Update on December 21, 2005: The Figures have been slightly revised to reflect new conclusions.

Here is part of my version of the current understanding of the evolutionary relationships of the orders of the flowering plants and their families that are represented in the southeast of the United States. Click Here to get the complete pdf version. For those who want references or are curious as to why I made it, please read on!



There are many reasons why we want to know the evolutionary relationships of the families of flowering plants, the Angiosperms. They all revolve around the absolutely amazing diversity in morphology, biochemistry, and developmental and physiological behavior of Angiosperms. As a developmental biologist, I am interested in where and when character states, such as fused petals or embryo-imposed seed dormancy, arose and where and when they were subsequently lost. This information can be used to help test iterative hypotheses about the genetic mechanisms responsible for these changes. Most often these hypotheses are first constructed from the study of mutants in only a few species like maize and Arabidopsis. As a plant taxonomist, I believe that an understanding of the phylogeny will help make sense of family character states and help me remember them when presented with a new plant in the field or when teaching plant systematics to my students. Both widely separate goals require mapping the kinds of character states mentioned above onto a true phylogeny constructed from an entirely different set of character states. To do that, we first need the true phylogeny.

That sounds impossible, but it has long been a holy grail for evolutionary biologists: an unambiguous and true phylogeny constructed from character states that have nothing to do with those states in which the biologists are really interested. To my mind and those of most biologists, these character states can only be changes in the nucleotide sequence or larger structure of the DNA of extant species and, by testable hypothesis, deduced for the DNA of their progenitors. Indirect comparisons of protein and DNA sequences thirty years ago indicated that it could be done, but at that time at great cost, at very low resolution, and for only a few species at a time.

Continuing independent technical, computational, and conceptual revolutions over the last fifteen years have come together to help construct phylogenies at increasingly higher resolution and reliability at all levels of the trees. These include: the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) used to rapidly amplify particular genes from increasingly-small samples of material, even fragments from dried plants on herbarium vouchers; automated sequencing of these amplified genes at great speed, low cost and high accuracy; increasingly-robust algorithms that construct trees from what will always be incomplete data from an incomplete sample of the universe of species dead and still alive and that provide reliable probabilities of their accuracy; facilitating all of these, community data bases to hold and organize the sequences; and increasing computation power at lower cost and greater accessibility, seemingly available just in time for the next iteration or revolution. Many individuals and organizations now evaluate data and conclusions from the primary literature and present their interpretations of these trees. A download link to a 30 meg spectacular tree of All Life is on This Page at the Tree of Life website. It is in an unusual but very aesthetic star-burst format and worth printing at poster size and is suitable for framing. Their version of the Angiosperm phylogeny starts On This Page, but the entire phylogeny is not presented in a single Figure and it is unclear how to assemble such a Figure from their subphylogenies.

A world-wide collaboration of plant taxonomists, systematists, and developmental biologists has made remarkable progress in targeting taxa and obtaining and using the nucleotide sequences of several of their nuclear, plastid, and mitochondrial genes as characters in cladistic analyses to reconstruct the phylogeny of the angiosperms. The informal club of colleagues and rivals calls itself the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) and its most recent analysis was presented in 2003 in a massive but very useful paper that rapidly puts all but the most ardent to sleep: APG II (2003) An update of the Angiosoperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants. Bot. J. Linnean Soc. 141: 399-436, which is available Here as a 0.4 meg pdf file. They present the phylogeny in the most common, reticulate format. Families have an -aceae (a-sea-e) suffix and orders have an -ales (ale-ease) suffix.

Anyone with a fast net connection to the public databases and expensive Apple-specific software can make their own trees reflecting their own set of standards and choice of algorithms. They can also collate and test the published analyses and present their own versions of the current phylogeny. Peter F. Stevens, Curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden and Professor in the Department of Biology, The University of Missouri at St Louis, is a remarkable scientist of many interests who maintains the Angiosperm Phylogeny website, APweb. It contains his continuing summary of the phylogeny and just as important, a wonderful collection of morphological, biochemical, and other character states of many of the taxa that is an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to map these states on the phylogeny to test hypotheses about the phylogeny or about the evolution of these character states. In my Figure, I mostly follow his phylogeny converted from its wedge format into a reticulate format I more easily understand, except that I make liberal use of a few gene-loss character states that I believe provide further resolution in the basal eudicots. These and other differences between the APweb tree and my Figure are in dark blue in my Figure.

Stevens usually follows the conservative proposals of the APG II about changes in classification and nomenclature required by the new phylogenetic information but he seems unafraid in using the next obviously-required iteration in nomenclature even though it is not necessarily yet approved by the community, much less yet codified in the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. In my words, clarity in talking about particular taxa in the phylogeny is more important than strictly obeying the rules that give precedence to the first use of particular names in a discipline that still argues about its official starting date. APG II anticipates that that date will move forward to 4 August 1789 (the date of the publication of Genera plantarum by Jussieu) and APG II provides a listing of names and authorships (authorities) of the families and orders that they recognize that were published after that date. Regardless of what you think of the complex rules of identification, publication and citation, they do allow one to trace all of the names ever given to a particular species.

