Celosia Flower Leaves
Nov 04, 2020 • 11:06 AM UTC
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jbruce
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In an effort to understand why my Celosia plant is struggling, I decided to take a look at some of its leaves under the Foldscope. I noticed that this plant was wilting even when given plenty of water and sunlight, so I suspected that there may be other factors contributing to its poor health I conducted this project as part of Professor Pringle’s EEB321 class at Princeton University.
The picture below shows a vein in one of the leaves taken from my Celosia plant under the Foldscope.
The picture below shows a vein in one of the leaves taken from my Celosia plant under the Foldscope.
I noticed that there were several dark spots in the vein which I wasn’t expecting to see.
The right side of the image also shows that there is a patchy, uneven spread of plant cells in the leaf, which appears to be the result of many dead cells letting light through. When taking a closer look at he plant, I noticed several small red bugs (that I assume are spider mites) crawling on the leaves. Spider mites are known to suck nutrients from the plats that they inhabit and I suspect that this may be the cause of the dark spots on the Celosia leaf vein. This may also result in the high number of dead cells since the plant is low on nutrients. Unfortunately, I was not able to capture one of Spider Mite under the microscope. I plan on introducing some ladybugs onto the Celosia and hopefully they will kill the spider mites and allow my beautiful Celosia to become healthy again!
-Janaya
-Janaya
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