In hot Spanish summers, the thistle Carlina corymbosa is somehow able to cool itself substantially below air temperature.
. The most extreme cooling — sometimes up to 10 degrees C — occurs during the hottest part of the day. This means when the air temperature reaches a sweltering 45° C, the plant’s flowers can remain close to a relatively cool 35° C.
In Spain’s Sierra de Cazorla mountain range, scorching summers leave many plants dead, dried out or dormant. This brown sea is intermittently broken by bursts of yellow, asimprobably peeks its flowers above the vegetation. When Herrera, of the Spanish National Research Council in Sevilla, touched one of the flower heads during the peak of the day’s heat on a recent trek, he found it pleasantly cool.
Using an electric thermometer, he measured the temperatures of seven different thistles across two sites and multiple days per flower. He found the flowers consistently cooled down as the day grew hotter.). Most research has focused on how leaves keep cool, but in many cases, leaves don’t get colder than the surrounding air. When they do, Herrera reports, the difference in temperature is less drastic than seen in the thistle flowers.
Because the thistles started cooling down at the hottest part of the day, it’s possible that the plants are actively turning a self-refrigerating mechanism on and off., and is known as “limited homeothermy.” However, this is a rare skill among plants, Still says. A 2022 study he ledBoth Herrera and Still think that something about the thistle flower’s shape and structure enables it to cool off so effectively.
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