Anti-cancer compound found in rare rain forest tree

This news came from Australia where a compound found in the fruits of a rare rain forest tree have some promise as an anti-cancer agent. TPP took particular notice of this news item because as soon as rare, rain forest tree, and Australia were mentioned together he immediately thought of the Atherton Tableland in far northern Queensland. A lot of quite unusual plants, and animals, live there and many years ago so did the Phactors, in fact the F1 attended kindergarden in Atherton and became a right proper little Aussie for awhile. The plant in the news article was Hylandia and TPP has seen it once and then only because a field savvy colleague pointed it out. This is also of particular interest because the tree is named after Bernie Hyland, a taxonomic legend of this area and he ran the herbarium for the CSIRO's tropical forest research center in Atherton. Before people go crazy and start the "natural/herbal cure" stuff, let's be clear. This tree is a member of the Euphorb family and they are mostly toxic. Finding a compound that reduces cancer tumors in mice is a great start, but understand what this means. Researchers are looking for a toxic substance that kills cancer cells at a dosage that is still tolerable (safe?) for the organism with the cancer, and the wider the window the better. Researchers will now monkey around with the molecule to see if some derivative molecule is better than the "natural" chemical because natural is not always better. Here's an example. The bark of the white willow (Salix alba) made great poultices for say a sore elbow, but the salicyclic acid in the bark would really upset your stomach if you tried to take it orally. But then someone found out that if you acetalized it, the acetosalicyclic acid was much easier on your stomach and a great general pain-killer was born (Got it yet? aspirin!). Of course this is a great argument for rain forest conservation, and a great deal of the Atherton Tableland has been converted to agriculture already because the basaltic soils, where they occur, are fertile. Good thing this rate plant wasn't exterminated in the process of raising peanuts or potatoes. 

A tropical interlude

It's single digit temperatures outside (and in F degrees that's really cold), and snowy, and with a huge wind chill factor making it seem even colder, and TPP still has a flu-like substance. What's needed is a nicr tropical interlude. Nothing gets your head straight faster, improves your out look, and cures what ails you faster than a trip to the tropics. Now why the heck is TPP still up north here?  He's retired! Why not move to the tropics? Well, there's a lot of reasons that isn't happening and won't happen, but a guy can still dream can't he?  Here's a view in one to TPP's favorite places, one of the beach communities north of Cairns (Qld).  What you see here is a coconut palm characteristically leaning out over the beach so that it's sea water dispersed fruits drop where a high tide will pick them up and float them away. Successful dispersal requires that the fruit gets deposited above the high tide mark, usually by a storm surge, but then if the palm didn't lean out the fruits would fall too far above the high tide mark. A nice beach morning glory is growing out onto the upper beach from under the shade of casuarina trees (maybe Casuarina equisetifolia). Notice the crowds. A couple months of this would just about fix me up. 

Why are all baby animals so cute?

One of the great side benefits of having done a lot of field work in Queensland Australia is that TPP has seen a lot of really unusual animals, but none is any more fun or any cuter than the platypus. TPP has observed them many times in several different places. They are apparently fairly common even if less commonly seen. Here's a nice article about the natural history of platypuses, and an image borrowed from the article. Never saw baby platypuses before, but they are sure are cute. 

Pave paradise, put up a parking lot

What the bloody hell are they thinking? Please understand, far northern Queensland is one of TPP's favorite places, so why does big money interests continue to try to pave paradise and put up a parking lot?  In an early bout of developmental insanity, moneyed interests ruined Port Douglas.  What was previously a sleepy outpost on the Daintree River, a last bit of civilization on the edge of rainforest and coral reef (one of the few places on Earth where the two meet).  Port Douglas was at the end of a 11 km road. All of the tropical vegetation was bulldozed, resorts and (gad!) golf courses were built, all to attract Japanese tourists, but a transportation glitch (if TPP remembers correctly) left all this new development without tourists, and the Japanese bought it all at bankruptcy sales. Man, in the old days you only needed a sarong and a pair of flip-flops to wander along an unspoiled beach.  TPP cannot bring himself to return. Well, this development idea is even worse. North of Cairns are a series of beach communities, wonderful places to sort of just drop out. The beaches are wonderfully undeveloped, and then mostly small, locally owned businesses.  At any rate, look at this monstrosity, the Aquis project!  A project way out of proportion with far northern Queensland, especially when located near Yorkeys Knob, an otherwise lovely beach community.  And then get this. "A gigantic resort proposed for far north Queensland does not need federal environmental assessment, its backers have argued, even though it includes two casinos, eight accommodation towers, a golf course and a 33-hectare lake filled via a 2.2km pipeline from the Great Barrier Reef."  Yes, that's right!  An environmental impact study isn't needed because something like this project isn't going to have any serious impact on the local environment even though located on an estuary flood plain. Just the construction alone will produce a huge amount of sediment that will wash out to sea. And naturally several thousand guests won't produce any waste water needing treatment. Anyone who has visited Cairns will know that the seaside Esplanade, while lovely, overlooks a mud flat, actually a biologically interesting area, but not a beach, the result of soil loss from sugar cane farming. And sediments always affects the Barrier Reef too, so the developers are showing a total disregard for the environment. Might as well fill in those mangroves and pave the area for parking. So, in this humble opinion, such projects will ruin the unique nature and culture of far northern Queensland, not to mention the environmental damage. TPP is greatly saddened.

