An evil scientist at Palm Beach State College takes over Lake Worth Lagoon with a swarm of aquadroids made with a combination of stingray, gator, and manatee DNA. They pierce flesh, they bite with gusto, they graze on seagrass. Far-fetched you say? Maybe so to blinkered animal-o-centrists, but reality in the heartless world of green. Fear Alligator Weed smothering the water from Florida to China, one canal at a time. Resembling the Lake Worth Lagoon Stinging-Gator, Alligator Weed is a deadly combo of three species, hybridized long ago and far away. It retains the DNA of all three ancestors, three sets of paired chromosomes.
The green Frankenstein is well armed for aquatic conquest with rafts of floating hollow stems, dangling root tangles mopping up nutrients from the fertilizer-polluted waters, and regrowth from broken fragments.
That regrowth matters a lot. If you have the DNA from three different species packed into one individual, how ever are you going to reproduce? Those eggs and sperms just won’t be right. Guess what, throughout its global conquest, Alligator Weed is unknown to make seeds. Kinda ironic-eh? One of the world’s most aggressive reproducers is sterile. But blast it with a neutron laser destructo-beam (or a string trimmer) and where you had one you now have 100.
If you want to dominate the Earth you must adjust as you go: climate differences & stuff. With that in mind, check out this USDA article about Alligator Weed taking hold in California.
The plant seems to be evolving (“altering its genetic makeup”) to expand northward. Okay, but isn’t evolving and altering genetic makeup what the birds and bees do? Today’s invader has no birds and bees. And that may be where having DNA from three species shows up. A Swiss Army Knife of DNA. The Lake Worth Lagoon alligator hybrid can sting yer’ ass, chomp yer’ bones, or eat some grass. Maybe the Alligator Weed hybrid has DNA from one ancestor attuned to warmer water while DNA from Ancestor B helps in cooler canals. DNA for every contingency. Or something very very roughly like that. You get the idea.
[Oh yea, and by the way, there are many naturally hybrid plants that do make seeds, and don’t aspire to take over the world….it’s just that AW is an extreme and fun case.]
In the pre WWII era botanist John Kunkel Small (1869-1938) documented the daylights out of South Florida when you had to get muddy, thorn-pricked, and heat-exhausted to earn your creds. Not bad for a flautist in the NYC Philharmonic.
Today, for reasons unrelated to the blog, I looked up Coreopsis leavenworthii (Leavenworth’s Tickseed) in JK Small’s 1933 plant manual and bumped into an odd little comment tacked onto the species description:
“A hot infusion of this plant is used externally by the Seminoles in cases of heat prostration.”
Generally “out there” are many reports on historical plant uses, many of them derived, hearsay, and third-hand. And truth is, the ratio of modern confirmed benefits to reported historical uses has turned out to be sorely disappointing despite enthusiastic efforts by researchers to mine for gold. But Small’s non sequitur caused me a double-take, and his use of the present tense, “is used.” sounds like experience rather than something he read. He took an interest in the Seminole People of his era, which no doubt underpinned his observation. Small did say “externally,” but let’s cheat a teensie and stretch that plausibly to “internally,” because Native Americans beyond Florida reportedly used Coreopsis tea internally for many ailments.
As an aging botanist myself who has experienced “heat prostration” in a nasty way, I also wondered if Small had his own personal interest in that Florida occupational hazard. After all, he was basically a city-dweller whose scrambling through brush lugging plant press and camera under the Florida sun was an acquired taste. Could there be anything to sipping Coreopsis tea against heat illness? Happily and sadly, contemporary computer-based research sure is easy. So here is what online sources say on the possibility of Coreopsis against heat illness (which does not make it all necessarily true, effective, or harmless!). Reportedly:
Coreopsis gladiata by John Bradford.
Coreopsis produces antioxidants, including that sunshine yellow flower pigment. Heat illness causes excessive immune responses and vascular inflammation tamped down by antioxidants. Additional Coreopsis (phenolic) compounds likely reduce intestinal damage and consequent self-poisoning associated with heat illness.
