while puttering around the yard after work today i wandered over to the maize patch to see if anything had disturbed the ear on the broken stalk i found yesterday...it was still there..
there is some suspicious behavior going on elsewhere...corn husks do not generally open on their own ( recall hugh iltus's "catastrophic sexual mutation" in maize [ and its bastard offspring dense yellow #2 ] in this plant making it symbiotic [ and, probably, co-evolved ] with humans for its continued survival )...that is off topic though...we may get to that later...
when it landed that cornstalk fell across a tiller from the eight foot teocintli plant that had gone over earlier as they are wont to do ( i believe i mentioned that particular tiller in an earlier post )... and it was the behavior that tiller is displaying that is the topic here...
if the tiller were not resting on top of other plants it would be completely horizontal...as it is it is almost parallel to the ground... and about half way between the the parent plant and the flower at the end of the tiller there is a branch growing vertically...
with an irruption of ears and topping out with a somewhat stunted flower...
there is another two thirds of the way along the tiller...
and the end of the tiller has a better developed flower and a mass of silks that are indices of ears to come...so the tiller has toppled and is now working to spread seed at a distance from the parent plant and expand the range of the teocintli...nothing that unusual in plants expanding their range through a variety of reproductive strategies ( strawberry stolons or carolina horse nettle rhizomes say )...it's the variety part that is of interest...clever dna.
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