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Plant habit refers to the overall shape of a plant, and it describes a number of components such as stem length and development, branching pattern, and texture. While many plants fit neatly into some main categories, such as grasses, vines, shrubs, or trees, others can be more difficult to categorise.
Natural patterns are sometimes formed by animals, as in the Mima mounds of the Northwestern United States and some other areas, which appear to be created over many years by the burrowing activities of pocket gophers, [90] while the so-called fairy circles of Namibia appear to be created by the interaction of competing groups of sand termites ...
Heliotropism, a form of tropism, is the diurnal or seasonal motion of plant parts (flowers or leaves) in response to the direction of the Sun. The habit of some plants to move in the direction of the Sun, a form of tropism, was already known by the Ancient Greeks. They named one of those plants after that property Heliotropium, meaning "sun turn".
As an animal moves up an inclined branch, it must fight the force of gravity to raise its body, making the movement more difficult. To get past this difficulty, many animals have to grasp the substrate with all four limbs and increase the frequency of their gait sequence. Conversely, as the animal descends, it must also fight gravity to control ...
Fourthly, plant morphology examines the pattern of development, the process by which structures originate and mature as a plant grows. While animals produce all the body parts they will ever have from early in their life, plants constantly produce new tissues and structures throughout their life. A living plant always has embryonic tissues.
For example, along a new branch the leaves may vary in a consistent pattern along the branch. The form of leaves produced near the base of the branch differs from leaves produced at the tip of the plant, and this difference is consistent from branch to branch on a given plant and in a given species.
Many animals alter walking kinematics as they modulate walking speed. [16] [17] [18] An interlimb kinematic parameter that is commonly speed dependent is gait, the stepping pattern across legs. While some animals alternate between distinct gaits as a function of speed, [19] others move along a continuum of gaits. [20]
Edward Hitchcock's fold-out paleontological chart in his 1840 Elementary Geology. Although tree-like diagrams have long been used to organise knowledge, and although branching diagrams known as claves ("keys") were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural order was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" (Botanical Tree) of the French ...