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Link to paper (eLife): https://elifesciences.org/articles/80984

From the abstract:

"Here, we show that the circadian clock controls the timing of late-stage floret development, or anthesis, in domesticated sunflowers. In these plants, up to thousands of individual florets are tightly packed onto a capitulum disk. While early floret development occurs continuously across capitula to generate iconic spiral phyllotaxy, during anthesis floret development occurs in discrete ring-like pseudowhorls with up to hundreds of florets undergoing simultaneous maturation. "

That's so interesting.

The United States are not the largest producers of sunflowers, and yet even here over 1.7 million acres were planted in 2014 and probably more each year since. Much of which can be found in North Dakota.

The pattern of the sunflower seeds is the Fibonacci sequence: https://momath.org/home/fibonacci-numbers-of-sunflower-seed-spirals/#:~:text=The%20sunflower%20seed%20pattern%20used,find%20spirals%20in%20this%20pattern.

Even bees get down with the Fibonacci sequence: https://wild.maths.org/fibonacci-and-bees

If you watch a sunflower during this blooming period, you will see that it tracks the sun - facing toward the E in the morning and following the sun across the sky until it ends the day facing W.

thank you for linking the paper! its always a hassle to try and find the papers an article references. the links in the articles never work when i use the app.

Which is also controlled by the circadian clock! https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/sunflowers-move-clock