Word: floras
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Park officials maintain that they can only contain the fires, not extinguish them. Meanwhile, defenders of the natural-burn policy trumpet its benefits: the flames clear thick stands of timber and prepare the soil for a new generation of flora. For example, many of the seed cones of the lodgepole pine, which covers 60% of the park, only open after being exposed to intense heat. Ecologists expect the fires to help restore the park's depleted stands of aspen trees and increase the wide array of insects, birds and mammals that have found Yellowstone's aging forests increasingly inhospitable...
...jungle out there, teeming with hordes of unseen enemies. Bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites fill the air. They cluster on every surface, from the restaurant table to the living-room sofa. They abound in lakes and in pools, flourish in the soil and disport themselves among the flora and fauna. This menagerie of microscopic organisms, most of them potentially harmful or even lethal, has a favorite target: the human body. In fact, the tantalizing human prey is a walking repository of just the kind of stuff the tiny predators need to survive, thrive and reproduce...
...twilight hours grow dimmer with every passing December afternoon, as the last brown leaves cling tenaciously, forlorn, on the branches of Cambridge's flora...
...would call the actor's private life boring, and Mastroianni would not call it private. He has been married to the indulgent Flora for 37 years; their daughter Barbara is 35. But then there is Chiara, his 15-year-old daughter by Actress Catherine Deneuve. Ask him about his limitations, and you get the shrug. "Perhaps I don't be so faithful," he says. "Actors make promises, and they don't keep promises. This infantile nature follows us. Whoever lives with an actor has to accept that he needs to live a little in his fantasies...
That progress encompasses both flora and fauna. Inside the boundaries of the monument, where by law people are not allowed to assist regeneration, a mammalian equivalent of the bulldozer has been the pocket gopher. Colonies of these tiny industrious burrowers have helped mix the nutrient-poor ash and pumice with rich, pre-eruptive soil, creating a more hospitable turf for windblown seeds. Deer mice, ants and beetles have also assisted in the regeneration of the soil. Flowering lupine, with root nodules that convert nitrogen into compounds necessary for plant growth, has seized a foothold on the pumice plain, along with...