One standard is violated only at great risk in this age of cladistic analysis: only a monophyletic group (a clade) may have a group name that indicates it as an evolutionarily-related group. A clade contains the same most recent common ancestor (a common node) and all of the taxa derived from that node. In the Figure, for instance, the monocots are a clade, and the pandanids and commelinids are both clades within the monocot clade, but the basal monocots and the ex-liliids (which used to be a clade in earlier phylogenies) within the monocot clade are not themselves clades. Clade designations and other group names that are in dark blue are not found in APG II or in APweb and for the most part are my own but obvious in my opinion. My usage of the clades provisionally named fabids, malvids, lamiids and campanulids follows that usage at The Tree of Life. Note that the use of lower case, and for terminal clades the use of an -ids (as in kids) suffix, indicates that these names are descriptive place holders without pretension to elevation to higher status or as names of higher rank. Incidentally, note that there are angiosperms, monocots, and eudicots, but there are now no dicots. Anyone who uses the term dicots is now considered hopelessly out of date. But how can you have eudicots without having dicots? After all, there are rosids and eurosids in the phylogeny. Don’t ask me. Such is business, such is life - The Hudsucker Proxy.

To the right of each order in the Figure are those families in that order that have representatives reported to be somewhere in Georgia, the Carolinas, or Virginia by Alan S. Weakley at the UNC Herbarium, North Carolina Botanical Garden, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His flora in-progress is Here and it builds on the classic published flora of the Carolinas Radford, A.E., J.E. Ahles and C.R. Bell (196 Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

The Weakley flora should be taken as an ongoing effort to construct a wider and more complete flora of the southeast than that compiled in Radford et al. As additional species are discovered and added to a flora, the keys to genus and keys to species must be changed, often radically, to ensure that all old and new species are keyable. Even descriptions of particular species have to be modified to include diagnostic character states that differentiate the new species from the old. It takes a love of the biology and lots of guts to work on such a moving target of continuously-discovered new species, especially in what would otherwise be an exciting environment with family and generic circumscriptions in flux as a result of the new phylogeny. I truly admire his work. It is with mixed emotions that in my Figure I convert a few of his family names from those previously standard to those now recognized by APG II (synonyms of families and the orders in which they are placed can be found at APweb).

This completes the brief(!) explanation of the Figure, acknowledgment of its sources, and why I made it. But what is missing in the Figure is at least as important as to what is present. The character states (remember them?): what are they at each node and did they change and if so into what along each branch? I do not yet know myself, but character states are known for many of the terminal taxa (but surprising to the community, not for what are now many of the seminal basal angiosperms and basal eudicots) and with a phylogeny approaching a true phylogeny. Others are addressing these objectives. Please stay linked. In the meantime, print it out poster size and if you are in the southeast, stick pins in it for each family you find! If you are somewhere else and can find a flora for your area, or if you want to use it for other purposes, the powerpoint file is Here and you can modify it as you wish.

Thingfish23 introduced me to his friend Rob, who owns the Spruce Pine Cottage Critter and Garden Journal. Right on the front page this time was a description of American Wisteria, which has been in the back of my mind for some time as a plant I need. This is not the extremely invasive Chinese or Japanese wisterias, but the much more accomodating native wisteria. Sort of the same difference as between the invasive Trumpet Creeper and more tractable Crossvine. Rob writes on a number of other native plants and birds. Thanks for the alert on that.

One of the reasons I’m writing this rambling sort of post, and indeed one of the purposes of this blog (besides a forum for whatever is on my mind) is to describe a more or less ad hoc approach to increasing diversity of plant species on a discrete property. We’ve learned a lot from books and the internet about what we should expect, we’ve done a lot of cataloging of plant species already here, but finding individuals who are interested in, do this sort of thing, and have complementary knowledge, is frustrating.

I’d be interested in hearing from such individuals or from people who know of such. I’d be more than willing to publish on this blog any descriptions or photographs from individuals who do this sort of thing. Please email me if you’re interested in doing this

Hopefully this is not a “reinventing the wheel” sort of thing. In a beginning effort to construct a listing of similar projects going on and where they’re going on, I’ve begun a section on the right of this page entitled “Local Stewardship”. If you want your webpage or blog placed here, please describe where you’re from, maybe what your motivations are, what your target is, what you’re doing to enable native diversification of plant and animal species. Since we’ve talked extensively about such things I’ve taken the liberty of beginning the list with The Taming of the Band-Aid, a blog whose owner has a similar kind of passion.

As I said, and have written about here before, one of the long-term goals of our “stewardship” of our property is to increase the plant diversity on our property here outside Athens, Georgia. As beautiful and apparently healthy as the property appears, it is strikingly lacking in a large diversity of plant forbs, herbaceous perennials and annuals. I see several problems: the farming history of the land and a shortage of certain habits, but the major problem I think is the dense population of white-tailed deer in this part of northeast Georgia.

