Swamp Bay Has AI

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Persea palustris

Lauraceae

Part of the fun of plant enthusiasms is witnessing the complexities embedded in the green world.   A “hard look” at any given species flowering system often turns up more fun than the birds and the bees merely moving pollen from blossom to blossom, although that is mighty nice. 

Swamp Bay

Swamp Bay belongs to the genus Persea, which claims also Avocado, Red Bay, and many additional species.  Avocado and probably Red Bay have systems similar to the one that will soon awe you, differing in details.    Its flowering program forces cross-pollination between two different strains within the same species.

If you are wondering, the blue thread marks the flower as male in the early session.

Now pay attention.  This is mildly complex.   The tree has two flowering periods each day: the first period is early afternoon, the second period is late afternoon-evening.

We’ll call the two strains Strain A and Strain B.  Strain A opens its flowers in unison as temporarily female (pistillate) in the early session.  At the end of the early session they all close and stay closed until the late session the next day.  Repeat, they stay closed over 24 hours.  When they re-open in the late session on the second day they have transformed from female to male (staminate), and release pollen.

Strain B, by contrast, opens its flowers synchronously as female in the late session.    Yes, that is the Strain male moment, handily allowing Strain A to pollinate temporarily female Strain B.   Strain B closes at sunset, to reopen transformed to male the next day in the early session.  At that point the now-male Strain B can pollinate the then-female opening Strain A flowers.   

Staminate = male. Pistillate = female.

Swamp Bay deviates infrequently from this pattern.   Whether the exceptions are mere software glitches as opposed to being “meaningful” is unknown.   The deviations may allow occasional beneficial self-pollination as assured pollination, let’s say in situations where the other strain is absent.  A second possibility is that self-pollination or fruiting without pollination (it happens in many plants) may be common enough in Swamp Bay to allow the fancy system to “relax.”   Nobody knows and I’ll bet nobody will know anytime soon.    One thing for sure though, shifting back to Avocado,  for a healthy crop you usually need a mix of the two strains close together, although they have their own deviations and many commercial Avocado trees can fruit without cross-pollination.

All that said, it boggles the mind how such a mind-boggling system with two blooming periods can force two different Persea strains to cross pollinate spanning two days. 2X2X2.  I don’t think I could program that puzzle if I tried. But Swamp Bay is smart. And how do the two strains manage to be “all male” or “all female” in concert depending on the time of day anyhow?

Obviously past research is full of insights…duh.   But there’s no substitute for personal experience.  Here is homework.   When you see a Swamp Bay or Red Bay in flower, jot down its sex (releasing pollen or not) and the time of day—early afternoon or late afternoon/evening.  Or mark it with color coded thread.  If the first check was early afternoon, check it for male or female at dusk a different day.  Or vice versa.   Like a “White Chocolate Tres Leches” donut, interesting on paper, but full marvel comes with the experience.

 

Butterfly Orchid. A Beautiful Bag of Questions

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Encyclia tampensis

Orchidacee

How can one of the prettiest and most fragrant local wildflowers be such a stranger?  Wow does it smell good!  Butterfly Orchid, named for its lepidopteran appearance, not for any known association with butterflies, is unusual in our area.  There no doubt used to be a lot more of them before “collectors” collected.   You can buy them commercially now, presumably from tissue culture or from other ethical propagation.  I don’t know anything about their commercial production, which is not today’s topic.

As it looks today

Butterfly Orchid is limited to Florida and a little bit in the Caribbean, occurring epiphytically on the trunks and main branches of several tree species, often in moist habitats, although also in scrub. When you’re not rooted in the ground, you can get around. 

The flower is fantastic.  Too bad nobody knows what pollinates it.   In 2019 a group led by UF entomologist Hayleigh Ray recorded floral visitors to the Orchid and found out some things: 1. It does not pollinate itself (well, some Orchids do).  2. The flowers are visited by an array of bees, flies, and even beetles.  3. None of the insect visitors carried the Orchid’s pollen packets (pollinia).  So the long and short of all that is, as enticing as the Butterfly Orchid is to human and arthropod alike, no human knows for sure who actually transfers its pollen.

By John Bradford

To make matters more complex, Encyclia Orchids either have no nectar, and lure pollinators with false promises, or precious little nectar, or non-nectar substances certain bees may consume or use for signaling each other.   I’ve peeped “deeply” into the flowers with lights and magnifiers and found no nectar apparent, although it may come forth at secret times, or may only release when the right visitor “scratches and sniffs.”  

Come on in…if you fit, and if you think there’s nectar!