Tea made from Coreopsis causes sweating, with evaporative cooling, although it is a reasonable bet (?) that the patient was placed in cool water.
Heat stress disrupts sugar metabolism. Coreopsis extracts have been shown in modern research to resist blood sugar spikes.
So then, I’ll bet the Seminoles knew a thing or two about heat illness, and how to deal with it. I’ll bet JK Small knew a thing or two about heat illness too, and had interest in how to deal with it.
(Personally I’d like to try it but have an absolute ban on ingesting wild plants, which are not binary “safe” vs. “toxic” .)
Last few days I’ve been exploring mostly native plants expanding through the mean ecological filter into urban habitats. Not many country cousins succeed in town.
Out of many challenges (and opportunities) to native urban expanders are “urban heat islands.” A cool park beats hot times in the city. That matters to plants and critters. It also complicates assessments of climate change. And you know what heat islands are hotter than hell? Rocky railroad beds. They can be more or less 40 degrees F hotter than surrounding areas on hot sunny days, worse than a Publix parking lot. Not only toasty, but also stones instead of soil, drained dry, shadeless, stinky trains polluting past, and occasional herbicides. No wonder almost nothing grows there. I was hot-footin’ around the tracks yesterday marevelling at railroad rock dwellers. There you find Euphorbia lasiocarpa (aka Chamaecyse lasiocarpa), native mostly to Mexico.
Try to look it up in the 1971 classic “Flora of Tropical Florida.” Not in the book, because in 1971 it was grabbing a Florida toehold south of Miami, however it may have arrived. And look where it was found first….a RR track, foreshadowing the next 20 years. This is a species whose northward (and eventually east-west) expansion featured train tracks. Gathering data from several museums, the earliest 15 records of the species in Florida are shown in the timeline below.
An observer might say, “trains are natural seed transporters, expanding species distributions.” Sure, but I suspect a minor factor for this species. An observer might say, “global warming could help a tropical species migrate northward/.” Okay, but the blazing hot RR track bed is vastly hotter than whatever global warming is in play.
Euphorbia lasiocarpa appears to be at heart adapted to very hot, very dry, very rocky, very unshaded Mexican deserts. I think the main reason I found it yesterday workin’ on the railroad is that for E. lasiocarpa, “the railroad bed is a little slice of home.” That unique habitat IMHO extends the Euphorbia’s happy place into Florida where btw it has almost no competitors.
Whether a person’s contact with Saw Palmetto is at a pretentious subdivision entrance or in the itchy scratchy woods, we all know some are green, other silver. Why?
Before tackling that existential mystery let’s set the foundation:
Are they two separate species? No. Seedlings coming from one seed parent can be both colors, as a black cat can have a black and white litter.
Are they separated geographically? No. Populations are often mixed. And it is not as simple as seashore = silver, inland = green. You get both in both settings, although proportions may differ.
Is color form determined by environmental cues such as heat or sun? A qualified mostly no. With minor exceptions, the plants are fundamentally one or the other, often side by side, or if transplanted. There are occasional combo-color individuals. Some have mostly greenish young leaves and increasingly silver older more-exposed older leaves. And intermediates are not rare. Let’s just say, whatever the underlying “toggle” may be, it seems both simple and imperfect. For present purposes what matters is that any population can spawn mixtures.
Photos by John Bradford
What causes the silver? Grainy wax coating.
What good is that? I’m not aware of any such research for Saw Palmetto itself. Common on other palms (Bismarck for example) and on many other plants, botanists generally regard the wax as protection. Scrub-dwelling, sun-scorched, UV-mutated, wind-blown, sand-blasted, salt-burned, fungal-attacked, bug-eaten Saw Palmetto is easily imagined as benefiting from a protective coating. Important to note—the protection is probably not from heat itself.
And that now invites the big questions:
If the a wax job is terrifically protective on Porches and saw palmettos, why aren’t all the saw palmettos silvery waxy? There must be a downside.
What could that be? Plants use evaporation from the leaves to draw water up from below and for evaporative cooling. Wax would probably diminish evaporation.
So then, if protection is good but evaporation blockage is bad, why don’t the shrubs compromise on a single sweet spot with optimal waxiness?