Overabundance of herbivores and lack of predators:
Deer are browsers. They’ll try just about anything and move on if they don’t like it. So will the two or three or six in the herd following behind will, and whether they like a stand of plants or not it’s just not there after they’ve passed. Deer are incredibly destructive when not limited by predators, and unfortunately those no longer exist except in the form of human hunters and the occasional wild pack of dogs. Sometimes people claim to have seen a cougar (Felis concolor), but the coyote packs that have moved in and the presumptive bobcats don’t really constitute much of a selective force.

So I’m operating on two hypotheses here - one treats deer as the problem: many species of plants that should exist here don’t because they’ve been removed by browsing deer. To this end we’ve erected an electric fence around the four acres or so that surround the house - it’s effective and there are indeed a number of plants such as hearts-a-bursting, Euonymus americanus, that have taken off once the deer have been excluded from the scene. In various habitats around the property we’ve erected simple, tall, non-electric fencing enclosing small areas, just to see what might crop up there.

Not only do deer destroy a large number of forb species directly, but in so doing eliminate the competitors of species they don’t care for. This “simplification” of the ecosystem results in vast stands of highly undesirable species such as Microstegium vimineum, which in particular I’ve spent hours and hours and dollars and dollars attempting to eliminate. We’re lucky enough not to have large stands of privet, but we do have tons of japanese honeysuckle. Ironically, the deer keep this under control, nibbled down to little sprigs, but I find it hard to credit them since they were the motivation for planting it in the first place.

Prior landuse
The other hypothesis is that the land around here, once (50 years ago?) used extensively for farming, had been eliminated of many native plant species. There’s plenty of evidence for the farming: molding of the land into terraces and youngish stands of pines and other pioneer trees. The terraces are good news; there is little evidence of wholesale erosion and the soil in most places is very healthy, with a deep sedimentation of humus and organic material atop a clay base.

So we’ve been gradually re-introducing native plants that should be here. We do try replanting outside the electric fence, but the main work is done in planting inside the fence. The thought is that this area will act as a protected enclave, a nucleus from which seeds can propagate outward from year to year, gradually spreading. If the deer are not an overwhelming force then we should slowly see an increase in the diversity of forbs in other parts of the property.

Limited habitats
Another approach is to increase the diversity of habitats on the property. One of my projects was suggested by my father: increasing the forest margins. With stands of trash trees like sweetgums and loblolly pines, we don’t have a lot of sunny areas. I’m careful about this, because it has the potential of creating negative effects such as erosion and reduction of leaf litter, but I have removed the majority of trees from two half-acre size areas to produce the clearings we don’t have a lot of. We do some deliberate planting of these areas, but mostly we’re observing what takes hold gradually from the outside, or from the seedbank that exists already.

Conservation Easements
One of the ways we’ve investigated, and will eventually employ, for protecting our property is to include it in a conservation easement - in our case, the Oconee River Land Trust. Although there are minor tax advantages for a limited period of time, this is not something you’ll do to make money. It increases the property values for your neighbors but makes it more difficult if you need to sell your own property. It costs money - a fair amount. An annual inspection of your property is required, at least by our favored land trust, to affirm that the property is being utilized appropriately and within the agree-upon rules. Ideally it protects the property for the foreseeable future but in practice courts and presumably eminent domain may still be able to intercede and supercede; presumably it would be more difficult for them.

Cataloging
All is not grim. We have cataloged a good many valuable and interesting forbs: bloodroot and rattlesnake root populations on the slopes, zigzag goldenrod, mayapples, downy lobelias, and wild geraniums down by the creek, crown-beard and bearded shorthusk along the floodplain, climbing hydrangea in the trees, and the periodic appearance of indian pipes. We have fungi in abundance - chanterelles, morels, oyster mushroom, amanitas, all kinds. The diversity of shrubs and trees is quite high.

Animal wildlife
One of the effects of our stewardship, we hope, will be to increase the diversity of animals. This includes the larger mammals and birds, of course, but also the diversity of insects: butterflies, bees, wasps, and so forth. An ancillary project is to begin cataloging of these, as thingfish23 has done and has progressed much further than we.

And the creepy nozzles look like something straight out of Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers”.

As all our cats have, Gene came to us. Except about a year and a half ago it was one of those matters of going to the vet to pick up some supply or something and coming home with an 8-week-old waif. Gene was discovered along with his littermates a day or so after birth by Patty, the technician for our fabulous veterinarians. Gene was the runt but under Patty’s competent care it was he who survived and his littermates who died. Our vet knows that we’re suckers, hardly the best basis for a business relationship. Glenn really didn’t have a chance, that day.

He’s a little bitty cat, full of energy, way too full of energy as we said this morning as he tore around the yard and scrambled up trees. Interested in everything and into everything, it takes duct tape to keep from finding cabinets and drawers open in the kitchen when we come down in the morning. Sometimes even that doesn’t work. The alpha kitty and terror of the household; the ultimate companion, always helpful when sweeping out the house or weeding in the gardens. Genie-weenie.

I have a soft spot for tuxedo cats (although Gene is not a tuxedo - more technically I suppose he’s a mask-and-mantle). We’ve had four of these now and they’re all similar in that they dominate the other cats with an iron rule and a quick left hook.

Someone asked why I entitled a previous post about wild gingers evoking the sandworms of Dune.
Well.