Entering the inner sanctum of the flower is a trick.  The narrow tunnel at the center requires force to open and penetrate.  Not only are there top and bottom flaps to squeeze past, but the name Encyclia means “encircling,”  in reference to two spring-loaded side flaps.   The “correct” (or maybe incorrect) insect entering the flowers (or probing it with long proboscis) must push between four self-closing flaps, only to find no or skimpy nectar.   Probably some type of bees but that is useless speculation.

There’s even more funny business.  Way back in 1992 local biologist Dr. Suzanne Koptur reported nectaries external to the flowers (extrafloral nectaries)  on E. tampensis.   Usually ants going to extrafloral nectaries defend the plant that feeds them, but in the present case, from what!?  Maybe botanists with cameras.

CLICK to see the spring-loaded flower

Unrelated to the nectaries (or maybe related) there’s another reported probable role for ants in some Encyclia species, although to date not reported for E. tampensis itself.   That role is living at the base of the plant where organic debris collects, ants in Mexico helping to break down that compost into organic waste, aka fertilizer.   It is easy to suspect that E. tampensis,  with or without the aid of ants, obtains nutrition from its substantial collection of litter from above, but if anyone has tested that notion I can’t find it using Google.

 

Lady’s Tresses and Upwardly Mobile Bees

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Spiranthes species, Bombus species

White wands waving in wet places…perhaps one of several species of Spiranthes orchids, often called Lady’s Tresses.  About 15 species in Florida.   What they lack in orchidaceous showiness, they make up in subtle interest.   Lady’s Tresses Orchids are a fine example of the “strategies” found in floral arrangements and timing in relation to pollinators. 

Although a varied mix of insects might turn up occasionally on Spiranthes species,  most Lady’s Tresses receive most of their pollination from Bumblebees.   Bumblebees and the twisty white wands are well matched.

This image and next by John Bradford.

For one thing, the Spiranthes wands are “in flower” for a long time as flower opening, maturation, and nectar presentation progress slowly along the wand.      That being so, each wand in the marsh is in place and worth visiting for a long time, allowing the clever bees to develop a route of reliable nectar visits.  That is, the bees are capable of “traplining.”   Folks who study bumblebees are interested in the question of, “do they mentally map the entire route, or does the stop at one flower lead to the next?”  Only the bees knows.

What we know is that it gets more complex.   Presented with a vertical spike, Bumblebees (and many other floral visitors) start at the bottom and work upward from the older flowers toward the base toward the immature younger flowers above.  That works out well for the bee and for the orchid.   The lower mature flowers have more nectar than the upper less-mature flowers. Score one for the bee.

That works out great for the plant as well.  Its flowers start out male, then become female.  That way the older flowers toward the spike base are female, below the younger male flowers toward the spike top.  That way a visiting bee on the rise encounters female flowers before male, or you might say it drops off pollen onto the receptive females before picking up new pollen from the males and jumping off to the next stop along the trapline. If the bee encountered the male flowers first, it would merely self-pollinate the plant instead of cross-pollinating.

 

Cabbage Palm Leafhopper: Stay Out of My Comfort Zone

Ormenaria rufifascia

When gardeners think of leafhoppers the first thing that probably  comes to mind might be “disease vector,” but let’s set that negativity aside for now.  The Cabbage Palm Leafhopper is native, specializing on Cabbage Palms, also Saw Palmetto, and sometimes additional palms.    Today’s plant visitor may not be much of a problem species, and it has some enjoyably curious aspects., beginning with its relationship.  The genus Ormenaria has  just two species, one in the Southeastern U.S. and a little in the Caribbean, the other in the far-western states on desert plants.  Wouldn’t it be fun to know how that split happened?  It is probably an example of many Florida creatures having origins in the Southwest, such as Scrub Jays and Gopher tortoises.

The hopper’s coloration looks more like a tropical reef fish than an insect in the woods. Probably the same function:  warn predators, “bug off, I’m nasty.”

Although the adult hopper is colorful, its larvae are not, and they have their own fascinating defenses, and their own problems studied in some depth in the 1980s by biologists Craig LaMunyon and Thomas Eisner.   The larvae produce around themselves a waxy patch as a circle of protection.

Wax safety zone by Dr. Thomas Eisner

This helps in two ways.  First, the granular wax provides traction for the larvae to jump away from predatory attack using spurs on their hind legs. 