I think the species makes the two forms to cover all contingencies. Mother palm says, “if some of my babies are waxy tough while others are better at staying cool, some will prosper, no matter what.” (For those who like terms, if all this blah blah blah is true, a textbook would dub it “balanced polymorphism,” aka, “hedge your bet.”)
Evidence? Mighty meagre in the literature, but I’ve been clipping temperature recorders to Saw Palmetto fronds. My case may not be strong enough for conviction, and messy data are not completely consistent, probably influenced by soil water and who knows what. But look at the three graphs below. The first two show leaf temperatures over spans of hours, silver lines = silver fronds, green for green. Because the first two graphs were deliberately selected, I added the third graph with all my readings to keep me honest: silver fronds above the red line, green below it.
The general trend seems to be this:
At lower temperatures the green and silver remain close in temperature, or the green slightly cooler. In other words, at lower temperatures the wax seems to offer its general-purpose protection without impairing cooling. Must be worth having!
But, under hot circumstances silver heats up hotter than green. When the heat is on, the wax apparently interferes with cooling. So green fares better when hot and silver fares better when not. Maybe.
Silver leaves above the red line. Green below it. Orange ellipse highlights hot silver leaves at hot temperatures.
The native plant community has lost a superb botanist, naturalist, and photographer. And I’ve lost a 20-some-year collaborator and wonderful friend. John Bradford passed away peacefully on April 24 after a spell of illness. John was utterly unique in his razor-sharp knowledge of plants, photographic talents, enthusiasm for nature,. And it wasn’t all greens: his nature realm extended to birds, frogs, and a special warm spot for spiders.
John tackled the local flora shortly after relocating with his wife Dee from Grand Cayman to Jensen Beach in the 90s, his first steps being botany classes at the University of Florida Ft. Pierce. After learning all they had to teach, the professors suggested he drop by Palm Beach State College because we conducted weekly native plant field trips. He took that advice and rapidly became an integral component of those excursions. Then he proceeded to help us set up a small herbarium, and started building a photo collection central to illustrating classroom curriculum materials. That was just a beginning.
Not only did John contribute photos but he acquired a knowledge of botany on a par with professional botanists. We turned out to be natural collaborators and worked jointly on too many projects to list, including wildflower guide booklets, a grass and sedge website, revision of a weed booklet, an online native plants class, a research paper on Butterworts, and plenty more. He suggested starting the present blog to document our weekly fieldtrips. Maybe 40 trips a year X 20 years. John on his own developed website photo and video guides to most of the local natural areas. His knowledge and abilities exceeded those of many prominent naturalists, but he disdained self-promotion and did not enjoy public speaking, nor did he enjoy writing despite being a fine author if coerced. Like many highly talented people, doing what he enjoyed was the reward. With little fanfare, John’s photos appear in a lot of publications and websites.
John had an unusual bragging right. Many people find county record plant occurrences. Those may warrant sending a specimen to a museum. A state record can result in a journal article. National records are rare in the U.S. John had a continental record. We were working in Halpatioke Park in Stuart, and John had compiled a chart of useful identification characteristics for some local grasses. He encountered a specimen that did not fit his chart. My erroneous reaction was, “shoehorn it into one of those species.” In typical adamant fashion, John contended that failure to fit was cause for action, so we sent a sample to a specialist at the Missouri Botanical Garden who determined it to be the first finding of Steinchisma laxa in North America, perhaps a seed arrival on Hurricane Wilma.
This is not the place for an obituary, but some readers might be interested in knowing that John wasn’t all just nature and cameras. Few folks know that in the Army he recovered and repaired disabled army tanks in Germany, and that young John was a race car driver, pit crew chief, and scuba diver. More recently, he hand-constructed artistic wood-framed stables and similar buildings for rural clients with such tastes. And if you had any mechanical or home maintenance problem, or a question about Formula 1 his advice was solid. John Bradford was absolutely one of a kind, and speaking of kind, he was that as well. He proved that brilliant talents with a modest ego can fill the largest shoes.
