Merremia dissecta

Convolvulaceae

It is with extreme sadness, I must note the passing of our wonderful blog friend Mary Hart.  Some readers may recall her participation in the blog a year ago and more from Worcester in the U.K. where she had been confined to a wheelchair.   Mary was a botany student in my program during the early 90s at the University of the West Indies, Barbados, and was an avid horticulturist and naturalist, smart as a whip, a basketball fan, and a ton of fun.  She is missed. 

After some time away, John and George revisited Seabranch State Park yesterday to preview a nature walk we plan to lead there tomorrow.   Greeting visitors at the park entrance, climbing in the low scrub vegetation, is a weedy-looking morning glory vine with some history and mystery.   (Most of what I know that history comes from a 2007 article in the journal Economic Botany by the late morning glory expert Professor Dan Austin.)

Noyau literally means, “nut.” In the Caribbean context the term refers to almonds.  You guessed it. Noyau vine is almond-ish.   Not that that’s good for those who think the joy of wild plants is to eat them; essence of almond is associated with cyanide, just as in apple seeds and those laetrile apricot pits.

Noyau Vine (By John Bradford, this and the next are file photos not taken yesterday)

But a little toxicity never gets in the way of plant uses; in fact poisonous-ness flags medicinal applications.  As Dr. Austin documented,  Merremia dissecta has served the variety of purposes in traditional medicines, flavoring, and even as a root food in Argentina, presumably prepared to free the entrée of cyanide.

As with so many bioactive plants, the historical medicine cabinet is boring and redundant, although ointments against skin ailments ring plausible as cyanide-based toxicity obviously may grant antibiotic powers.

What I find more interesting than the individual uses is a broader implication based on the breadth of uses:  People move useful plants around, and this creates complications in branding species as native or not native to any given region.  There are many cases perhaps where such designation should not occur, and we have before us a good example.   When you don’t know, you don’t know.

Is noyau vine a Florida native?  Look in different books and find different answers.  Should we rogue it out with malice as an abominable invasive exotic weed?  Or is the vine a native ethnobotanical treasure?   Without the possibility of certainty,  Dr. Austin tilted toward the latter, and I’m aboard on that.

Given that the species is native around the Caribbean Basin, there’s a fair chance it arrived in Florida free of human help.  To make little more interesting, of course there has been commerce around the Caribbean Basin for a very long time before Columbus spoiled the fun, although the degree of involvement of Florida in pre-Columbian Caribbean commerce is an open question.   Could it have come in a canoe or around the Gulf of Mexico from points south and west?  Sure.  We can ask the same about papayas, agaves, and more. William Bartram encountered the vine in Florida in the late 1700s.  How did it get around so early?  Non-human dispersal?  Native Americans?  Early Europeans?  A combo?

Whenever the original geographic limits,  noyau vine now with the help of people is worldwide in warm climates, and even some that aren’t so hot: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Africa where it has developed an ethnobotany of its own, and even Australia as a weed.

On tomorrow’s nature walk, we won’t eat any, but we might smash it up and see if it smells like almonds.

Seeds of Change

Today John and George were so busy putting the finishing touches on our upcoming Native Plants MOOC (yea, it’ll be mobbed).  We didn’t take much field time, except to look at something you see every day but ponder once a decade—native woody plants coming up seemingly isolated where you don’t expect to see them.

That led to some thought on why plants wind up growing where they do.  Oh, I know the answer!   The wind, or a bird, or a bear in the woods drop a seed, and the seed grows.  Got it, but events aplenty happen between the bird ingesting the seed and a tree grows in Brooklyn.  Nature does not work in a human time and space.

For starters, that seed had to arrive from somewhere.  Maybe merely across the creek, or then again, perhaps from across the sea.  There are plenty of transoceanic examples, and the Bottle Gourd stands out.  The species has an archaeological history widespread in the Americas dating back 10,000 years and in Asia almost that long.   Botanists have debated for decades how this species could seem to be native around the ancient world so long ago.  It did not originate twice, on both sides of the Pacific.  Did very very ancient people move it thousands of miles?  One notion is that Easter Islanders took it westward to the Old World.  Another idea is that the first Native Americans brought it from Asia.  Or maybe it floated a few thousand miles.  To test the bobber theory, researchers floated some for about a year in sea water, and let them sit another six years;  the seeds sprouted like new.  Take home lesson:  seeds get around.