Botanical field work and snakes

Mostly TPP has a laissez-faire relationship with snakes: if they don't bother me, TPP won't bother them.  For about a decade, a great deal of TPP's field work was done in Queensland, the wet tropics in the vicinity of Cairns (one of my study sites can be seen from the city's harbor, in the distance).  If there's anything you need to learn quickly in Queensland before venturing into its rainforests, it's that virtually every snake that isn't a python is poisonous and certain bushes and trees have vicious stinging hairs.  So when an Aussie field hockey player tries to remove a snake from the field and gets bitten in the process, and dies because it's one of the truly dangerously toxic venomous snakes, you have to sort of wonder about where he was brought up.  Dang, TPP had just one encounter with a taipan, and an image of this sleek snake was burned into his skull after shooing one out of the parking area behind his QLD apartment.  His study site was alive with the common brown snake, another top 10 venomous snake (see linked article for a top 10 rundown), but a rather shy and rather easily intimidated snake.  Good thing!  This makes TPP's current study site in Costa Rica relatively safe what with only fer-de-lances lurking everywhere in the leaves.  There are lots of other little vipers around: eye-lash viper, hog-nosed viper, and the not so little bushmaster, and in spite of nearly stepping on a hog-nosed viper on his first day at this field station, TPP still feels safer than when in Australia. So what was the field hockey player's big, and fatal, mistake?  Not wearing Wellington boots!  Hey, got any field work volunteers out there? 

Bush Tucker

The mention of paw-paws following Tuesday's fruit blog got the Phactor thinking about all the exotic fruits he's encountered over the years, especially wild ones. Wild tamarind (Diploglottis australis) and several related species were a particular favorite bit of bush tucker encountered while doing field research in Queensland Australia. Actually the fruit is an inedible capsule, but each seed is surrounded by a red-orange aril with a very tart tropical fruity flavor. Boy could they wake up your taste buds. Hate to think how long ago that was, some 30 years. Made a nice beverage and dynamite jelly.

Friday Fabulous Flower - a Queensland orchid

What with the international date line crossings, the Phactor is a bit unclear about the day of the week, even more than usual. However, my trusty international Casio watch, which has a better understanding of such things, tells me it's a Friday, so time to blog about a flower, as if this never happens otherwise. This particular orchid (Dendrobium linguiforme) is a wonderful plant that can (or could be) found in a wide variety of habitats, most often as a stem epiphyte of trees. As you will note the tough sclerophytic leaves and short stocky rhizome form a substrate hugging mat that allows it to survive in some pretty harsh places. Unfortunately it's easy to grow and the flowering is quite lovely, if brief, and the flowers are fragrant, all of which leads frequently to poaching from the wild.

Sexual Dimorphism - Golden Orb Spiders

One of my favorite tropical organisms are the orb weaver spiders, and Queensland has some spectacular ones. Here's an image of one that had woven a big web in the corner of the car port of our beach house. When pointing the beast out, the Phactor refered to it as a "her", and was chastised by family and friends as being unable to sex spiders, but in this case the big ones are always female because these spiders have a tremendous sexual dimorphism: huge females and dwarf males, spiders so small that they are generally not noticed if you don't know what you're looking for. The female spiders are locally refered to as "bird-eating spiders" and you do occasionally see a feather stuck in the web, but while the web can hang on to the stray loose feather, even these substantial webs seldom can hold a bird. Old Shelob here has a body 4-5 cm long and a leg span of 20-21 cm! So just maybe she could "eat" a small entangled bird, but not sure how reliable some of the reports of bird catching are. While running into one of their webs and tangling with Shelob is a bit creepy, she's actually harmless to people, at least big people.

This particular spider's orb was also inhabited by a male, shown here in an inset (upper right) at approximately the same scale (Did you notice?). Now you may ask why is there such a huge difference in body size? In answer, remember sperm are not very big, so even a small male can make quite a few. So how do you mate with such a big fierce predator? Answer: carefully. Presumably a dwarf male is so small he isn't going to be mistaken for a meal, or even a snack, very often. In many invertebrates, females are bigger for egg production, so you start with somewhat smaller males who after all only make the much cheaper gametes, sperm. Such systems evolve when males of various sizes have different reproductive success. If larger males more frequently get eaten by the female before mating, and smaller males more frequently succeed in mating, then the average size of males decreases because those genes are passed on to offspring more frequently. At some point selection will be such that there no longer is any advantage to being still smaller. The dwarf males make a living by scavenging tiny prey caught and ignored by the big female, or by sneaking meals from larger prey items.