In a separate blog will appear links to John’s on-line legacy.
The blog today is not about Cypress trees, but let’s wade there first as a step into swamp tree shapes. Back in 1987 Georgia biologist Howard Neufeld wrote a fascinating article about Bald Cypress and Pond Cypress. His observation was that Pond Cypresses tend to be taller (for any given trunk diameter), to have fewer branches, and to have leaves along the branches (as opposed to toward the branch ends), and broader based. By contrast, Bald Cypress is stockier, more branched with the leaves more concentrated toward the branch tips, and not broadened so much basally.
As Neufeld saw it, the thinner, more-conic Pond Cypress was less costly to build (fewer smaller everything ), less prone to sun stress, and more drought tolerant (by having simpler and overall less plumbing). The more-conical shape allows nice even filtered light deeper into the tree, and allows the lower branches good illumination. Neufeld interpreted pond cypress to have evolved frombig domineering muscular bald cypress as a lighter nimble cousin in changing drier habitats, as opposed to competing massive single-species stands in plenty of water.
Thus inspired, as a semi-swamp dweller, today I was messing around in a swamp near the southern limit of the beautiful Loblolly Bay sharing its cottonmouths with large Dahoon Hollies. Both species rise up above the dense swamp canopy, and when the Hollies and Bays get above the lower canopy their shapes contrast, reminiscent of the Cypress situation. Dahoon Holly is the “Bald Cypress” copycat, comparatively hunky, highly branched, and irregular in shape.
To the point!, Loblolly.
Loblolly Bay rises like Space-X, pointed and conic. It seems to punch aggressively through the understory with one thought: “get above shade” undistracted. So purposeful! And when it achieves that purpose, its base can broaden and expose those big glossy leaves to photosynthesis. The Holly does ok too in its own more cautious fashion: it tilts this way, then tries another, investing in multiple trunks and branches at all angles, experimenting, and exploring obstacles, competitors, sunspots, openings, and shadows.
Sort of resembles human affairs. Rush brashly to the goal, and you might win with luck in an ideal place and time. On the other hand, if you bob and weave you might win in diverse suboptimal places and times. Wonder if the tree shapes have anything to do with Loblolly Bays living confined to a few particular habitats, Dahoon Holly wangling into more diverse circumstances, even though their overall geographic ranges are the same.
Fun fact: Loblolly Bay is in the tea family and Dahoon Holly is an historical source of yaupon teas.
Different Styles of Swamp-Dwelling: Straight to the Point or Hedge Your Bets
The blog today is not about Cypress trees, but let’s wade there first as a step into swamp tree shapes. Back in 1987 Georgia biologist Howard Neufeld wrote a fascinating article about Bald Cypress and Pond Cypress. His observation was that Pond Cypresses tend to be taller (for any given trunk diameter), to have fewer branches, and to have leaves along the branches (as opposed to toward the branch ends), and broader based. By contrast, Bald Cypress is stockier, more branched with the leaves more concentrated toward the branch tips, and not broadened so much basally.
As Neufeld saw it, the thinner, more-conic Pond Cypress was less costly to build (fewer smaller everything ), less prone to sun stress, and more drought tolerant (by having simpler and overall less plumbing). The more-conical shape allows nice even filtered light deeper into the tree, and allows the lower branches good illumination. Neufeld interpreted pond cypress to have evolved frombig domineering muscular bald cypress as a lighter nimble cousin in changing drier habitats, as opposed to competing massive single-species stands in plenty of water.
Thus inspired, as a semi-swamp dweller, today I was messing around in a swamp near the southern limit of the beautiful Loblolly Bay sharing its cottonmouths with large Dahoon Hollies. Both species rise up above the dense swamp canopy, and when the Hollies and Bays get above the lower canopy their shapes contrast, reminiscent of the Cypress situation. Dahoon Holly is the “Bald Cypress” copycat, comparatively hunky, highly branched, and irregular in shape. Loblolly Bay rises like Space-X, pointed and conic. It seems to punch aggressively through the understory with one thought: “get above shade” undistracted. So purposeful! And when it achieves that purpose, its base can broaden and expose those big glossy leaves to photosynthesis. The Holly does ok too in its own more cautious fashion: it tilts this way, then tries another, investing in multiple trunks and branches at all angles, experimenting, and exploring obstacles, competitors, sunspots, openings, and shadows.