Spurred legs by Dr. Thomas Eisner

They can leapup to about a foot.  Pretty spunky for a little rascal you may not even see.    More oddly, the wax patch is an invisible force field of protection: insect predators have been shown to shun the wax.  If ants enter the waxy pad they get so gunky they have to abort the hunt to clean themselves of wax.   The wax on the larva itself is helpful too: it won’t stick to spider webs, and if the larval hop plops it in a puddle the wax acts as a buoyant life preserver.

 

Pine-Hyacinth

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Clematis baldwinii (Clema- comes from Greek for a plant shoot,  William Baldwin was an American Botanist active in the 1800s.)

Ranunculaceae (Buttercup Family)

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With nature study, go looking for one thing, find something else.  That’s a good thing.  Working on John’s and my guide booklet to local woody plants had me seeking Persimmons to photograph in swampy pine woods.  Well lookee there, Pine-Hyacinth, a fancy spring-blooming floral friend you don’t see every day.   Not remotely related to true Hyacinths, P-H is in the Buttercup family, the only native Ranunculaceae in Palm Beach County.  It is limited to Florida.

Nodding beauties by John Bradford

The flowers hang down from a J-shaped stem.  Nodding flowers are a pretty curiosity scattered through the plant world among unrelated plants.  Most botanists who have commented on dangling flowers agree they are umbrellas protecting pollen from sun, rain, and related perils, and/or protecting nectar from rain dilution. 

Flower color varies

More interesting, if speculative, are additional possible advantages for nodding.   Suggestions by other observers include:

1. Favoring floral visits by bumblebees who can navigate inversion, excluding floral pests who can’t handle upside down. The big curled “petal” (actually sepal) tips may be bee handles.

2. Temperature control.  Maybe the bells capture warm air rising from the ground, although not a likely “concern” in Florida in April?

3. Maybe the hook on the stem can push upward through forest floor debris protectively preceding the delicate flower. It “elbows” the competitors.

The fruits are fuzzy spider legs, by JB. Look closely—the formerly hooked stem has straightened out.

Nobody I can find on Google has studied the reproductive biology of this species.   Based on similar related Clematis species, the flowers are probably female-before male, and there may be an overlap period where self pollination can occur at the end of the female phase for assured seed set.   What is certain, the plant has an unusual way to clone:  late in the flowering phase the stem flops to sprawl as sort of a “rhizome,” allowing the Pine-Hyacinth to spread by creeping.

Sprawling. Flower is on the left.

 

Staggerbush Galls Look Like GMO Ears

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Staggerbush (Lyonia) leaf galls

Exobasidium sp.

Today’s topic comes from Chase Robertson, correspondent from Jonathan Dickinson State Park scrublands.   Take a walk there or in other scrub, especially after fire maybe,  and marvel at big reddish fleshy flowery-looking things on the Staggerbushes. 

Photo by John Bradford

They remind me of that infamous mouse with a “human ear.” Maybe we could start engineering crops with human body parts. Ha ha.

The third ear is molded, not actually GMO

The Staggerbush galls are the funny business of a fungus Exobasidium (probably E. ferrugineae). There are about 50 Exobasidium species altogether, and they have a special preference for members of the Blueberry Family, including Lyonia.   

Photo by John Bradford

They also are pests on Tea.

The fungus is in the same fungal kingdom as mushrooms in which the mushroom cap serves to drop spores onto the wind.   Exobasidiums don’t have a cap, instead they transform the host leaf into one. Fungal strands grow out through the leaf stomates and release spores all over the surface of the leaf.  Look at the following photo showing the threadlike fungal strands spreading across the deformed leaf, and spores beginning to appear.

By JB

Speaking of revealing photos, look at the one below by Chase Robertson, showing a fly on the gall.   Let us now speculate.  Flies pollinate flesh-colored flowers as well as some flesh-colored fungi, including at least one other species of Exobasidium.   The Exobasidium galls on Staggerbush have that carrion color attractive to flies.  Do the flies then disperse the spores around the habitat to other plants?  Don’t know…but my bet is on yes. 

 

Oakleaf Fleabane (is also a Mitebane)

Erigeron quercifolius

(Erigeron is Latin for early woolly old man, probably in reference to the white parachute on the seedlike fruit. Quercifolius means oak leaf.)

Asteraceae, the Daisy Family

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Erigeron is a large genus, having around 170 species in North America,  11 in Florida.   Chromosomal abnormalities and cloning tend to make species definitions difficult.   A glance at museum specimens often shows individual specimens to have been identified differently by different botanists, true of today’s species.  So then I’m going to refer to Fleabanes in a general sense without much concern with individual species.

