Wikipedia:Today's second feature/December 10, 2005

Today's featured picture

Wind dispersal of dandelion seeds

Biological dispersal refers to those processes by which a species maintains or expands the distribution of a population. For non-aquatic, terrestrial plants, the wind is an obvious supplier of energy of movement, and many plant adaptations exist that clearly take advantage of this fact. Perhaps most familiar are the feather-light fibre parachutes with attached achenes that are produced by a number of species of Asteraceae, a well-known example being the dandelion.

Photo credit: PiccoloNamek