Dahoon, exploring its options
Sort of resembles human affairs. Rush brashly to the goal, and you might win with luck in an ideal place and time. On the other hand, if you bob and weave you might win in diverse suboptimal places and times. Wonder if the tree shapes have anything to do with Loblolly Bays living confined to a few particular habitats, Dahoon Holly wangling into more diverse circumstances, even though their overall geographic ranges are the same.
Fun fact: Loblolly Bay is in the tea family and Dahoon Holly is an historical source of yaupon teas.
Work time in a scrub area last Tuesday was extra cheery due to the sunshine yellow prickly pear blooms as fancy as roses, lovely as a flower can be. Bet they help neighboring flowers of other species become pollinated by drawing pollinators from round about.
All photos today by John Bradford
Less cheerful, trudging through a scrub you suffer a hot stab to your shin, look down, and not only is there a cactus spine impaling your flesh, but attached to the nasty spear is a small stem segment. Yanking it out hurts, but congratulations, you just discovered a key to prickly pear distribution. Those detached pads cover the broken edge quickly with mucilege goo that hardens like epoxy, then the pad can live eternally to reroot wherever it shakes loose. Pad relocation has something to do with the global prickly pear presence (native in the New World, introduced in the Old World):
Map from Plants of the World online
Some Opuntia species are so dedicated to stem-piece dispersal they have stopped producing fertile seeds altogether. Back in 1892 Arizona naturalist J.W. Toumey wrote about the spines propping the broken-off stem pads above the ground. That’s handy: helps with cooling, keeps ground bugs and fungi off, and makes the pad more likely to grab a passing beast. To complicate regeneration further, some populate their seeds with a clonal piece of the mother plant instead of an actual embryo. Even more oddly, the fruits can take root directly even if the seeds they contain don’t.
Most opuntias and close relatives have chromosomal aberrations to interfere with normal sexual processes. Although untested for cacti so far as I know, there is a general association between ancient cultivation and chromosomal oddness mixed with clonality. Might apply to prickly pears.
On the downside, cochineal insects grown on cultivated prickly pears for purple dyes have escaped detrimentally onto our native prickly pears, a topic covered in a prior blog.
Human uses for prickly pears are old, widespread, and diverse, so you can rest assured long-ago people moved them around. There is evidence in Mexico of ancient prickly pear domestication, that not a big surprise. Plants that are easy to propagate with edible stems and fruits, with 100 additional uses happy to grow in deserts are a gift to cherish. That map above shows how prickly pears have gotten around the Old World, in some places being pests. But when not pests, in addition to tasty, water-filled fruits and stems, the vast medicinal uses are too diverse to list. Pick any ailment, some you never heard of. There are prickly pear wines and brandies, and pancakes. Have you seen expensive hydrogels added to garden soil to retail moisture? Prickly pears are the original wild hydrogel, long used in Italy especially for growing cucumbers. There is modern commercial interest in PP neutraceuticals, whatever a neutraceutical is. Remember that quick-hardening mucilage? Cactus pads have been used as spreaders to apply the smooth mucilage to boat hulls to make them glide with ease. Uses as sewing needles and as field medical probes are obvious and true. More interestingly, ancient peoples found bundles of the spines useful as a combination needle and paintbrush for tattooing. Like an old-school smallpox vaccination.
Opuntia stricta. Explain this shotgun distribution! (Map from BONAP).
What Linnaeus had in mind in 1754 when he coined the name Proserpinaca is its first mystery. A leading possibility, not my original idea, is Proserpina, Roman goddess of springtime and of the underworld. The plant Proserpinaca does rise up from the underworld mud in the springtime like a little green goddess mermaid. Pectinata means roughly, “looks like a fish skeleton.”
Proserpinaca pectinata with fruits by John Bradford.