Admittedly “Heretics” wasn’t his best book, but it did have the best sandworm cover.

The emergence, after a year of treatment, of an Ilex vomitoria. Welcome!!

We collected these seeds in late 2003. Expelled them from their berries, a nasty task especially given the specific epithet, and put them in a baggie with soil. Spent 7 months at room temperature that way, and then went into the fridge for another six months. That’s what it takes to wake some folks up.

Have to admit I love yaupon hollies, nonetheless.

On the CDC website there is a pandemic preparedness section. The first item on the list is a link to Department of Health and Human Services where an executive summary and the core document can be downloaded. On this page are also a number of annexes with additional information and resources.

The core document (download as pdf file) is only a draft (thanks to Effect Measure, and J. Garrow, for suggesting this). It is fairly general and mentions avian flu only once in brief terms. It presents some history, definition of phases of pandemic, roles of the various bureaucracies, and goals. Primary goals are to develop vaccines and stockpile antiviral drugs. There’s also material on state and local planning and surveillance.

Insofar as the meat of the document appears to be the development of vaccines and antivirals, on which a good deal of the response relies, the plan at present may not be very useful. The 52-page draft was submitted in August 2004; no indication of its progress toward revision or adoption. However it does supply some information for enterprising and motivated individuals.

The second item on the CDC section is another link to HHS involving information about influenza and preparedness. There’s not a whole lot of new stuff here, but it’s interesting reading. However among the list of resources, this link to suggestions for local preparedness is of particular interest.

My take on this, and there may well be more to it than meets the eye, or at least my eye, is that it’s a good start. Given the lack of update in six months since the draft was written, as well as the lack of movement toward stockpiling antivirals and vaccine development, I’d have to conclude that the CDC’s assertion that the US is prepared is something of an exaggeration at the moment.

and on Sparkleberry Springs there be Aristolochiaceae.

It’s been a rainy night in Georgia and it’s to be a rainy day as well, and while there be no complaints from me, I can’t get outside to dig so I’m wistfully contemplating the month to come by going through last year’s pics. I dug up these two jewels: wild ginger (or heartleaf, Hexastylis heterophylla, probably) and Dutchman’s pipe (Aristolochia macrophylla). Both are in the same family, the Birthwort Family, Aristolochiaceae. This is a “primitive” family of paleoherbs, a basal group of plants, which means they’re neither dicots nor monocots and are probably similar to the ancestors of all flowering plants.

The wild ginger on the left is a friendly little ground plant, and you can imagine the screech of delight last spring when I pulled back the leaf cover and saw this. Apparently the members of this family trap insects inside the hair-covered flowers until pollination has occurred.

On the right is an exciting little vine, Dutchman’s pipe, which I am really hoping will make capsules this year. Like the wild gingers these flowers are said to smell of carrion and attract pollinating flies. Dutchman’s pipe is also important caterpillar food for swallowtails, for some rare swallowtail species only a single species of Aristolochia will do.

Today I thought I saw bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) coming up but it turned out to be henbit. However last year’s calender said it was flowering Mar 3, so it should be imminent! Also the may apples should be coming up Mar 18, again from last year’s calendar.

CNN reports that CDC has a PLAN to deal with avian flu - the headline reads “CDC: U.S. ready if avian flu breaks out”.

I hate to sound skeptical, but my understanding is that there are 2 million doses of the antiviral tamiflu, and 6 million potentially useless vaccines, with no credible likelihood of producing treatments for up to the 300 million people that live in the US. I’m hoping this list of resources doesn’t constitute their plan. If not, then what is the CDC’s plan? It wasn’t detailed in the CNN report, or linked to. I don’t find it at the CDC website, although I could have missed it.

The absence of a discoverable plan either means there isn’t one, or it’s a plan that does not require either the general public or local emergency personnel to know about it in advance. Either way, it’s a little spooky.

If anyone has any information about the US plan to combat avian flu should it break out, please let me know.

UPDATE: The Feb 28 issue of the New Yorker has a very good article by Michael Specter, who I believe also wrote earlier influenza articles. I haven’t found an online version of the article but there’s an interview with Specter available. In the New Yorker article, Specter is a little kinder to the Bush Administration and CDC, claiming that “hundreds of millions of dollars” have been pumped into flu readiness.

UPDATE2: See this post for additional information on a pandemic plan.

The dinosaur that is the sluggish mainstream news media seems to finally be noticing avian flu.

Meanwhile Henry Niman has reviewed the evolution of avian flu and relates the threat of bioterrorism to the recombinant viruses detected in swine in South Korea. These viruses contain RNA sequences from WSN/33, an influenza virus isolated from an infected human in 1933 and experimentally manipulated for virulence in mice. It is unclear how this unique laboratory virus could have escaped the lab and recombined with swine flu viruses. Another report on this situation is found here.

Last month I posted the flu activity map as it was drawn by CDC for the period ending early January - I repost that below along with the activity map for the period ending Feb 12, the most recent CDC update.

Clearly flu is still increasing in frequency this winter, and is widespread in half the US and regional in all but two remaining states. Time to be cautious - wash hands frequently, try to avoid large crowds of people, and STAY AT HOME IF YOU’RE SICK.

