Top 10 New Species for 2011

National Geographic has constructed a list of the top 10 new species for 2010: it consists of one bacterium, 2 fungi, and 7 animals. This is about par for things in biology these days: no plants. Now don't get the Phactor wrong here; some of these are pretty cool organisms. The iron metabolizing bacterium is actually sort of ho hum, but it was found "feeding" on the Titanic. This is not really an unusual metabolism. One of the fungi is an aquatic mushroom, and who knew they could do that? No question that's one creepy leech. But no plants. It's a good bet that they didn't even try very hard to find one.
So here we go, Yasunia is not a new species, it's a new genus with 2 new species, a member of the laural family from South America. How about them apples? A new genus! New genera you don't just get every day like new species. Hope that evens up the score a bit!

Enhancing diversity, hope, and anticipation

A total of 273 plants flowering in our gardens in a single season is pretty good, but now is the time to prime the pump so to speak for next season. This is being accomplished by planting some new spring bulbs. One in particular puzzled the Phactor for several years; a small early flowering bulb with pale blue on white flowers looking a bit like a pale flowered squill, but many flowered on a small raceme like a hyacinth. Further they had somewhat dilated stamen filaments like another spring liliaceous bulb Chionodoxa, glory of the snow. The only place these flowers had been observed was in a neighbor's front lawn planted there by owners long past, and this being an historic neighborhood and all such surprises are not uncommon, and by and large most of us do not have the primal urge to dig them out. But lacking any means of systematically identifying such plants, there being no guide to exotic spring flowers, they remained a mystery until happening upon Puschkinia scilloides var. libanotica alba, and of course, it's supposedly related to both Scilla and Chionodoxa. Ta da! Unfortunately no image exists in my garden files; but wait until spring. Now we only have to find 26 more to push us to the 300 plants flowering thresh hold, but still there are some young shrubs that might come through for us in the coming year. And is this not the way of the gardener? Always looking to the coming season with hope and anticipation, sort of like being a Cubs fan but with a much better record of success. Don't you just once want a political candidate to say, "Gardening is my favorite passtime, and I wish to use my position to enhance the lot of gardeners everywhere by passing a universal mulch plan." Unfortunately what we get is insubstantial compost, especially here in Lincolnland. But more thoughts on this will have to wait for a less sunny day. Today we garden with optimism.

250th is a good year for Kew Gardens

The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew celebrated its 250th birthday in 2009, and during this year botanists working there added over 250 new plant species (actually 292) to science. This feat and the amount of taxonomic research taking place at Kew can be put into perspective when you understand that on average about 1000 new plant species are described each year (Kew averages 200.). This accomplishment does not come easily. It took people working in the field collecting specimens in over 100 countries, collecting thousands of specimens, and then matching and comparing them with what is known, only to find some few that remain unknown. A rather frightening finding (at least it is if you know something about biology and diversity) is that nearly a third of these new species are in danger of extinction largely through habitat destruction. And of course knowing what exists and where diversity exists is the scientific basis for conservation efforts. If you want to see some of these discoveries and read more about them, visit the Kew Gardens web page.
OK, the Phytophactor had to pick his favorite new species, Isoetes eludens, a quillwort, which is part of the most ancient living lineage of vascular plants, the clubmosses. Wow! Doesn't that just take your breath away! Quillworts are a lot more common than people think because most people just don’t frog around in their shallow water habitats checking out reedy looking plants. When the water dries up quillworts die back to a perennial corm. Although they do not look it, quillworts are living descendents of arborescent lycopods of the Carboniferous era. Hey, don’t mock it, birds mostly don’t look like dinosaurs either. This one was found by Stephen Hopper, Kew's director, in temporary rock pools in South Africa, a country that is a hot bed of plant diversity .
HT to a BBC news story.