You don’t have to work hard in dried out marshbottom mud to find Proserpinacapectinata rising, creeping, flowering, and fruiting. We have two (+) species of Proserpinica around here, but let’s focus on just one. I have no particular point to make about P. pectinata, except that it is shy, odd, and poorly known.
In flower, by JB. Pinkish stigmas between yellow anthers.
Looks like it is getting its own yellow pollen onto the pink stigmas.
Odd thing 1. The mermaid lives in two separate regions. The main region is semi-coastal from New England, across Florida and Cuba to Texas. The curious second region is central Tennessee. A skeptic might say, well, some bird probably dropped it there and it spread. Agreed! But birds probably drop its little fruits all over the place, so why “take hold” and spread just in the center of Tennessee? I dunno.
Map 1999 by botanist P. Catling. What’s going on in Tennessee?
Odd thing 2. When the marsh bottom dries Proserpinaca can explode into a green carpet of zillions of crowded individuals covering a lot of space. How does it do that? The fruits are hard, floaty little “nutlets,” and clearly get around. But at any given moment there don’t seem to be enough of them to take over, and you don’t see them sprouting on the mud anyhow. So where’s all that massive new mermaid coming from? Old fruits accumulating dormant in the mud? (probably) Stem and root fragments breaking apart and floating around? (probably, the stems root where they touch). Surviving plants that persisted during the last inundation? (probably). Stem-creep? (probably). That’s a lot of probablys. Wonder what the main source of the springtime mermaid explosion is. Maybe not even in my list.
Prolific!
Odd thing 3. Itty bitty flowers having no appreciable petals. The flowers have three pink fuzzy pollen-receiving stigmas and three yellowish anthers releasing pollen. The entire plant being short, the flowers are semi-hidden near the ground. Googling to discover the pollinators yields three (not necessarily exclusive) assertions by folks who obviously do not really know:
Wind pollination (I doubt that, as the flowers are hidden down out of the wind; they tend to be relatively few, and they don’t seem well “designed” for putting pollen in the wind.) ((But never say never.))
Unknown insect visitors. (Bet that occurs. Would be fun to catch visitors red-handed.)
Self-pollination (I like that possibility: even in todays photo you can see self-pollen slopping onto the stigmas. Self-pollination would explain why the flowers reliably form fruits.)
Odd thing four: The leaves have tiny white doohickies directly in the angle where the leaflet joins the central leaf stalk. The little attachments are made of several cells, and under a microscope look like a cluster of grapes. These are a mystery. Water lilies have somewhat similar structures, called hydropotes (“water drinkers”), but those probably do not drink water, and they too are of unknown function. Many plants have water-release “valves” called hydathodes at the ends of veins. Could be, but the placement and appearance are very iffy. Anybody’s guess can be the function of the tiny appendages, if any. Something to do with water uptake and output, or dissolved material? Feeding tiny insects such as ants, and if so, why? Help draw visitors to the flowers? Make the leaves taste like $#@#@! to leaf eaters? Breaking free and micro-sprouting?
The history of plant ecology is for good reason preoccupied with competition between and within species—-you know, survival of the fittest as the very motor of evolution. On the other side of the uneven coin, mutual aid or maybe one-sided aid, facilitation, never gets as much stage time. I’m sort of fascinated by it, also with cypress swamps. Let’s join the two.
There’s a long-standing perception that in favorable conditions competition dominates, and that in harsh conditions facilitation is more likely. Obvious examples:—let’s say in the desert small plants “taking shelter” under scattered shade trees, or in a Florida scrub smaller creatures taking refuge in gopher tortoise burrows. Or In a flooded marsh you see small plant species clustering on the raised hummocks of larger plants. This last example is close to today’s slightly more peculiar case of sizable trees seated preferentially on top of smaller plants.
Floating fruits, big tough seeds by JB
I spend too much time in cypress swamps, and declare that today’s situation is not universal It seems to be curiously situational. Step carefully with me into the swamp just east of the main parking lot across from Jupiter Farms Road at the Cypress Creek Natural Area. (This is not a particularly aesthetic destination for a Sunday stroll, with barbed wire, broken glass, trash, and feral hogs.)