So then, the seeds arrived from somewhere near or far, and now they can grow.  Hold on, not so fast.  How long a delay between arrival and growth?   Maybe the season is not right this month.  Maybe conditions aren’t right this century.  How about another thousand years?  Seeds can be patient, and can await environmental cues, such as disinterrment.  In 1879 Professor William Beal at Michigan State University buried in glass jars seeds of several wild species, leaving a time capsule experiment that remains running.  The seeds are tested at intervals, and some remain willing despite attrition.  Going back farther, barley seeds from King Tut’s tomb reportedly sprouted in modern times, although the claim is disputed.

Free of dispute, Canna seeds 600 years old from an Argentinian grave spawned pretty new Cannas.  And their circumstances were weird.  The Canna seeds from the grave were inside walnuts.  Ancient biotechnicians understood how to insert Canna seeds into immature living walnuts, allowing the nuts to mature into rattles.  In 2012 30,000-year-old seeds of a Carnation relative buried (by squirrels) in Russia grew like Rip Van Winkle awakening.  That’s probably the all-time seed nap record.

Native Florida Canna. Were its seeds 600 years old? (By John Bradford)

Right, so the seeds came from places unknown, then they waited patiently in the soil seed bank.  Now it is time to boogie!  The seed sprouts dutifully, and hello world!  Hello drought, hello shade, hello sun, hello frost, hello competition, hello drowning, hello bugs, hello fungi, hello hungry bunnies.  The perils facing a tender green sprout remind me of leaving home at age 18!

Obviously the conditions must be suitable—that goes without saying doesn’t it?  Probably, but even that boring observation gains interest if the seedling’s establishment requires relationships with other species.  (We’ll come back to this next week.)   It also becomes more interesting if the overall conditions are changing…oh for example, let’s say by Global Warming.  Just this year the Sunshine State figured in an eye-opening example.  In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, January 2014, biologist Kyle Cavanaugh and collaborators applied 28 years of satellite imagery to discern, as they say in their own title, “poleward expansion of mangroves is a threshold response to decreased frequency of extreme cold events.”   Where a mangrove might sprout has shifted in just 28 years.  That’s not my lifetime, but that of my son.

Mangrove headed north! (By John Bradford)

Today we looked at a lonesome Gumbo Limbo sapling with its secret history,  a single Pineland Pinweed 10 miles from any known others, and where did that baby Hercules Club come from?  A little imagination beyond “bird dropping” makes it more fun.  Maybe the guilty birds were the last flock of Carolina Parakeets in 1920.   Who can say it ain’t so?

Hercules Club (by John Bradford)

When April’s here and meadows wide

Once more with spring’s sweet growths are pied

I close each book, drop each pursuit,

And past the brook, no longer mute,

I joyous roam the countryside.  (Jessie Redmon Fauset)

[Are there deformed frogs in the brook?]

Today’s roamed countryside was the Kiplinger Natural Area on Kanner Highway in Stuart, a bundle of habitat diversity tucked into a small package—weedy meadow, brook with baby gator, mangrove swamp, river bank, low pine woods, and marsh.   The usually modest Gallberry was having its 15 minutes of fame with millions of white flowers abuzz with happy bees.  White Pinebarren Aster (Oclemena reticulata) and Elliott’s Milkpea (Galactia elliottii) splashed more white into nature’s garden.  Rabbit Bells (Crotalaria rotundifolia) were at their yellow best, and Smilax reached out with tender new tendrils and its yellow-green “lily” blossoms.

Galactia elliottii (All photos today by John Bradford)

We’ll zoom in (again) on Smilax as an example of plants able to make compounds, phytoestrogens,  that mimic or interfere with mammalian estrogen hormones and related functions.  A lot of natural and unnatural chemicals do that. The “Silent Spring of the 90s,” increasing public awareness of environmental estrogens, was “Our Stolen Future,” 1997 by Theo Colborn and collaborators.

