Florum

A florum (pronounced /ˈflɔːrəm/; plural flora, /ˈflɔːrə/) is a member of an etorical kingdom (or comparable taxon) most members of which are characterized by a sedentary, autotrophic lifestyle. Motile and/or heterotrophic life forms belonging to a floral kingdom—ambulatory and/or carnivorous plants, for instance—are traditionally still considered flora; the word describes the typical characteristics of the clade, not those of every individual species.

Flora are often mentioned in contrast to fauna, creatures belonging to kingdoms most representatives of which are mobile and heterotrophic. No standard term exists for kingdoms characterized by motility and autotrophy, or sessility and heterotrophy, although a few proposals have been made, such as furina for the former and feronia for the latter. (Such kingdoms are rare in any case; because motricity requires energy, and larger amounts of energy are typically acquired through heterotrophy than through autotrophy, motility and heterotrophy do in general tend to go together.)

On Earth, the word "flora" is sometimes used to refer exclusively to plants, but floral kingdoms in the broader sense also include fungi and algae. The microscopic bacteria and archæa are also usually considered flora. Other types of flora, of course, exist on other worlds.

Etymology and synonymy

The word florum frequently comes ultimately from the Latin word flōs, meaning "flower"—or more specifically from either its genitive plural flōrum or its accusative singular flōrem. On many worlds, the plural, "flora", came first, and "florum" emerged as a back formation. The people of some of those worlds have settled on a different singularization, "floron" (pronounced /ˈflɔːrü/), and there are many worlds where neither back formation has caught on, and only the plural "flora" is in common use. The latter include Earth, where the word "flora" arises more directly from the name of a Roman goddess of flowers and the season of spring (which name of course can be traced back to the aforementioned flos).

The word "vegetable" is sometimes used as a synonym for florum. This usage is obsolescent at best on many worlds, given that many people associate the word "vegetable" specifically with edible plant matter—and often more specifically with edible plant matter as used in savory dishes. (This latter, informal definition sometimes leads to confusion, as people mistakenly try to draw a sharp distinction between fruits and vegetables, not realizing that many vegetables used in savory dishes are also fruit, a common classification error which lent its name to the phenomenon of tomatism.)

On worlds where it is not recognized that all flora do not form a clade (or on worlds where all flora in fact do form a clade, though this is rare), flora are often collectively referred to as the "vegetable kingdom". Often a three-way distinction is drawn between the "vegetable kingdom" (flora), the "animal kingdom" (fauna), and the "mineral kingdom" (inorganic matter). Once scientists develop a more sophisticated understanding of the relationships between different organisms, this categorization falls into disuse.

Ecology

Flora generally compose the bottom of the food chain, though this role may be shared by (much less common) furina. Lacking any ability to flee or hide, let alone to actively fight back, flora may seem largely defenseless against heterotrophs that would feed on them. Indeed, many floral species are largely defenseless, and survive simply by growing or reproducing quickly enough to replenish their losses to browsers. Other flora, however, do develop defenses. Some common floral defenses include sharp thorns, toxic chemicals such as poisons and irritants, and growing hard shells around particularly vulnerable parts. Some flora are also capable of communicating with each other through various means, including airborne chemicals, electrical signals, or even sound. They may use this communication to alert other plants in the vicinity to adverse conditions that they can prepare for.

While many faunal species may feed on flora, flora may also rely on fauna for their survival. Some flora in areas with poor soil may even eat animals or other fauna, luring them close and then closing their leaves in on them, entrapping them in sticky fluid, or otherwise capturing them. (The Venus flytrap is perhaps the best known example, but by no means the only one.) Flora that don't eat fauna may still rely on them in other ways, such as for seed dispersion; some flora, for example, grow their seeds inside spiky burrs that can stick to an animal's fur and thus be carried far from the original parent.

But the relationship between flora and fauna can go both ways; many flora and fauna have mutualistic relationships. For example, some flora grow their seeds inside fruit that are eaten by fauna that then either discard or excrete the seeds in new locations. The fauna get a tasty and nutritious meal; the flora get their seeds dispersed far from the parent organism. Other flora develop more complex relationships with fauna; a famous example is the bullhorn acacia Vachellia cornigera, which grows hollow thorns that provide homes for ants, which also get food from the tree's secretions. In return, the ants defend the tree from herbivorous animals and from competing plants.

