I'm on vacation, so only a short written accompaniment today. – Daniel
Eric La Fountaine wrote today's entry (and he scanned the seed). – Daniel.
The dry winged seeds of Acer macrophyllum, or bigleaf maple, are referred to as samaras or keys. The one in this image was collected in 1946 and is now part of the John Davidson Seed collection at the UBC Botanical Garden.
The tree is native from Alaska to southern California and can reach a height of 30 metres. Macrophyllum means “big leaf” – the maple is therefore appropriately named, as it is the species with the largest leaves. The leaves can measure up to 20 cm across.
How do you "scan" a seed? Can I do it with my scanner? ... and get such beautiful resolution?
The hairs on these are irritating and easily dislodged, apparently having a protective function.
Hollis, with a good scanner you can easily get images like this one. Scanners basically take a flat image, but capture more depth in images than might be expected. There have been other scanned items on BPotD, here is my favourite Physalis sp.
It is interesting to note the hairs, wings and details of seeds when the view is blown up like this. They are amazingly complicated little packages.
All these are done with a flatbed scanner
http://www.pinetum.org/cones/PNStrobus.htm
Acer macrophyllum is in the Aceraceae family
and the Sapindales Order.
Hi Bob - yes and no. In most traditional taxonomic classifications systems, yes. However, we generally follow the classification system put out by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group which incorporates molecular data along with the traditional morphological (and more) data. See the entry on Sapindaceae
a belated thanks for the info re scanning ... I'm looking forward to trying it.
Hello. Thanks for posting this great specimen picture! You say your source is the John Davidson Seed collection at the UBC Botanical Garden. I have been searching their website, but I can't find this photo. Can you please provide a link to this picture, or tell us how you found it? Thanks.
Curiously, it seems this one was skipped on the John Davidson site. Not sure why that occurred, though it is possible that the vial containing this seed was separated from the rest that were scanned in for the site.