Smilax

There are things to worry about in the estrogen endocrine-disrupting realm.

Thing 1:  Natural botanical “phytoestrogens” can impact animals, including humans for better or worse, an observation not lost on diet- and herbal-conscious writers.   When we talk of artificial estrogens, we’re not merely talking about potentially feminized males (although possible, as in the famous “teenie weenies” on Lake Apopka gators),  but also fundamental developmental disruption and cancers, especially breast cancers.  Hormonal  activity and the altered gene control of cancers are no doubt intertwined.  As two examples of dietary plant-derived phytoestrogenic booboos, A) multiple post-menopausal women have suffered uterine ailments apparently from high consumption of soy products (legumes can be high in phytoestrogens).   And B) a man developed breast cancer after six years of herbal remedies rich in phytoestrogens.

Some observers suspect that traditional plant medicines for reproductive complaints often tend to involve phytoestrogens or similar endocrine-active compounds.  After all, the first birth control pills came indirectly from yams.   And that brings us back to Smilax.

Smilax is a popular trail nibble and as a genus serves worldwide in traditional medicines including several hormonally related problems, including menstrual  complaints, perimenopausal symptoms (for which it is promoted), impotence, prostate enlargement, childbirth, and psoriasis, which has a hormonal connection.   Smilax is a much-touted source of hormonally active compounds..

(Disclaimers:  I am using the term “phytoestrogen” broadly to include compounds that mimic estrogens, or that impact directly or indirectly regulation of the mammalian estrogen-related system.  Also, Smilax has traditional non-reproductive uses too, and of course human history is loaded with attempts to alleviate reproductive ailments.)

Moving on to additional worrisome things:

Thing 2.  My colleague Maura Merkal last week shared a  report on pesticides in South Florida waters:  “Ambient Pesticide Monitoring Network:  1992-2007” (linked below).  Here is a fun fact from the report:  The chlorinated agricultural and lawn-grass herbicide Atrazine turned up at every sampling location.   Did I mention, every sampling location in our general area.   1517 detections.

Crummy, but how does it tie to Smilax?   We’re getting there.  A recent issue of the New Yorker Magazine (Feb. 10 2014)  recounted an epic battle between  University of California researcher Dr. Tyrone Hayes and the manufacturer of Atrazine.   The rub grew out of Dr. Haye’s research conclusions that a profitable herbicide is an estrogen-related source of developmental deformities in amphibians, or let’s call them canaries in the water.

To comfort ourselves we may say, sure there’s Atrazine in all the water, but optimists and vested interests claim the effects are not proven, and the concentrations are low.  (It was not “proven” that cigarettes cause lung cancer.)  There’s been a loud  “Hayes is nuts”  reaction to his research, including assertions that the results can’t be replicated and that his alarm is debunked.  But there are also independent indications that Hayes is not nuts, and there is evidence of human damage from Atrazine in the water.  It would be an understatement to call this dispute controversial.   Interested persons can conduct their own Google research on this remarkable dustup.   (Readers interested in a broad history of inconvenient research in relation to economic interests might enjoy David Michaels’s “Doubt is Their Product.”)

Thing 3.  Now let’s worry that no matter how hormonally pernicious Atrazine may or may not be, there are a lot of additional estrogen-interfering chemicals in the air and water.  Addiitonal estrogen-related compounds haunt the Ambient Pesticide study.  And even if Atrazine is in “low” concentrations now, we’re adding more and more, and what about combined effects of mixed estrogen mimics?  That brings us to worrisome thing #4.

Thing 4:  According to Our Stolen Future and other sources, hormonally-related chemicals can work in astoundingly low concentrations exponentially below what we tend to talk about in terms of toxicity thresholds, such as killing water-fleas.  (“Didn’t kill the fleas, so I guess we’re safe” does not comfort me.)   Hormones and their mimics seem to have chronic effects at levels of parts per billion, or, yikes, even parts per trillion.  But admittedly all very general and murky.