Oakleaf Fleabane by John Bradford

The heck with plant manuals and research projects, what I really really like is standing in a meadow with a fragrant breeze and watching the flowers sway and the butterflies flutter.    Not much better meadow flower than Oakleaf Fleabane with its sunny-side-up flowers.   It beautifies the gritty places like roadsides.

Working on this blog yesterday, I read how it decorates the stone walls of the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, described by one observer as having, “blooms like a thousand small lights in the afternoon, highlighting the earth tone colors of the fort’s stone walls.”  Only trouble is, the roots penetrate the castle walls better than enemy gunfire, making it necessary for the castle-keepers to extinguish those delightful lights with herbicides.

By JB

That’s the basic trouble with being a Fleabane…pretty but durable enough to be pesky.  The pesky part in other places has led to a lot of herbicide application to a lot of  Fleabanes, until guess what, some have become a poster child of herbicide resistance.  Ya just can’t keep a good daisy down.

So why the name “Fleabane”?   These plants naturally have more insecticides than the Orkin Man.  Folks historically stuffed pillows with Erigerons to suppress fleas.  It is always interesting when different cultures in different regions jointly discover the same uses for plants.  Even better:  different species jointly discovering the same uses.   Humans drive fleas from their nests, and starlings drive mites from their nests.  In a 1988 study ecologists Larry Clark and J.R. Mason found starlings to use Wild Carrot and Fleabane preferentially in nest building.  Turned out parasitic mites cause anemia in the nestlings, except when the two preferred plant species suppress the bloodthirsty little varmints.

 

Southern Sneezeweed

Helenium pinnatifidum

Asteraceae, the Aster Family

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The depression ponds of South Florida are among the most fascinating habitats hereabouts, with their feast and famine seasonal water extremes, patchiness, biodiversity, beauty, and enduring mysteries.   Botanically heavenly!  This week in wetfootland the seasonal inundation is giving way to dry soil exposure.  St. Johnsworts are blossoming like champs. Gratiolas are transitioning from their surf to turf.  Lovevine seems so happy on freshly invigorated hostplantss.    It all smells nice.  And today’s featured flowers are boldly yellow.

Sneezeweed with basal rosette. All “outdoor” pictures except the last today by John Bradford.

Southern Sneezeweed is dignified with its symmetrical yellow heads on stalks with perfect posture.    Look closely at the yellow head, the outer ruffles are decorative sexless flowers having no stamens, no ovaries, and no fruits.  The central business region is packed with a cluster of fertile flowers that open sequentially from the outermost to the innermost over an extended period, giving that single head a lot of bang for its buck despite the absence of branching.

Why the name “Sneezeweed”?  The plant produces a bitter repellent containing an irritant called “pinnatifidin.”  There are two non-mutually-exclusive explanations for how that became the basis for the name.  One idea is that the sniffly resin is in tiny particles on the plant parts.  If a person handles a drying specimen (such as in a museum), the tiny poison pills come free and tickle the botanist’s schnoz.  The other explanation is that indigenous peoples employed the sneeziness as snuff.  I ain’t dippin’ no Sneezeweed thank you very much.

Plants in seasonally wet-dry habitats are fun because they compete under both sets of circumstances.  Somebody should write a book about that!  Chapter 1 could be Helenium pinnatifidum, although nobody has ever really studied it.   It grows in seasonally (or sometimes perpetually?) wet suffocating soil,  even under intermittent shallow water. The plants are perennial living through the seasonal cycles year to year.  Almost all the leaves are in a basal rosette, which if the going gets too rough (such as submerged in wet times, or burned when dry) can die back and recover in better times from the roots.  In fact, gardeners sometimes buy heleniums as bare root perennials.   

With age they can develop a strong durable rootstock.

You get a lot of rosette plants in places where it pays to “keep your head down,” such as heavy grazing or weather extremes.   The safety of “duck and cover” is probably true in the present harsh marsh setting where several rosette species remain on the down low— Butterworts, Eriocaulons, Sundews, Syngonanthus, Violets, and  Xyris.    There may be a secondary advantage in this habitat to the rosette lifestyle.   During the winter the dominant grassy-sedgy layer turns brown, which would allow increased light to the green rosettes who may have their main photosynthetic season while the grassy competition is thin and lifeless.  

Flowers above the grass.

As the competing grassy layer greens up and becomes dense and competitive, the rosette plants seem to shift their priority to producing seeds while the soil is exposed.   So they raise a flower or flower-head on a cheap temporary stalk (the scape) above the grass-sedge layer.  Like a submarine safely down below raising a periscope. 

