Ah yes, Ted, you are right in line with my thinking!
I'm thinking bullate leaves likely is a functional form that is then further modified by things like cuticle, leaf thickness, etc., and the "bullate"-ness of a leaf may be a term capturing multiple different things. I googled "bullate anthurium" and came up with A. radicans, a species I adore. It is distinctly bullate, but also distinctly happy as a houseplant in my conditions and is not limited to high humidity... but those are some mighty thick leaves with a nice waxy cuticle. The mystery continues!
As for your question on photon capture - I highly recommend the book "Nature's Palette: The science of plant color" by David Lee. I think it will hit a lot on the light functionality stuff you are looking for, and has a lot of cool plant bits in it. And speaking of that book, there are some great sections that go into cells as lenses and leaves as lenses (very cool!) but never directly addresses bullate - which is something in between those two extremes. Likely because bullate leaves (where the whole leaf is folded up like an origami structure) doesn't have as much influence on color (the point of the book) as it does in water and air exchange. There are some clues that it may play a part in light diffusion though... the book was fascinating but also had me asking almost as many questions as it answered :)
It's frustrating to me to be trained to look at a fish and use traits to identify things (highly forked tail for speed, etc.) but I can't find references to be able to learn the same for plants. I seem to be able to find a lot of physiology books that tell me the chemical pathways and how it develops, but not much on the "why" behind these traits.
Corey
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