The strain of flu that started out as Fujien H3N2 has now been replaced by a California H3N2 strain. H3N2 is the more virulent subtype of influenza; this year’s vaccinations have been prepared using the Fujien strain of H3N2. I haven’t found information as to the effectiveness of this year’s vaccination against the California strain which has suddenly appeared and quickly spread throughout the country.

As Henry Niman has observed the California H3N2 strain has appeared at the same time as the appearance of two alarming flu-like clusters. Flu-like nfections in Pennsylvania resulted in the deaths of three students ages 11, 11, and 15 on Feb 7, 9, and 15. The other cluster in Fort Bragg, NC involves the deaths since Dec 26 of three soldiers, again with sudden and alarmingly severe symptoms.

Note that this posting has nothing to do with the H5N1 avian flu which is still fluctuating in southeast Asia. As always the best way to keep up with bird flu is by visiting the three “essential” sites on the right sidebar.

Jan 8:

Feb 12:

For the last week, I’ve been digging sumac and blackberries out of what used to be a vegetable garden. The soil was rich and loose and the rapidly growing roots of the sumacs especially infiltrated throughout the garden. Sumacs propagate by seeds of course, but also vegetatively by long thick branching roots, tossing up a shoot that rapidly grows into a new tree every few feet. The thickets are very nice, and I do like them *elsewhere*. There’s only one way to work it - pickax, shovel, sift, toss. Repeat. At this point about half the original garden is removed of roots.

I dub them “dinorrhoids”, terrible roots. Yes, I know it should be “dinorrhizae”, but that doesn’t have quite the flavor of “dinorrhoids”, a flavor only enhanced by the piles they create.

Our neighbor would burn his piles, immediately. I don't; I let them decay slowly.
Ultimately the same amount of CO2, but released at vastly different rates. Usually I pile cleared brush where it serves as wildlife cover as it decays - at some point it’s useful as mulch. Here I will plant climbers like cucumbers around the piles which will act as a trellis.

Before:

After:

OK, this is silly but I got to thinking about wurlitzer weather organs on the moon and this came to mind. Who’s the funny-looking hyperactive kid with the qaalude eyes and the weird oil funnel on his head? And for extra credit, who played the weather machine?

So what do you do when you’re up at 4am and the cats are being VERY bad, making all kinds of noise, clamoring to eat even though it’s nowhere near 6am?

Simple - lure them with false promises, herd them into the sunroom, and then shut the door.


Poor little jawas.

Well I would have hoped Glenn would have written about this, since he visted this particular outcrop last weekend, but I know he won’t, so I will. It’s kind of a moral story, but also an interesting ecological habitat.

Throughout north Georgia there are granite outcrops; 300 million-year-old Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta is one particularly spectacular one, although sadly diminished ecologically. Arabia Mountain, 400 million years old and also near Atlanta is another, which will hopefully be better protected from tourism than was Stone Mountain. And here in Athens we have Rock and Shoals Granite Outcrop. While I don’t know what the current status is, I do know that one reason it exists relatively undisturbed is that the neighborhood around it has taken an interest in protecting it. I would love to have someone who knows the ends and outs of this to write me and tell me more about how this came to pass, that a neighborhood was successful in protecting and preserving a unique kind of ecosystem.

Anyway, granite outcrops are neat because they support a diversity of unusual and endangered plants. Unusual because of the habitat; endangered because granite outcrops are attractive sources of, well, quarried granite. During dry seasons an outcrop is hot and dry, of course, and because it’s a granite outcrop with only the thinnest of soils atop the rock, only certain sorts of plants and lichens can survive. When it rains you get floods of water that help to wash excess soil off and maintain the ecosystem. In the little streams that form you have unusual and rare species of things like quillworts. There’s a great little book on granite outcrops that lists species with photography, and hopefully Glenn, should he read this, will comment with the name of the book.

We’ve taken students out to the outcrop here in Athens many times. It’s a wonderful study in plants you normally don’t see elsewhere, and in how a community can work together to protect a habitat that is vulnerable and valuable.

Anyway, here’s a few photos of the outcrop. Immediately below left is a portion of the outcrop - you can see the wash of water from a rain a day or so ago. These spring rains enable a massive flowering; later in the dry summer the temps will go above 100 deg and everything will parch.

On the right is Elf Orpine (Diamorpha smallii) a little red succulent of the Crassulaceae family. Very pretty in a mass.




Above left is an annual portulaca: Talinum teretifolium. Above right is Oenothera fruiticosa or Sundrops - it has nice reddish foliage later in the summer.
Below left is a milkwort, Polygala curtisii. And below right is False Pimpernel, Lindernia monticola, actually a very tiny little bitty flower.

Sounds like something by Tori Amos, I know, but sometimes they come back!

A coupla years ago I was awakened by a rattling of the windows - it wasn’t just any rattling, this was a persistant, *Deep* rattling that the windows somehow *felt*. It was utterly exciting, at 2 in the am. I sat up and I said to the cats, This isn’t *normal*. Few around here heard it but it did turn out to be a 4.2 earthquake, right here in, well, not Kansas City, but at least Wolfskin District! Our Western friends will scorn me, but it was a thrill.