To  return to native plants, why would a natural organic plant be so crass as to make hormonally -interfering compounds?   Plants able to sabotage their herbivores’ baby-making don’t get gobbled.  Human case in point:  Cottonseed oil, containing phytoestrogens, is touted as a potential male oral contraceptive.  Turns out couples in regions heavy on dietary cottonseed oil have trouble making babies.

Are Dr. Hayes and his supporters correct?   As the detractors say, there is no “proof,”  but the fear of Dollarweed in my lawn ranks below my fear of impaired aquatic ecosystems, deformed babies, and adolescent cancers.

Notes:

Ambient Pesticide report

More on Dr. Hayes, Atrazine,  and the New  Yorker article

More on Atrazine and people:

Digest this before scarfing down herbal remedies 

Interesting blog on phytoestrogens

New  Yorker article

Nature-bugs like me avidly bemoan nature-deficit-disorder, the concept that today’s children grow up in a nature vacuum sucked dry by video games, sterile air conditioned gated communities, and overly structured  upbringings.  

All true of course, but thinking back to my own childhood in industrial Wheeling, West Virginia followed by Detroit, I don’t recall childhood companions terrifically fascinated with spiders and warblers.    I do recall adult concerns about kids getting too soft and indoorsy, but then again in my recent readings of 1920s nature writings,  they worried back then too about the kids losing their grip on nature.    That worry must go back all the way to the transition from a land of farmers to the Industrial Revolution, and I kinda suspect 19^th Century farm kids were more interested in the attractions of the big city than in wildflowers and butterflies.  The hippies talked about “back to nature” in the 60s, but that was mostly some silly affectation with no substance.  Were the ancient Romans interested in nature?

But even if it is long-standing human nature to ignore Mother Nature, things seem extra screwy to me when I teach a botany class with students afraid to touch a flower because it might house a bug.   When the Boy Scouts seem more concerned with silly exclusive policies than in bringing kids outside.   When lightning bugs and salamanders decline and nobody notices.   When “outdoor activity” becomes golf and soccer.   When fishing became more expensive than leisurely.  When to see butterflies I go to “Butterfly World.”  And when a college can’t teach ecology without flying everyone to Costa Rica.

Something has even happened to gardening.    Forever, hasn’t gardening been more about beauty, flowers, soil, fresh air, exercise, wind, and worms?   A personal experience, or a family experience, often multigenerational.   It was for everybody.  So when did gardening become “landscaping”?  When did ostentation loom large?  When did ego creep in?  Who in the world ever thought there’d be “garden celebrities.”  Oh come on!   Let’s dig the dirt and plant some flowers.

I don’t think it is as simple as, “when I was a kid we played outside in the hills and meadows, and now we don’t.”   (Although that may often be quite true.)    What worries me more is a slightly different shift in values, a lost ability to enjoy basic simple pleasures, nature or whatever it may be.   Life has gotten so fast, so specialized, so complex, so competitive, and so driven by some sort of new values coming at us electronically.

Enviornmentalists are fond of explaining attitudes about nature in terms of World View.   Seems to me that collectively our big World View has homogenized around an unnatural core through the electronic media bath in which we live:  giant TVs, WWW,  cable news 24/7,  pundits, gurus,  satellite radio, political polarization,  stock reports,  sports fixation.   Reminds me of my college days ca. 1970 when Marshall McLuhan with the “medium is the message” was hot classroom fodder.    I just looked him up on Wikipedia and found a comment that seems to say so much:  “Key to McLuhan’s argument is the idea that technology has no per se moral bent—it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual’s and, by extension, a society’s self-conception and realization.”

It isn’t that our “self-conception and realization” is anti-nature, but rather merely a narcissistic cyber-world ever-evolving away from the small tangible pleasures, individual pursuits, and the values they engender.    Even our conversational social lives meld into Facebook, texting, and Twitter.  Celebrities tell us what to value.   Nature is not in the back yard—it is on the Discovery Channel.

And here I sit on a beautiful Florida summer afternoon with my face buried in a laptop computer.