 

Smilax and the smelly green sticky flowers, with no nectar

Cat Briar

Smilax auriculata and additional species

Smilacaceae

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In South Florida, you could arguably say “springtime” is in the air:  or at least pollen (lots of it),  and new flowers popping into bloom.   Among those starting to flower is Cat Briar, Smilax.  We have a few species around here.  They are similar, so let’s not sort them out.  What’s more interesting are those green flowers.  They have some curious characteristics.

Smilax fruits by John Bradford.

The vines are dioecious, that is, with separate pollen-making males and fruit-making females.   That requires pollen transfer from the males to females.  No problem, right?  That is what the birds and bees are for.   Only problem is, these flowers make no nectar to feed their bugs.

Male flower with 6 stamens, by JB.

But they do have some assets. The presence of pollen on the male flowers is a reward, even if that leaves the female flowers with nothing edible to offer.  They do, however, a strong fragrance.  Some folks call Smilax  “carrion” flowers, although I find them to smell much better then decaying roadkill, to my nose. more like a scented detergent.  Although perhaps  false advertising,  the powerful scent seems to help draw pollen-bearing insect visitors.  Some observers suggest the big ostentatious stigmas on the female flower to add fake promises by looking like pollen-bearing anthers.  I don’t see it, but I’m not a beetle.

Females, by JB. I guess those stigmas on top look like the stamens on the male flower. Maybe to a fly!

Turning back to the male flowers, there are a couple of additional odd features.  As is true of some other plants, the pollen is mixed with stretchy stringy, sticky material call viscin (vis-EEN) threads.

Look very closely for two delicate viscin threads, dangling like bungee cords from falling pollen.

Botanists interpret these as preventing the pollen from being blown away by winds and rain, and/or helping to snag the pollen onto the visiting insect, and/or to help with bulk pollen delivery.  Sometimes viscin threads extend from the anther to an adjacent part of the flower, seeming positioned to snag on a bug. (Mite webs can occur in flowers too but are not likely to extend out of pollen masses.)   CLICK here to see pollen stuck to viscin threads vibrated out of flowers.

Also, the petals (tepals) are a little sticky, like flypaper.   Pollen falls out of the anthers and sticks to the petals, probably being a secondary source of pollen presentation, sticking pollen onto pollinators from the petal surface.

Pollen sticking to the petals

 

Funny Honey!

You ever notice the range of colors in honey? From light and clear to deep brown depending on the flower species visited.  Producers pride themselves on regional variants:   sourwood honey, orange blossom honey,  clover honey, tupelo honey, and so forth.  Hundreds of honeys!   The variation is fun, like wines.  In fact,  some wineries offer their own honeys hand in hand with vintages. CLICK    

Honey for everybody! Well, until the honey get a little funky.  Let’s start with red honey in Tampa….odd but for a nice reason.   The Monin Syrup Company there manufactures sweet syrups for cordials and cocktails,  and the factory feeds the “factory seconds” to bees, which come and get it from miles around.   If the discarded syrup is a red variety, so is the honey. 

Beekeepers around Brooklyn NY experienced red honey too , again tied to cordials and cocktails, but it did not taste so great.  Enviro-detectives found “red dye #40”  in the jars. How can that bee?  Turned out the Dell’s maraschino cherry factory was illegally dumping maraschino runoff into NY Harbor.  A consequent investigation into the syrup pollution revealed the crimes to extend beyond cherry juice to massive pot cultivation in a hidden portion of the facility.

In France, no red honey but blue and green.  Turned out they manufacture M&Ms nearby in Germany.  Waste from the candy plant shipped in open containers to an incinerator in France. Sacre blue!…bees found the candy waste, and the rest is honey history.

Closer to home, North Carolina purple honey remains mysterious despite being a novelty in demand for many years.  Potential explanations include:  aluminum reacting with acid in the bees’ tummies, originating from kudzu (with grape-colored flowers), nectars from sourwood trees  turning blue from chemical reactions.  Some think the purple comes from blue or purple fruits such as blueberries, or toxic pokeberries.  Although bees do not bite fruits directly, they feed on juices from fruits with damaged skins or when broken or squished on the ground.  Vineyards like bees as pollinators, but the bees sometimes become pesky feeding on damaged grapes.   

You know, if I sold purple honey, I’d prefer a perpetual flowery mystery to an answer of, ” it is acidified aluminum.”   And you know what else, if I share purple honey with my foodie friends, I pray no creative producer added value by stirring in a little grape juice.