Relationships between different species of flora can be similarly complex. Flora often compete for resources such as sunlight and nutrients. Some flora may parasitize others, or at least rely on them commensally for support, such as the epiphytes that grow in the joints of trees. But like flora and fauna, different flora may also have mutualistic relationships. Lichen, a common phenomenon on Earth and other terrestrial worlds, is actually a complex of two or three different species of flora: one or two species of fungus and one species of cyanophyte.

Local flora

The word "flora" is also used to describe all the floral organisms of a particular area or environment. When it is necessary to disambiguate this from the general plural "flora", the flora of an area can be called "local flora". One may therefore refer to forest flora, or ocean flora, or the flora of a specific forest or locale. The term can be applied not just to places and to terrains and biomes but also to other specialized environments; a common example is "gut flora", a collective term for the microorganisms living within the digestive tracts of humans or other animals.

Books are frequently published describing the local flora of particular areas. Perhaps confusingly, these books are also called floras—though in this case "flora" is used as a singular noun, with a regular plural.

Collectively, the flora, fauna, and other organisms of an area or environment may be referred to as the local biota.

Reproduction

Many flora can and do reproduce by budding, with offshoots of the florum separating from the parent and growing into separate life forms. However, floral organisms, like other such organisms, benefit from sexual reproduction, as it increases their genetic diversity and adaptability. Such reproduction requires one organism to fertilize another, which potentially poses a problem for the stationary flora, since a florum cannot move toward a mate. Some flora simply reproduce with those that grow close enough for the two to come into contact, but others must find a way to distribute their genetic material, which they may do either by relying on wind and currents or by coöpting fauna (or furina) to do the distribution for them.

Once fertilization occurs, a florum is faced with the same issue of dispersal of its offspring. This problem may be solved in similar ways to the initial fertilization—the initial stage of the plant takes the form of a (usually) tiny capsule which can then be distributed by wind, water, or fauna, among other methods. These germinal capsules are often called spores if they are relatively simple, generally unicellular structures, or seeds if they are more complex constructs that involve embryos enclosed in shells or other coverings.

Of course, flora of abiotic kingdoms—as well as some floral organisms—may not require sexual reproduction, but may instead be artificially created or spontaneously generated, or they may be transformed from other creatures—among other possibilities.

Uses

Flora can be and widely are harvested by humans and other folks for many reasons. Many flora are edible, or can be made edible with the proper treatment—acorns, for instance, the nuts of oak trees, contain chemicals called tannins that render them inedible to humans, but that can be removed through a process of soaking and leaching them in water. Herbivorous and omnivorous folks therefore may eat a wide variety of flora from different kingdoms—on Earth, most of the flora in a human's diet may be plant life, but humans do also eat fungi, algae, and even bacteria (in the form of bacterial cultures in yogurts and cheeses—this, of course, is not including the countless bacteria that are incidentally consumed on and in other food). Of course, folks may not just eat flora directly, but may also use them to feed fauna they are raising. Historically, the widespread cultivation of flora played an important role in human civilization on Earth, and in that of many other folk on many other worlds; growing grains and other crops in tended fields, rather than gathering them from the wild, was the initial step in the Agricultural Revolution that would reshape human lifestyles. Agriculture would later include the cultivation of fauna as well as flora, but the flora came first.

But food is not the only use to which flora can be put. Chemicals extracted from flora—or simply ingested along with the floral parts to which they pertain—can have medicinal or recreational uses, though the latter often come with some danger, or to the manufacture of dyes, flavorings, and other utilious substances. Some parts of flora can also see use as building material, most notably wood harvested from trees.

Even aside from any resources that can be extracted from them, flora, particularly trees and other larger flora, may serve useful purposes by their mere presence. People may benefit from such flora in their capacity as windbreaks or providers of shade, or by the mere fact that they help hold the soil together and prevent or at least reduce duststorms and destructive erosion.