How Thirsty Trees Drink Cloud Water Graduate student Greg
Goldsmith in the montane cloud forest of Monteverde Cloud Forest
Reserve, Costa Rica. CREDIT: Photo courtesy of Drew Fulton
(Canopy in the Clouds) When roots just aren't getting the job
done, leaves on some thirsty tropical trees can suck up water
from low-hanging clouds, new research shows. "The textbooks
teach us that water enters roots, moves up the trunk and into
the branches, then finally exits the leaves," graduate student
Greg Goldsmith, a University of California, Berkeley said in a
statement. "That's true, but it's not the whole story."
Goldsmith and his colleagues set up plastic moisture-detecting
"leaves" to study the patterns of leaf wetness caused by the
constant cloud-cover in the tropical forests of Monteverde,
Costa Rica. They also installed tiny sensors on the branches of
the cloud forest plants to see whether or not water was entering
leaves when they were wet. "With our sensors, we observed water
entering the leaves and actually movi