisms that can be classified as fish were soft-bodied chordates that first appeared during the Cambrian period. Although they lacked a true spine, they possessed notochords which allowed them to be more agile than their invertebrate counterparts, fish would continue to evolve through the Paleozoic era, diversifying into a wide variety of forms. Many fish of the Paleozoic developed external armor that protected them from predators, the first fish with jaws appeared in the Silurian period, after which many became formidable marine predators rather than just the prey of arthropods. Fish are abundant in most bodies of water and they can be found in nearly all aquatic environments, from high mountain streams to the abyssal and even hadal depths of the deepest oceans. With 33,100 described species, fish exhibit greater species diversity than any group of vertebrates. Fish are an important resource for humans worldwide, especially as food, commercial and subsistence fishers hunt fish in wild fisheries or farm them in ponds or in cages in the ocean. They are also caught by fishers, kept as pets, raised by fishkeepers. Fish have had a role in culture through the ages, serving as deities, religious symbols, fish do not represent a monophyletic group, and therefore the evolution of fish is not studied as a single event. Early fish from the record are represented by a group of small, jawless. Jawless fish lineages are mostly extinct, an extant clade, the lampreys may approximate ancient pre-jawed fish. The first jaws are found in Placodermi fossils, the diversity of jawed vertebrates may indicate the evolutionary advantage of a jawed mouth. It is unclear if the advantage of a hinged jaw is greater biting force, improved respiration, fish may have evolved from a creature similar to a coral-like sea squirt, whose larvae resemble primitive fish in important ways. The first ancestors of fish may have kept the form into adulthood. Fish are a group, that is, any clade containing all fish also contains the tetrapods
10.
Substrate (marine biology)
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Stream substrate is the material that rests at the bottom of a stream. One is, Mud – silt and clay, sand – Particles between 0.06 and 2 mm in diameter. Granule – Between 2 and 4 mm in diameter, pebble – Between 4 –64 mm in diameter. Cobble – between 6.4 and 25.6 cm in diameter Boulder – more than 25.6 cm in diameter, stream substrate can affect the life found within the stream habitat. Muddy streams generally have more sediment in the water, reducing clarity, clarity is one guide to stream health. Marine substrate can be classified geologically as well, see Green et al.1999 for a reference
