Biology Now, 2e

290 ■ CHAPTER 16 Plants, Fungi, and Protists

BIODIVERSITY

Figure 16.5

Plants are eukaryotic autotrophs

Plants are photosynthetic, making their own food from sunlight, and are almost exclusively found on land. They are at the

base of almost all terrestrial food webs.

Q1: What evolutionary innovation separates all land plants from their aquatic ancestors?

Q2: How do ferns differ from bryophytes? Do they share this difference with other plant groups? (You will need to read

ahead to answer this question.)

Q3: What group(s) might a plant with seeds belong to? What about a plant with flowers?

Domain

Bacteria

Domain

Archaea

Kingdom

Protista

Kingdom

Fungi

Kingdom

Animalia

Adaptation

to terrestrial

life

Vascular

tissue

evolves

Seeds

evolve

Flowers

evolve

Common

ancestral

cell or

universal

ancestor

Bryophytes

Ferns

Gymnosperms

Angiosperms

Kingdom

Plantae

Domain

Eukarya

Figure 16.4

Cycads: ancient, rare, and hard to move

Several workers struggle to move a cycad. In spite of their size, many

cycads have been stolen from public and private gardens, and then sold

on the black market.

The thieves had attempted to steal a group

of rare African cycads, an ancient type of

plant that once lived alongside dinosaurs in

the Jurassic period (Figure 16.4). As with the

Thai orchids, horticulturalists around the world

highly prize cycads as ornamental plants. Today,

a rare, mature cycad can fetch $20,000 or more

on the international black market. That’s right—

enough to fund a year of college. There are about

300 species of cycads, most threatened with

extinction.

Ironically, 4 of the 21 cycads stolen from the

Quail Botanical Gardens (now the San Diego

Botanic Garden) were part of a rescue program;

the plants had been illegally brought into the

United States, where they were seized upon

import by authorities, and the botanical garden

had taken over their care. Some of the plants

survived the ordeal and were replanted. But they

weren’t the only cycads stolen that year; a nurs-

ery in San Diego lost almost 40 large cycads to

thieves, and many homes in the Long Beach area

had plants swiped right out of their front yards.

Plants are multicellular autotrophs that are

mostly terrestrial (Figure 16.5). Like the green

had dumped their haul in a sorry-looking pile:

21 stocky plants, specimens with thick trunks

covered in woody scales and a crown of long,

green palm-like leaves, like a pineapple.