ABSTRACT
Plants are clever green strategists (Horn, 1971). By plants, I mean those living on land-or vascular plants. Their evolutionary history goes back to the Silurian, some 430 million years ago. Their evolution in dramatically different environments over that time resulted in the formation of an impressive variety of forms and attributes, in a global diversity that today consists of approximately 260,000 species. Although exceedingly important (one can say, with some justi„cation, that biology is the study of plants and their parasites), our knowledge of them is far exceeded by that of animals. We are more connected to animals (we are animals), more concerned about their conservation, and have studied them much more. Because plants are poor models for human diseases, there is much less research funding available to study them. Some research on plants and biomiomicry has dealt with rapid movements from the storage of energy in tensile organs (Burghart and Franzl, 2009); we seem to be particularly fascinated by plants when they take on the animal-like characteristics of rapid movement (Edwards et al., 2005; Taylor et al., 2006).
