Sure is a lot of chatter these days about Greenland.   I’d like to contribute an otherwise unknown Florida tidbit to the discussion.  Who knows, maybe useful “inside info” for high- level negotiations and deliberations.   Although today’s 41 degree morning may raise doubts, we think of South Florida as sweaty subtropical with pythons, and Greenland as frigidly Arctic with walruses. Botanically speaking, whatever could link such contrasting lands?  Here’s a hint:  Greenland has hot springs housing  plants you don’t associate with glaciers.

I’ll bet the Vikings enjoyed a warm soak in those natural hot tub springs after pillaging across the North Atlantic.  While they were skinny dipping blissfully with a frosty tankard of mead among the polar bears,  the aquatic foliage tickling their toes might have been Little Pondweed, aka, Potomogeton pusillus.    It could tickle your tootsies here too, but good luck finding any:   the species is super-rare locally, having one known population in Lake Okeechobee, and a nearby clump near Barley Barber Swamp adjacent to Lake O.   There’s probably plenty more than that about, but who’s going swimming with the gators to look, and even if encountered, not so easy to recognize.

Photo courtesy of Gabriel Campbell

Similar problems have afflicted the pondweed in Greenland.  I don’t want to go down a boring classification icy path, but when first discovered in Greenland, the specimens had no fruits or flowers, so were named as a separate species, Potamogeton groenlandicus. Whether this should be considered distinct from the broadly widespread Potamogeton pusillus is a little unclear, but that point of confusion is not important for our outrageous cross-latitudinal botanical bridge to Greenland.