Anyway, here I read on CNN the following:

CARAWAY, Arkansas (AP) – A small earthquake centered in northeastern Arkansas rattled parts of several states Thursday but caused no major damage.

Shaking was felt as far away as Memphis, Tennessee, and in Mississippi casinos.

That is extremely cool. It was felt in Mississippi casinos. I wonder what Dr. Dobson is going to say about that? He should probably feel fortunate that he wasn’t in the, well, shoes, or slippers, or even BED of John Cannon, of Memphis TN, who said,

“It was shaking,” said John Cannon, who was roused awake by a brief rumble in Memphis, 50 miles south of the epicenter. “I thought someone got in the bed with me. It was strong.”

In that case, it probably wasn’t Dr. Dobson.
However,

Helen Parker, the sheriff’s dispatcher in the county where Thursday’s quake was centered, said no damage was reported but the switchboard lit up.

“Calls were from curious people who want to know what it was,” Parker said. "One called to verify it, to make sure his daddy wasn’t crazy.

"Calling Dr. Dobson!"

Not a lot to say, except I was pleased to see a member of the Rubiaceae family, Houstonia pusilla, tiny bluets, on the drive as I was doing some cleaning after the ice storm. Just out of curiosity I dug some up and put them in pots to see what I could do with them; discovered Glenn had done the same elsewhere earlier in the day. Great minds, etc...
Oh yeah, and for some reason, Houstonia always reminds me of one of my all time favorite movies, “The Last Picture Show”. I got no idea why.
Well, anyway, here they are, the little darlin’s.

I had a rather long and silly post on human speciation today but it’s not working very well at the moment so here’s a related substitute.

Munch joined us several years ago, another discard that made his way to our house pretty badly beaten up. For the first few months he literally hugged me periodically. I would hate to anthropomorphize, but given that after that few months he stopped the hugging stuff and expected to be waited on hand and foot like everyone else, well, I have to assume he really was grateful, if only for awhile.

He is capable of making sounds but hardly ever does. In the last few months we’ve realized he’s just about completely deaf and have been adjusting to that and realizing that yes, there are adjustments required on our part. He misses meals, for example, if he’s upstairs and doesn’t hear the other cats getting fed.

And oh yes, it’s a suitable cute picture. This is not one of those fortuitous shots; he actually sleeps like this most of the time.

I said earlier that I was going to post some pics of the general habitat in which the current crop of ancient daffodils grows, but I’d almost decided not to do that. However as thingfish23 says it is winter, and as I say, you have to take your subjects where you find them.

Although there’s a lot of habitats of differing character around the property, we immediately saw this one as unique when we bought the property. It’s a moist, partly sunny, flat plateau south of the house. It’s sandwiched in between a series of terraces and rises on the north and east, and a steep dropoff to the south and west (in the direction we’re looking in the top two photos below) toward a very nice little creek at the bottom of a 1000' long hollow. A bit to the south it slope down slightly onto a smaller plateau that we call the Kat Sematary (certain sorts of people would get this, and indeed there’s a dozen or so of our former companions here.)

This flat area was clearly once a house site. There’s an attractive nuisance in the form of an old well about six feet deep (at this point, it’s filled in a lot) and 3 feet across. The area is mostly occupied by a walnut grove, which has grow in the twenty years since we bought the property, and is now more shady than I’d prefer. There’s several good-size hickories and a bunch of American beautyberry and redbuds of course. There’s hackberries, which are larval food for a lot of lepidopterans. There’s eastern junipers. It’s suffered the scourge of the horribly invasive Microstegium vimineum in the last few years but I’ve been getting rid of that over the last two. The herb roberts have been coming back, as have the spinypod and anglepod climbing milkweeds. None of these guys seem to much mind the walnuts.

As I said earlier there’s several patches of early daffodils (photos below)currently in flower and a patch of late narcissus that we’ll see in a month or so.

I’m not sure what to do with this area. We have few habitats that have a good bit of sun, and this one has been getting shadier and shadier. I’m considering taking out most of the smaller walnuts and hackberries to keep a sizeable part of the area open and grassy - the wild turkeys have stopped coming up here in the last few years and I think that might be the trick.

Throw out all those field guides, all those Audubons, those Golden Guides, and your Herbert Zims - you don’t need them anymore.

From CNN, we’ll now have DNA barcodes for identification purposes. Just snip a leaf off that odd plant, do a little PCR and a little sequencing, and there you have it. Poison ivy!

OK, that’s probably an exaggeration - the project has higher ideals in mind.

The information it collects can be used to identify pathogens, carriers of disease, pests and to monitor endangered species

That sounds reasonable. But there’s something about the implicit admission that kind of creeps me out about the showcase projects. We could call it “deathmask systematics”.

The initiative will begin with three projects. One will provide barcodes for the 10,000 known species of birds by 2010, another will tackle the 23,000 types of marine and fresh water fish and a third will genetically label the 8,000 kinds of plants in Costa Rica, Central America.

CNN headline:

Poll: Bush gets higher marks on terror

Sure you are, but are you terrified enough?

