Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Sweat: Scale's Critical Weakness!

Tim pointed something out from our experiment with the Scale Chamber of Doom.
I do believe you may be on to something here! As long as the daisy is well watered and the chamber is not too humid, she can cool herself off for a while by evaporative transpiration (call it plant sweat, if you like), but I don't think the scale are so lucky (they are built to conserve moisture, not evaporate it).

And a big advantage of heating over suffocating, is that reasonably accurate thermometers are *way* cheaper than oxygen sensors.
Indeed they can't, Tim. In fact, with very rare exceptions, only warm-blooded creatures can sweat.

"Do you expect me to talk?"
"No, Mr. Arthropod. I expect you to die!"

1 comment:

tim eisele said...

This article on Tree Heat Stress Syndrome says, among many other useful things, that plants start to die from overheating at about 115 F. This would probably be a good target for future treatments.

Also, it occurs to me that, in addition to having a thermometer for the air temperature in the Chamber of Doom, one of those cheap IR thermometers could let you measure the actual leaf temperatures.