I know this is totally off-topic but I think that this is really cool and I wanted to share it with everyone. in our yard we have some Black-Eyed Susans. and over they years thet have grown into this huge cluster of about 150-200 flowers, recently we have seen some crazy mutations. here is a sample:



so does anyone else have anything like this going on in there yard?

I'm seriously willing to bet that that has something to do with fu-kushima. After all, fu-kushima released way more radiation than chernobyl.
Here's a post from a fu-kushima related website showing this:
http://tinyurl.com/7zmna86

EDIT: Why the heck is fu-kushima censored? Had to use tinyurl for the website since BA keeps censoring the name.

The f-u-k at the start gets it censored. Silly BA censor.

And please, this is not likely to be anything to do with radiation. Mutations are part of nature, and mutations such as that are more common than you seem to credit - as a mutation, it's probably along the same line as cancer in humans, which is relatively common and has existed long before any man-made radioactivity - the main reason we see it today more than in the far past is simply down to humans living longer.

Also, radiation is not just released by a nuclear incident. Coal Power Plants release far more radiation than a nuclear power plant in normal operation for example, because coal itself contains a number of radioactive isotopes that are released into the air as part of the soot when coal burns.

True. Although there still is a chance that this is related.

Unless the OP lives on mainland Japan, I seriously doubt this has even a chance of being related to "fu-kushima".

agreed, If you have a large enough sample size (we have close to 200 individual flowers) then there is a greater chance of mutations. Out of the 200 I'd say there is about 50-75 mutations.



I live on the East coast of the US (in Massachusetts to be exact).

Thats 25%-37.5% mutation. And 200 isn't a large sample size either. Mutations occur naturally, and obviously they are all mutated, but considering your probably talking about bigger mutations, that seems like quite a lot of mutations, but I don't know anything about flowers. Our old place had heaps of them, looked really nice, but this new rental place hasn't got any.

Consider that many, if not all flowers are more than likely related, so there's a large chance that genetic mutations could be passed on to offspring resulting in an unknowable amount of actual first time mutations.