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From COSMOS magazine - News:
SYDNEY: Over 90 per cent of vines twist anti-clockwise, according to a massive Australian study of plants in 75 locations from Zambia to Patagonia.
The discovery is one of many likely to come from a huge and ongoing study into the global variation between plants. Lead scientist behind the research Angela Moles, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, also collected height data for plants of 35,000 species.
Curious question
In another project, she compiled information on the seeds of 12,669 species, revealing that tropical seeds are, on average, 300 times bigger than the seeds of species found in temperate forests much further north.
The vine orientation finding was reported in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography and detailed on Tuesday at a Melbourne event which announced the 2008 L'Oréal Australia For Women in Science Fellowships, where Moles won a A$20,000 funding award to continue her research.
Moles was already globe-trotting between nine countries, for her World Herbivory Project, when co-worker Will Edwards, a botanist from James Cook University in Cairns, requested that she collect some further data.
When asked by a student why all vines appeared to twist in the same way, Edwards had been stumped, and enlisted the help of Moles.
The pair tested three hypotheses: that plants twine in a random direction; that twining direction is determined by plant tips following the movement of the Sun across the sky; and that twining direction is determined by the Coriolis effect.
This Coriolis effect is the phenomenon incorrectly reported in popular culture to cause water running down the plughole to swirl in different directions in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
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