Arum maculatum

[Guppy]

Hi

Worldwide there are about 120 genera of the arum family (Araceae), most of them in the tropics.
Here in Switzerland (Europe) there are only 5 genera, among them the arum (Arum maculatum) with its interesting flower.

Here I have cut open the flower of a native Arum.
Visible is the construction of the insect trap.
Scent of carrion attracts the insects, they fall inside the flower, are trapped and thus pollinate the flower.
When the flower withers, the insects can escape again with pollen in their luggage and pollinate the next stinking flower with foreign pollen.


www.focus-stacking.ch/B/05496_00.JPG

Camera: Nikon D810
Lens: LAOWA 100mm F2.8 CA-Dreamer Macro 2x
Aperture: 6.7
ISO: 64
Lighting: 5 flashes, YONGNUO YN560III
Diffuser: White writing paper
Shooting file format (RAW/JPG): RAW
Species name: Arum maculatum
Stacking software / method: Zerene Stacker / PMax
Image scale: 1:1.5
Number of stacking steps: 82
Average stacking step size (µm) with Cognisys StackShot: 300

Kurt

[rjlittlefield]

Very interesting!

So, the purple stuff in the middle is pollen?

--Rik

[Guppy]

Hi Rik

Yes, the purple in the middle are the male anthers,
they are not fully open yet, but some pollen is already visible

Kurt

[Lou Jost]

So, the purple stuff in the middle is pollen?

Yes, the purple in the middle are the male anthers...

Rik may have been asking about the purple ring on the spathe, which looks like purple dust. I think that is most likely just purple pigment.

[rjlittlefield]

Rik may have been asking about the purple ring on the spathe, which looks like purple dust.

Yes, the purple stuff that looks like dust, at the scale of the larger image, zoomed to max.

--Rik

[Guppy]

Hi

Here a detail of another flower of Arum maculatum,
a little bit bigger



Kurt

[Lou Jost]

Yes, the purple dots are just highly pigmented cells, while the pollen seems to be yellow.

[rjlittlefield]

Got it, thanks.

There's a nice video at 1:50-2:00 of https://av.tib.eu/media/11548 .

As an experiment, I downloaded the video, extracted the audio, and uploaded that to veed.io to generate subtitles from the audio.

For the indicated section, veed.io gave:

Die Antheren der männlichen Blüten platzen beider Reife auf und geben den gelbenpollenfrei jede Blüte besteht aus drei Staubblättern.

My free trial of veed.io does not offer translation. So I copy/pasted the subtitles into Google Translate, which gave:

The anthers of the male flowers burst open when they ripen and release the yellow pollen. Each flower consists of three stamens.

Technology marches on...

--Rik

[Guppy]

Hi Rik

I surf with Firefox and I have installed the ADD-ONS, the online translator of Filipe Ps.
It immediately translates the foreign languages with Google or Yandex while browsing, without opening a new tab.
For me, this ADD-ONS is very useful.

And for this text I used the site of www.deepl.com.

We Swiss often have to translate, not like when you live in an English speaking country.
Switzerland is a small country, but we have four official languages, Swiss German, French, Italian and Romansh.

Kurt

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[rjlittlefield]

My Chrome browser does such text translations also. This happens automatically when the whole page is in foreign language.

In the case here with veed.io, the translation in browser does not work because the voice-to-text German subtitles are encoded in some strange way that prevents the browser from translating them. Even if I force the language selection to say "this page is in German, translate to English", the subtitles remain untranslated.

Nonetheless they can be copied out as text, and then fed manually into a text-to-text translator.

But all that is a minor detail.

What I was most interested in was the ability, with some struggling, to get spoken German translated to English, using an online service.

Probably there are better services than veed.io for this purpose. I used veed.io only because it was the first one I found that did what I needed.

It will be great when the browsers provide good audio-to-audio translations, preferably in real time. As the old advertisement said: "Entertainment? We have every movie ever made, in every language ever spoken." I expect to see this while I'm still active.

--Rik