Botany 2015 by the numbers and some plant identification

TPP has been struggling with a few plant identifications these past couple of hours; a sunflower (just checking the id - Helianthus laetiflorus var. rigidus), a rosinweed, a couple of species (maybe?) of Solidago, and an unknown Aster with tiny little rayless heads. Does everyone know what SYC stands for? At any rate if you have ever waded through identification keys for any of these, especially the aster and goldenrod, you'll understand why TPP is allowing some email distraction followed by a bit of blogging.
The final report on the North American botany meetings that TPP just attended in Edmonton, Alberta, provided some encouraging numbers and demonstrated that this was one of the most diverse and best attended botany meetings in any ones' memory. Over 1600 students and faculty, and at least one dean, were in attendance, and while largely from the USA and Canada, over 50 countries were in represented. Over 900 talks and lectures were presented and there were acres of posters (almost 500 posters) and not enough time to see any thing close to all of them. This meeting was a collaboration among 14 scientific societies. It was just great. If you want to get a flavor of all this botanical science here's a link to some youtube videos of people presenting their posters. There are a couple of TPP's favorite colleagues in there, but they won't be identified so as to not sully their reputations.
Back to plant IDs. Ah, TPP guessed rightly about the aster being an Aster; it was tricky because it's a species that lacks ray flowers. Surprisingly, only one herbarium specimen exists of Aster brachyactis for positive comparison probably because of this plants drab, ho-hum floral display and weedy demeanor. However, that was an old field guide (but familiar) and the Flora of North America indicates that this species has been moved to another genus and reduced to synonymy with Symphyotrichum ciliatum. Here's a link to this beauty. 

Score one for the Phactor!

Everyone likes a challenge, and the latest Get Your Botany On plant ID quiz was indeed a challenge, but an educated guess (false toadflax) based on what the plant clearly wasn't (Comandra unbellata), together with its boggy habitat, scored one for the Phactor!  Yea!  Now to try and impress my taxonomy class of plant ID neophytes; now that's tough.  The key observation was that everything else with similar leaves, based on what you can see in a picture, has the leaves arranged in an opposite pattern, which eliminated a lot of possibilities. Gee, do you think the botanist is suffering from a bout of cabin fever?  For the record, the only time the Phactor has seen the false toadflax was on the Door Co. peninsula in WI, possibly at the Ridges Sanctuary in Bailey's Harbor.

Help with plant identification

Arjhay, a reader, needs help identifying a plant, actually just a plant image, a not very good image, so why expect flowers, and it's an exotic ornamental to boot, so it could be from anywhere.  Oh, TPP loves a challenge.  Arjhay wondered if this was mislabelled as "codiaeum croton"?  Yes, it most definitely is not a croton (Codiaeum variegatum).  That's a fun genus though what with one each of the 5 vowels (approximately koh-dee-aye-uhm).  Back to the plant image.  Firstly, notice the opposite leaves and the rather substantial nodes.  That helped narrow it down, and truly reject the croton, but it still took a day for the memory to click and send TPP looking in the right direction.  First reaction was a purple basil, but it's not minty enough (untoothed leaf margins), and hard to judge scent from an image.  Maybe some sort of Acanth, but that didn't seem quite right.  Ah, yes, an ornamental Amaranth, and don't ask me how that idea came to me.  So my best guess, well-educated, but a guess nonetheless, is Iresine diffusa, the aptly named bloodleaf, but really it's too purple, wine leaf would be better.  As you might guess based on the family, the floral display is not the reason people grow this plant, and it has not been common as a house plant for quite awhile now. TPP can't remember the last time he saw this plant.  Anyone out there with a better guess?  Does this seem right to the hive mind?

Who invented the dichotomous key?

It's easy to take dichotomous keys for granted, and they are a wonderful tool for sorting through and calling your attention to significant details. After working your way through a complicated and detailed dichotomous key, and arriving successfully at an identification you get quite a feeling of achievement. One such key, Gleason and Cronquist's Manual of Vascular Plants of NE United States and adjacent Canada (NY Botanical Garden) puts a tremendous amount of taxonomic identification power in your hands (It is a bit hefty, so use 2), once you learn how to use it and get a bit of experience from a seasoned pro. In case you are unfamiliar with such devices, dichotomous keys offer you pared choices with each choice leading you to another pair of choices, and so on until an identification is reached. But who invented the idea? As best the Phactor can recall, someone said Jean Baptiste Lamarck, he of inheritance of acquired characters fame, had introduced the dichotomous key in Flora Francaise (1778), but seldom does that get mentioned as one of his scientific accomplishments. And now one of my colleagues (Lawrence Griffing) says that a botanist, Robert Waller, gave a talk to the Royal Society of London some 100 years earlier entitled: Tables of the English Herbs reduced to such an order, as to find the name of them by their external figures and shapes (27 March 1689). (The entire article may be behind a fire wall as it was just published, but us insiders can get the pdf file if anyone is truly interested.) This does not mean Lamarck got the idea from Waller, just that such a tabular approach was introduced earlier. Waller was very modern by linking his key to water color illustrations of the British flora and supposedly these illustrations are accessible online at the British Library (thus the origin of a previous post), but even after registering, the Phactor was unable to find the illustrations, or even get back in again, and not enough time to really fight with it. If anyone else is successful, do let us know.

