PA by John Bradford
[Don’t forget: floridagrassesandsedges.net]
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.
John Bradford
George Rogers
George Rogers
Dee Staley
Treasure Coast Natives 