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Leaf vs Flower Petal

| Wed, May 29, 2024, 3:16 AM



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The question I asked was, “How does a flower (in particular its petal) look different from a leaf in terms of structure in a way that accounts for the petal looking and feeling much softer?” I went outside and found a random flower that someone had picked and I pulled a bright green leaf off of a bush. Since the flower had a large, pronounced stamen, I began by putting the anther of the flower on a clear tab and taking a look with the foldscope. The anther itself was too thick in a way that did not allow much light to pass through, but the edges of it had many little particles (perhaps pollen particles) that were shaped like little bananas. Though this was fitting with me being an explorer, it did not help much with my original question. So, next, I placed a small piece of a leaf on one tab and a small piece of a flower petal on another slide.  Getting photos through the Foldscope was actually very difficult. Since my iPhone has multiple cameras, it would keep switching which camera it was getting the visual input from in a way that made it hard to correctly position the camera in exactly the right place. The first thing that struck me in comparing what I saw for the leaf with what I saw with the petal was the amount of light going through. With the petal, it looked like a very thin sheet of wax paper, where some segments seemed to be letting almost all of the light through. On the other hand, with the leaf, there were what appeared to be extremely densely packed green cells. Even when I put the sample directly underneath my light, the resulting image was significantly darker. The cells were so densely packed that if the image was even slightly out of focus it looked like a green blob. Thus, it appears that the lower density of cells in a petal is at least in part responsible for why it appears “softer.”

Photos of the anther:
Photo of petal:
Photo of the leaf: 



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Type of Sample
plants
Foldscope Lens Magnification
140x

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