Critters don’t get much cuter than Key Deer.   Some folks who have never motored through the Keys may be unfamiliar with the pint-sized deer who pitter-patter around Big Pine Key and associated islands.  With sprawl and habitat modification, where they get fresh water during the dry months and what plants they eat are important questions.

Key Deer fertilizer machines have strong dietary preferences, and the bottom of the list is today’s shrub, Spanish Stopper.  Deer spit it out in disgust.

Now before we go on, a vocabulary lesson may help.   Life miners are tiny larvae from varied insects that feed inside leaves, mining tunnels in the leaf flesh.   Gardeners do not like them.  

Now back to the thread of the story: 

Being shunned by Key Deer is not 100% good news for Spanish Stopper.   As ecologists Mark Barrett and Peter Stiling determined,  leaf miner damage to Spanish Stopper increases markedly with increasing deer populations, that is, more deer = more mines.  

There are two non-mutually exclusive explanations:  1.  When the deer eat its competitors, the Spanish Stopper’s increased crowding facilitates the life miner’s reproductive cycle and dispersal.  2. The second explanation is that lots of deer generate lots of “fertilizer.” The Spanish Stopper stockpiles nitrogen from the deer waste into its leaves, “Eureka” for the leaf miners.

In any self-respecting narrative where Stoppers are mentioned,  it is required to speculate on the origin of the name “stopper.”  One standard speculation is that stem segments served as “stoppers in bottles.”  Yea, sure. The other standard speculation is that, taken medicinally, the plants stop diarrhea.  As cute as that may be, I shout, “baloney.”  A simple straightforward guess is that the dense tangles these shrubs grow into (nourished by Key Deer manure) stop your forward progress.  That’s why we use them as thick “keep out” hedges.  Just sayin’.