Growth & Development
36 mechanisms in this category
Age-Based Triggers
Some species use age-based triggers regardless of size. Bamboo flowers on a fixed schedule: every 40, 60, or 120 years depending on species. Nearly al...
Apical Dominance Removal
When terminal bud is removed, auxin production stops. Within days, auxin levels drop below inhibition threshold, dormant buds activate, multiple shoot...
Apical Meristem Growth
The apical meristem is the growing tip of a plant shoot or root — a dome of undifferentiated cells roughly 0.1-0.25mm across that generates all new ti...
Autotomy
A predator grabs a lizard's tail. Within milliseconds, the tail detaches, falls to the ground, and continues twitching violently—a decoy that holds th...
Branching Angle Strategy
Branching angle determines growth strategy: Narrow angles (20-40°) indicate strong apical dominance with lateral branches growing nearly vertical, max...
Cancer
A cancer diagnosis is terrifying because your own body is trying to kill you. Not from outside invasion — no virus, no bacteria, no external threat. Y...
Cell Differentiation
Here's something remarkable: every cell in your body has the same DNA. The same genetic code. The neurons in your brain, the muscle cells in your hear...
Cell Division
Growth at the cellular level isn't subtle. Cells don't gradually expand like balloons inflating. They grow by splitting in half - a process called mit...
Cold Stratification
Cold stratification is a dormancy mechanism requiring weeks or months near freezing before seeds will germinate. Apple seeds need 60-90 days at 1-5°C....
Contact Inhibition
Put normal cells in a petri dish, and they'll divide until they form a single layer covering the surface. Then they stop. They sense contact with neig...
Coppice Exhaustion
Coppicing — cutting a tree to the stump and allowing it to regrow — has been practiced for millennia because it works. The first cycle produces vigoro...
Coppicing
Coppicing is traditional woodland management where trees are cut to ground level every 7-20 years. The trees don't die - they regrow from the stump. T...
Dormancy
Dormancy is risk management encoded in biochemistry. Seeds can survive decades or centuries in dormant states, maintaining less than 5% of normal meta...
Epicormic Sprouting
Dormant buds hidden beneath bark can remain viable for decades, invisible and metabolically negligible, until external damage triggers their activatio...
Fire Succession
Forest fire kills above-ground plants but releases nutrients (ash), clears competitors, triggers dormant seed germination. Disturbance eliminates weak...
Fire-Stimulated Germination
Some chaparral seeds require fire to germinate (heat-shock or smoke-chemical triggers). Seeds lie dormant 20-50 years accumulated in soil seed bank. F...
Germination
Germination is the decision to break dormancy - to burn reserves and commit to growth in a specific environment, at a specific time, with specific res...
Growth Plates
Trees grow at the tips. Period. The technical term is 'meristem' — specialized tissue at the ends of branches and roots where cell division actively o...
Hox Gene Developmental Patterning
Hox genes are a family of transcription factors that control body plan organization in animals with bilateral symmetry. They specify positional identi...
Imbibition
Seeds can lose 90-95% of their water content and enter quiescence — metabolically almost dead, but structurally intact. Imbibition is the physical pro...
Lignotubers
About 95% of eucalyptus species possess lignotubers - woody swellings at the base of the trunk packed with dormant buds, stored carbohydrates, and nut...
Mitosis
Your body replaces approximately 330 billion cells per day — about 3.8 million per second. Each division must copy 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA, dist...
mTOR Pathway
The mTOR pathway is evolution's fundamental choice: grow or maintain, reproduce or survive, live fast or live long. When calories are abundant, mTOR a...
Multiplicative Growth
When growth rates are proportional to current size (rich get richer), and growth rates vary stochastically across individuals, size distributions beco...
Platform Architecture
Platform architecture in products mirrors the biological principle of shared underlying structures supporting diverse phenotypic expressions, much as...
Quiescence
Why do some startups burn through millions waiting for market conditions while others maintain skeleton operations for years before exploding into act...
Resprouting from Base
After a tree is cut or burned to the stump, dormant buds at the base activate within 1-4 weeks. These buds may have been suppressed for decades by hor...
Root Suckering
What appears to be a forest of 47,000 trees in Utah's Fishlake National Forest is actually a single organism. Pando - from Latin 'I spread' - is a qua...
Scarification
Scarification is the physical weakening of the seed coat to allow water penetration. Many seeds require physical abrasion before germinating: passage...
Seed Bank Regeneration
Seeds dormant in soil germinate after disturbance (fire, flooding, soil disturbance). Germination within weeks, but seedlings take years to reach prev...
Senescence
Pacific salmon grow continuously for 3-5 years in the ocean, then swim upstream to spawn. After spawning, 100% die - not from exhaustion but because p...
Serotinous Cones
Cones sealed with resin that require fire heat (60-70°C) to melt resin and release seeds. Cones stay closed on tree for decades. Fire kills adult tree...
Size-Dependent Maturity
Size-dependent maturity is when reproductive transition is triggered by resource accumulation rather than time passage. Arabidopsis flowers after prod...
Stem Cell Activation
When tissue is damaged, your body doesn't grow new cells from scratch. It activates reserves that were there all along—adult stem cells lying dormant...
The Grandmother Hypothesis
Human females live decades beyond menopause — an evolutionary anomaly. Most species reproduce until death. Why would natural selection maintain post-r...
Wound Healing
When tissue is damaged, the body doesn't immediately start building new structures. First, it stops the bleeding and clears debris. Then it grows repl...