Pond Cypress by JB
What you see is a tall overstory of big beautiful Pond Cypress, with sunlight shining through now during the leafless season. There are several mostly small woody species in the understory, but the striking thing is that the vast majority of those plants are Pond Apples, most of them biggish, averaging 16 inches diameter at the base. I temporarily marked four corners in the swamp roughly 130 feet on each side, about 1/3 acre. In that plot were 62 tree-sized Pond Apples under the Pond Cypress. And now hold on to your funny looking hat, 51 (82 percent) of them were seated directly upon Pond Cypress knee mounds. In many cases, the knee mounds were so overtopped by the PA trees that little knees were merely peeking out modestly between the fluted flanges on the Pond Apple bases. One Pond Apple base per knee mound.
PC knees with no guest.
Are the Pond Apples taking over “on the backs” of the Pond Cypress? Well, there is zero Pond Cypress apparent regeneration under present conditions, although the big cypresses seem fine & dandy above their knee-squatters. Come back in a hundred years…or after the next hurricane or fire, then we’ll know who’s king of the swamp (for the moment).
Pond apple sitting on a knee mound. See the little light tan knee front center peeking out from under its larger friend?
You can’t keep a good knee down.
Any horticulturist can see those knee mounds are wonderful little raised garden beds complete with aerated compost and the ability to snag floating Pond Apple apples. So a coarse explanation of the knee-sitting is no big deal, but the cool things in nature are more often the odd little deals.
Slime molds are famously clever microbes. Put one on one side of a maze and a food tidbit on the far side, and the slimer triumphantly solves the puzzle. Sort of. It slithers hither and thither confined by the maze, extending throughout. Eventually the widespread exploratory portion of the s.m. encounters the morsel, so the microbe concentrates on that pathway. Think of bees exploring for flowers, with successful foragers establishing a collective route to the sugary blossoms. That brings us to today’s “thing.” It is incredible how spreading rhizomatous marsh plants colonize and divide a marsh into single-species patches, maybe an exclusive acre of Knotted Spikerush here, a plue zone of pure Pickerelweed over there. That quilt doesn’t form overnight. Think of all the “exploring” by creeping rhizomes like giant slime molds: all the pushing, shoving, border disputing, poisoning, social climbing, and jostling until it is all sorted out into the patchwork we see from the boardwalk. Some patches have deeper water longer, or more nitrogen pollution, or muckier soil, giving different species patchy advantages according to their needs and tolerances,
We are not air snorkels.
Anyhow, I have a thing for cypress swamps, and enjoyed today a nice example of patchy life under the pond cypress, with a twist—a single species free of competitors. Astoundingly few non-woody plants grow on cypress swamp floors. Well yea, ferns, but ferns are ferns, and you could count the remaining herbaceous species on your toes. The floor of a cypress swamp is a fascinatingly narrow ecological filter: suffocating seasonal flooding, a thick layer of duff and semi-decayed needles, seasonal deep shade, and dry-season drying. In the swamp I explored today one species was the absolute ruler, but very unevenly. Maidencane Grass can stand up to the harsh swamp tortures, but across the swamp it ranges from dense expansive lawns, to modest clumps, to scattered individuals, to none.
Many here
A few here
Not many here! All these photos a stone’s throw apart.
Patchiness is easy to envision when forced by competitors, but in the cypress swamp there’s a different pattern. The strongest Maidencane growth is generally where the cypress trunks are fewest. That is, within the swamp the cypresses are subtly patchy, probably having to do with varying hydrologic conditions combined with the occasional gap from treefall. I don’t think the water conditions are the main control of the extreme Maidencane patchiness. Although untested, the driving force appears largely to be the relative light conditions caused by uneven cypress positioning. The Maidencane is probably fluctuating at the edge of its shade tolerance “in exchange” for a monopoly on the swamp understory herbaceous layer. Like a giant slime mold, it spends eternity floating and creeping around the swamp, “finding the food” in relatively bright spots and fading out when prospects dim.
John Bradford
George Rogers
George Rogers
Dee Staley
Treasure Coast Natives 