Plant ID - UTF my speciality

The internet has brought a whole new dimension to us plant identifiers. In the old days people with plastic bags of plant parts or telephone calls ("it's got green leaves and red berries; what is it?") all got routed to the Phactor, but they hadn't travelled very far. Now specimens come from all over the world and from lots of strange places, and while this botanist has gotten around pretty well, it's still only a couple of dozen countries. So an old buddy sends along an image and asks what he's taken a picture of in Dominica, an island the Phactor has never visited. Ah, but this one was easy because it's part of the UTF - ubiquitious tropical flora, a group of plants that's been moved around so much most people have no idea where the plant is really from or what it's really called. In some tropical places, people may never even see a native plant. Many members of the UTF pick up new common names in their new locations. The picture is pretty good, although it looked better in the horizontal, but blogger rotated it for me (?), and several obvious features should narrow things down for you right away. Note the big, glossy, opposite leaves and the white flowers with 5 corolla lobes flaring from a narrow tube. You should have thought that's in the Rubiaceae right away. Now the fruit is a bit unusual for this family, but very distinctive for this plant, which is often called noni, or Indian mulberry, or cheese fruit among others. Morinda citrifolia naturalizes near beach areas now in lots of countries although it's a native of SE Asia. As one of the common names suggests, the fruit is not to everyone's liking; think limburger cheese. Since the fruit is composed from many flowers, this is a multiple fruit, like pineapple. The Phactor scores again!

Field Guide to Gymnosperms & Book of Leaves

Nothing is better than well-illustrated plant books, except maybe an exceptional bottle of wine for under $10 (one can have dreams). Two newish books have come to the attention of the Phactor and both upon initial inspection seem quite good. The first is a field guide to Gymnosperms of the United State and Canada, and the wonderful illustrations may be glimpsted over at ArtPlantae, and do not let anyone anywhere try to tell you that photography can take the place of good botanical illustration. You'll love this book. However, as a field guide this book has not been tested to determine how well it works at actually identifying gymnosperms. Maybe some reader will have given it a go and let us know.
The second is a book about tree leaves, The Book of Leaves, more precisely the leaves of exactly 600 temperate zone trees. This is less of a field guide, being a rather hefty tome, and more of a reference book, but a quite handsome and very well done one. Each page has an excellent image of a leaf, full-sized (as much as the page allows) next to the full leaf, and an interesting commentary about the tree as well as its botanical specs. The tree selections, and you might quibble with a few, are selected from all the world's temperate zones, so yes, it includes Nothofagus as surely you were wondering. As a tropically oriented botanist, the temperate zone restriction is rather disappointing, but perhaps this will give the author, Allen Coombes, an idea for his next project. Looks like the Phactor has found a couple of presents to buy for that very special botanically-inclined someone. Or send this blog to someone as a hint of a present for yourself!

Identify this fungus

One of the Phactor's academic passtimes is plant identification. This skill takes a certain amount of knowledge, considerable experience, and the ability to not be misled, a common student mistake. Here's an example. A citizen wanders into the university, finds their way to my laboratory for plant identification, and asks the student on station, "Can you identify this fungus for me?" Now identification of fleshy fungi is another such skill, and at one time the Phactor was pretty good at the local fungal flora, but without lots of regular practice you lose your edge. Well, the student did one thing right, summoned me, and did one thing wrong, they were misled by the initial question and started looking in the wrong place. You see, fungi don't have flowers, and while lacking chlorophyll, this plant has flowers and actually all you usually see is just the flowering shoots of a subterranean parasitic plant. Locally this plant is called "Indian pipe" (Monotropa uniflora) and its a member of the heath/Rhododendron family, and while common enough, it is rather inconspicuous even in flower. So the lack of chlorophyll was taken to mean this was a fungus, but that isn't a valid dichotomy, and a very chagrined student hopefully learned a couple of lessons. Make your own observations and don't jump to someone else's erroneous conclusions.

Herbal Remedies and Supplements – Do you get what you pay for?