A nasty plant

My old friend Woody introduced me to this plant on our first trip to Australia 30 years ago for another botanical congress. “Stand next to that plant for a size comparison”, he said. Pointing to it, the Phactor said, “This one?” And the pointed finger was too close and a small hypodermic needle of a trichome (hair) slipped under the edge of my finger nail. The stinging sensation that resulted was something to behold because even though there was no visible injury at all, it felt like a hot ice pick had been shoved under my finger nail. The pain was severe and it just throbbed, and after subsiding 3-4 hours later, it would begin throbbing again every time my hand was in water. The rather innocent looking shrub that does this is Dendrocnide moroides, the stinging bush, one of the nastiest members of the nettle family. Another colleague tripped and fell into one, and the reaction and pain required a trip to hospital. Imagine how his showers felt after this! The fruit is a rather attractive red raspberry looking thing, but all those stinging hairs give you real pause about trying it. So visual ID of this plant is one of the first things you learn before doing field work in rainforests of Queensland. Slow learners will get a lesson they won’t forget.

Rainforest in the rain

Rainforest always looks its best just after a rain or during a light rain; in a real heavy rain you just can't see anything. Took our traveling companions of a field trip to see some rain forest in a light rain. This particular forest was in a national park at about 900 m above sea level. Here's a nice picture of the forest profile, a particularly difficult type of picture to get because you are seldom in the right place to see the forest like this. The primary vine in this forest is rattan palm, not one of the Phactor's favorite plants as it is forever trying to rip your head off. In just showing people the darned thing it ended up planting some of its grappling hooks in my hand. It's why the locals call it "lawyer cane" because once it gets its hooks into you it never lets go. Our temperate forests have fewer layers and are deciduous. Next blog another nasty denizen will be introduced.

Fern Envy

The Phactor's beach house is quite nicely landscaped for both attractiveness and privacy. And the selection of several plants shows a bit more imagination going beyond the typical UTF (ubiquitous tropical flora - Don't get me started!). So while sitting on the veranda enjoying the gentle (OK, a bit stronger than gentle) breezes blowing in off the Coral Sea, a fern catches my eye. Or at least my initial assumption was fern, but without any good reasons why. Several of the hanging baskets, of basket ferns and clusters of elkhorn ferns on tree trunks have long slender fronds hanging limply below, and it was clearly something different. The locals call it ribbon fern. Some of the long, slender fronds are dichotomously lobed apically, and then the whole thing became clear. There were fertile fronds with two rows of big fat sporangia fused basally to the fertile fronds, which leads you to the inescapable conclusion that even though this is a tropical epiphytic fern, there is only one thing in the world this fern can be which is a species of Ophioglossum, which turns out to be O. pendulum, a native of Queensland (sorry connection too slow to upload my images), and the Phactor is so jealous. Hope this fern is in the trade somewhere so it can be obtained in N. America.

Thick as a brick

Here's a tree of a type that you don't see very often, a pachycaul, a tree with an unusually thick trunk just like a pachyderm has a very thick skin. This one is just a juvenile, maybe 4 m tall, but already it has a massively thick trunk especially in relation to its height. This is a bottle tree, Brachychiton rupestris, from Queensland, a tree the Phactor first saw about 30 years ago out in 40-mile scrub, a large patch of dryish forest about 40 miles beyond the last excuse for a town. Their thick trunks and rather smallish crowns make the trees look like milk bottles with a shrub on top. This one is obviously cultivated in a garden in Sydney.

On the road some more - Heading down under

While not even recovered from the botanical meetings here in North America, the Phactor & phamily are off in a day or two to Australia for the international botanical congress in Melbourne. An international congress occurs every six years, and the Phactor has attended them in Berlin, Sydney, Vienna, St. Louis (yawn), while having missed Moscow and Tokyo. This is one of those things where the actual travel is brutal, but after you get there it's fun. From 1980 to 1990 the Phactor spent more than 1/10th of his time in Queensland doing research in the wet tropical forest. Unfortunately the congress is way down south and we like going way up north, so this will be like arriving in Washington DC, going to Boston, and then going to Miami. Who knows how many blogs from down under can be posted; depends upon when and where connections are available, and frankly it's one of those things that wasn't critical in booking that beach house. But we'll go looking for some great plants, and maybe we'll see some platypus or cassowary or bush tailed possums. One is actually probably, one is a maybe, and one would take both effort and luck. Maybe you can guess.

Floral and Foliar Display

This is a spectacular plant called the "cascading bean" (Maniltoa lenticellata - Caesalpinioideae: Fabaceae) from northern Queensland. How one of them got into our greenhouse is a long story, but here 'tis for the past 20 years or so. Actually it's outgrown the greenhouse, twice, and has been severely pruned for its effort. It regularly puts on a growth spurt producing these cascades of new leafy twigs that are pink, almost devoid of chlorophyll, and quite limp, falling out of the large pink buds all at once. Slowly the pink fades to be replaced by pale green and then a darker green, and as that happens the leaves and twigs get pulled up into a graceful arch. This year the leaf flush was accompanied by flowering for even more excitement. Both the pistil and stamens are exerted from a reflexed white corolla. Wow!