I took the pictures for this time-lapse video of a flowering Lophophora diffusa in early May, 2008. I can't quite remember why I decided to not publish it back then – I was probably disgruntled by the glitches (a couple of seconds into the movie you can see the plant shift a bit, and after 14 seconds there's an abrupt change in focus) and decided I could do better. Anyways, I never got around to doing that and now, after all these flowerless winter months, the small errors don't seem to matter ;-)
The L. diffusa flower opened amazingly fast. The time-lapse video covers a time span of only 45 minutes and is made from 154 still photos taken at intervals of 15 seconds; the photos are played back at a rate of 10 photos per second (the attentive reader will notice that the above numbers don't add up – the focus change 14 seconds into the video indicates a problem that resulted in loosing images for a period of approximately 6 minutes)
Flowering Lophophora diffusa, time-lapse video
The plant was bought just a couple of months prior to these pictures being taken, as described in my post on a Lophophora bargain.
Update - March 28, 2009
You can now watch the flowering Lophophora diffusa in blazing high-definition ;-) I cropped the photos used for the time-lapse video to a size of 1280x720 in order to make the 16x9 HD movie shown below.
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1 day ago
Magnificent! I watched the video several times. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteand what happened with that lophophora you wanted to dissect? is it still alive?
ReplyDeleteHe, he, I should have expected that bold statement to be thrown right back at me ;-) Faced with the prospect of dissecting a healthy plant I didn't have the heart to do it, so yes, that plant is still very much alive. One of the other newly acquired L. diffusa plants caught rot, though, and I ended up transecting it to see if I could save a cutting (I couldn't, the plant died). I scanned the cut surface to document how the rot had spread but it is far from the detailed study I had envisioned.
ReplyDeleteSince I wrote on dissecting plants, I have obtained a copy of the first section of the original 1927 edition of Alexandre Rouhier's book La plante qui fait les yeux émerveillés - Le Peyotl (Echinocactus Williamsii Lem.). This book has very detailed information on the internal morphology of peyote (far, far better than anything I could come up with by slashing a few plants), so I'll probably do a post based on Rouhier's material and avoid maiming any of my own plants unnecessarily.