Anyone have a better name? That’s my term, and it’s an old one dating back hundreds of years, natural historian might be equivalent but sounds less biological. Someone who observes and records what he or she sees in what is by the accounts of the vast number of species the real world.

Although it impacts us most directly I’ve come less and less to think of the human world as the real world. As time goes on, the human world has become increasingly disconnected with anything nonhuman around it. People who live entirely in the human world, navel-gazing as I like to think of it, keeping up on the latest fashions, careful to be able to converse with other people about what was on TV last night, these aren’t real world people. These are people (bless their hearts) who have little contact with the real world.

So I’ve come to think as more real than others, the people who write some of the “blogs I like”, over there on the right. These are people who actually see things in the real world. Sure sure, they may exist comfortably and knowledgeably in the human world; they may even speak knowledgeably of the human world. But they know there’s something vast outside of it. They know that the huge numbers of human world navel-gazers have eyes that glaze over anytime the subject veers into non-human affairs. They’re continually disappointed at the lack of attention to real things. They learn how to speak quickly and succintly, knowing that any discourse over non-human things that lasts more than 30 seconds is going to result in polite inattention. Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course .

Not that I want to mark any of my chosen blogs I like with the Curse of Reality; they’re all quite good at presenting themselves in the fantasy realm of human fashion too.

The latest blog with naturalist tendencies I’ve found is Dharma Bums, which I was introduced to through the bobcat post. We have bobcats here too, but I’ve never seen one nor taken a photo of one. That was great, DPR! My plan is this: to sit for hours quietly, with a book, in the right place with respect to habitat and wind direction, until one comes by. They aren’t particularly intimidated.

Down south of the house, in what we call the “fairy ring”, growing in and amongst a walnut grove, are several patches of daffodils. There was a house down there at one time, and an old well. Must have been more than fifty years ago; there’s not much sign of the house anymore unless you go digging, but the daffodils remain.

I went through Old House Garden trying to identify them. The closest I came was Lent Lily (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) but I took some in to Mary Helen and she didn’t think that was them. Other possibilities were Henry Irvings or Golden Spurs, but in each of these cases there were some small differences.

Anyway, I’m not obsessed with daffodils, but they are among the FIRST things to appear in the spring. Soon it will be the Coral Honeysuckle, and that I AM obsessed with!

So, to wit:
(OK, sorry, it’s pouring at the moment but I’ll get some in situ pics later; these are snipped)

After more than a week of interesting but increasingly wretched weather - temps below 40 and wet wet wet, today turned out beautiful. Dryish and 60 deg and perfect for digging around. I’m reactivating my old vegetable garden and it’s up to me to remove the little plantation of sumac that has grown up over the last couple of years.

Don’t get me wrong - I love sumac, and last year it looked really interesting and tropical and I wouldn’t have ventured into the little forest for anything. But it produces new tall plants quickly by suckering and by rhizomes and so it has to go. I’ll save some big roots for planting on fragile slopes on the floodplain. It’s quite a little chore.

This is where the heirloom potatoes are going to go .

I’ll be damned. NPR (All Things Considered) is going to have a tribute to Ernst Mayr. Of course we have to get beyond the ravings of our President first.

Ernst Mayr died yesterday, when I had not the slightest idea, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 100. In this country and era of Jacko and Lacy there probably aren’t a whole lot of people, other than his amateur and professional colleagues, who know who Mayr is. You won’t see the news on CNN and the best the New York Times will do is a back page obituary. I don’t suppose it will matter very much that his mind generated more ideas than most people consume. In a more thoughtful country than this one he’d be renown, and probably will be recognized more widely in those “old Europe” countries, just because, well, they are more thoughtful. In short, he was the 20th century Darwin.

I first encountered Professor Mayr as a grad student, as the subject of an interview in Campbell’s biology textbook. It didn’t take long before I read The Growth of Biological Thought, which was the best history book I ever read. It was my first exposure to Karl Popper, and the idea of falsifiability, a concept that it took some ‘splainin’ to get! Mayr opened for me a door into a much larger room.

Ernst Mayr was one of our time’s eminent evolutionary biologists. He was a “biologist’s biologist”. There are a few left like Dr. Mayr - Edward O. Wilson comes to mind - but he’s going to be damned hard to replace in a big science world.

These and more images of a remarkable life are available at the Ernst Mayr Centenary Photo Gallery.

I don’t know if this naturalist is continuing to write, but he or she certainly should be. The butterfly and moth photos are marvelous (just look at this fabulous tersa sphinx moth), and the intent of restoring a habitat and cataloging species is surely what Alexander Pope meant when he said “the proper study of mankind is man”.

I’m convinced by the ever-thoughtful Philalethes that one useful, if less-amusing, topic alternative to cats or bats for Friday bloggings is one that invokes the possibility of hope.

In that spirit, let me say that I believe in rope, great shining lengths of it, woven and braided by those who would hang themselves.

I also believe in stratification. If you can do it, stratification will get you through the rough patches. (Thanks, Dolores.)

Three days ago I ordered about 3 dozen heirloom varieties of crop seeds from Heirloom Seeds and they arrived today. Very neatly packaged with good instructions.

I’m excited about this - I’ve usually had a vegetable garden but never really planted much in the way of heirlooms. I did a fair amount of research determining what varieties of plants did well in the humid, hot, and variably wet or dry piedmont of Georgia, and Heirloom had at least one and usually more of what I’d discovered in each category. They also included three free packets - a melon, a tomato, and a radish - all of which ought to be interesting.

I did some canning, successfully too, for a couple of years, but let it lapse. It’s my intention this year to do a good bit more of this sort of stuff. Unfortunately the temp didn’t get above 40 today, and it just stopped raining. Tomorrow!

It’s always a pleasure to find a new blog that specializes in native plants, wildlife, habitats, and conservation. Here’s one I ran across the other day:

Wrenaissance Blog

I recognize a kindred spirit.

A post there pointed me toward the amazingly useful

National Wildlife Federation’s eNature site

Put in your zipcode and email address and you get a regional list of plants and animals that are found in the area. Not just a list, but a comprehensive description with pics for each item. A lot of other stuff too. A remarkable resource.

I’ve been making a detailed map of Oglethorpe County, Georgia, our home county. The pic below represents a small portion of western Oglethorpe, where I live (Athens is 10 miles further to the northwest). Mostly I’m interested in knowing the watershed areas. As Buckaroo Banzai might have but didn’t say, “No matter where you go, you’re in a watershed.”

I downloaded a PDF file of the county. Looks like this site only has counties for Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi; however the maps are from State Departments of Transportation. In paintshoppro I used screen capture to capture it in about 15 portions, then pasted them together. Colored in the major roads in red and the creeks and lakes or ponds in blue. Made the palette transparent and voila!

The full size reconstituted county map at 94 ppi resolution is 52" wide by 44" high. The scale is about 7 miles from southwest to northeast corners.

We live in the Oconee River Watershed, with three tributaries nearby: Moss Creek, Goulding Creek which runs along part of our property, and Barrow Creek to the east. Moss Creek runs into Goulding a couple of miles south of us, and then joins Long Creek to make Big Creek a mile or so further south. A mile or so after that Barrow Creek joins, and then shortly runs into the Oconee River. The Oconee River runs in three branches through Athens, and meanders through central Georgia to the south. Eventually, down around Hazlehurst the Oconee River and Ocmulgee River join to make the Altamaha River which runs into the Atlantic Ocean just above Brunswick and Jekyll Island (which kind of brings us full circle from our end of year vacation). The Bartram Trail runs all through this area. It’s all in the book if you’ll just read it!

So. Do you know what watershed you’re in, and what creeks and rivers drain it?

"Today is Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address. As Air America Radio pointed out, it is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication – and the other involves a groundhog."

The Onion has a wickedly funny piece on avian flu alarmists.

Among the highlights:

“The bird flu could cause a global influenza pandemic similar to the Spanish Flu that killed more than 20 million people in 1918,” medical alarmist Dr. Preston Douglas said. “Many experts also believe a major global flu outbreak to be imminent, if not—God forbid—already underway. Why, recent observation and documentation has recorded at least one case of human-to-human transmission of a rare strain of the avian influenza virus. If this one case is proof that the animal virus is mutating into a contagious, lethal human virus, then the entire world is basically doomed. Doomed!”

Douglas is best known for his brilliant alarmist analyses of flesh-eating bacteria, Ebola, and SARS—all of which he successfully developed into topics of major international trepidation.

Just to add to the levity, this site caught my attention yesterday. There actually is a piece on avian flu, but it’s REALLY hard to find the link!

A few months ago I picked up some Annie Dillard for the first time and read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It’s a wonderful little book that gets right down to the nitty-gritty of nature, but it’s also filled with the most sparely written yet vivid descriptions. The sucking out of the frog by a hidden water bug, the crippled Polyphemus moth, all of these stick with me.

(I mentioned it to an old friend, and she said: “Oh yes, I read her during my hippy days.” Um. Born teetering on the brink between the baby boomers and generation X, I not only don’t belong to any generation, but didn’t have any hippy days either, so ok.)

More on Tinker Creek and An American Childhood later. In the meantime I’ve been sort of stuck in an apocalyptic rut after reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake over the holidays and then rereading Ursula Leguin’s Lathe of Heaven and William Miller’s wonderful A Canticle for Leibowitz. And oh yes, my big brain reminds me that I also read Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos.

So a week ago I started Annie Dillard again with The Living, and again I’m struck with her descriptive abilities. (Another friend described an acquaintance’s reaction to The Living: “Well, I liked it, but everyone died.” Well, yes. Everyone does.) In the interests of keeping to the subject line, I leave you with the following passage:

John Ireland realized that the rising and falling back reminded him of something, which he soon identified: the Viking blood eagle. He had read that the blood eagle was an artistic and favored torture of the Vikings. With an ax, the Viking split his victim’s back; quickly, skillfully, he drew out the lungs on their bronchial branch and called his friends over to watch as, with the victim’s final gasps, his bleeding lungs flapped, like the wings of an eagle.

Aren’t you glad you came over today?