A great many of alternative, complementary, integrative, holistic, homeopathic, or naturopathic remedies or health products involve herbs. Herb has three distinctly different definitions: (1) any non-woody plant, (2) a savory seed or leaf mostly of Mediterranean origin (many are members of the mint or parsley families), (3) the guy who wears a Cubs hat and mows your lawn. Adherents of herbal remedies rely upon folk lore, personal experience, and testimonials from others’ personal experiences as evidence of efficaciousness, all of which are confounded by the placebo effect and other uncontrolled variables (dosage, plant material, storage, etc.). When these are taken into account, many popular herbal remedies, e.g., Echinacea, fail to provide any more benefit than a placebo.
But at a more basic level, when you buy some herbal health products, what are you getting? When you buy a bottle labeled GINKGO BILOBA, you have this crazy idea that ginkgo is what is inside, but maybe not. The Phactor has been asked to identify crumbled up, dried, green, plant material on more than one occasion, and quite frankly from an anatomical perspective, you cannot find out too much. New molecular methods can provide an alternative via DNA fingerprints that look at characteristic components of the genome as a means of determining if a particular plant is present or not. Unfortunately while such testing is positive when something is absent, you still may not have a positive identification unless the DNA fingerprint profile matches another plant you have a profile for.
So how’s it going out there in herbal health supplement land? Not well, if the DNA fingerprint testing conducted at the New York Botanical Garden is any indication of the quality of herbal health products. Many herbal teas are so diluted by a cheaper/tastier filler that an effective dosage seems unlikely, so you certainly are not getting very much of what you are paying for. Only one in 4 samples that were supposed to have ginkgo had the DNA fingerprint of ginkgo, and since ginkgo is an extremely common tree in cultivation and extremely easy to identify, even for amateurs, its absence from herbal supplements must be considered deliberate. Or maybe they just forgot. Although the testing is still dealing with smallish sample sizes, if the materials tested are representative at all, then the vast majority of the herbal supplement industry would seem to be a fraud on more than one level. Lastly the botanist in this interview, Dennis Stevenson, is one of my long-time professional friends.

Talk about a stimulating tattoo!

The Phactor gets asked to identify lots of botanical specimens, often from just an image. This arrived via email thanks to some anonymous correspondent, and they simply asked if this was botanically accurate? Well, to know that you have to determine what was being illustrated. And that isn’t too difficult, this is clearly Coffea arabica, coffee, and it not only is botanically accurate but copy of a classic botanical illustration. But this is almost a new one on the Phactor. Only once before has the identification been based on an image tattooed into someone’s dermis. One of my recent students had a hibiscus on her shoulder blade. Are gardeners going to start sporting tattoos of their favorite plant? Are botanists going to start bearing some indelible record of their research organisms? Who knows where this may lead, perhaps more students in my plant taxonomy class! Perhaps more tattoo pictures!

Ask a botanist, dummy

Nobody ever has a botanist around when they need one, and nobody ever thinks they need one. Nobody ever asks a botanist for answers to botanical things. (I told the local poison control center MDs that if I ever see them thumbing through a Peterson field guide again attempting to ID a plant some kid had eaten I'd scream. Imagine what an MD would do if they found me drawing a line an someone's belly while consulting a step-by-step pictoral guide to an appendectomy! And I know more about vertebrate anatomy than they know about botany.) And very few people ever take enough botany, heck, any botany, to know even the simplest things. So here’s some botanical stupidity of the most basic sort.

A British military campaign in Afghanistan is reported to have seized “1.3 tonnes of poppy seeds destined to become part of the opium crop that generates $400m a year for the Taliban”. Now that is one heck of a lot of poppy seeds. “Major Rupert Whitelegge, the commander of the company in charge of the area, tugged at one of the enormously heavy white sacks. "They are definitely poppy seeds," he said emphatically.” But of course they weren’t poppy seeds but mung beans. This was determined after an “analysis of a sample carried out by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation in Kabul…”

Right. I don’t know how many nanoseconds it would have taken me to recognize mung beans, but it’s faster than I can say “bean”. What kind of damned analysis is necessary to identify a mung bean? “Dr Samuel Kugbei, the chief FAO technical adviser in the Afghan capital, said: "We have been waiting all day to see these dangerous materials …and now we see that they are just mung beans!" Good old Dr. Kugbei is sounding like one of those MD type doctors who avoided botany like the plague in college. And it raises the question of what kind of technical advisor working for the UN’s FAO who wouldn’t recognize mung beans? He's technical advisor on food and agriculture who doesn't recognize major crop plants?

And of course, poppy seeds themselves aren’t dangerous in any way, shape, or form, which is why we put them on rolls and bagels (yes, those poppy seeds!). You have to grow them into poppy plants, and then wound the developing fruits, and then harvest the gummy sap that oozes out (opium) before you have anything dangerous. Mung beans (an Asian native) are a fairly new crop introduction to Afghanistan, so maybe that could explain the ignorance of some government official.

This is just one more example of "military intelligence". “Well, it looked like a grenade at first, but it turned out to just be an ear of corn.” Ha, even the military can’t get away from botanical influences. Grenade is named after pomegranates and the old practice of a bride throwing the fruit on the ground to see how many seeds pop out, which divines how many children she will have.

Earning my keep botanically

The Phactor does earn his salary, and for the sake of any Lincolnland legislators who happen to read this (if any happen to be able to read!), its a real bargain to get such expertise so cheaply!

All kinds of crazy, goofy, off-the-wall botanical questions that people come up with get directed to me. Even the Botanical Society of America sends the questions they get to me. Why? For the simple reason that having been a botanical garbage mind for several decades means they get answers. The Phactor delivers! It's a the result of a great deal of diverse experiences combined with a broad knowledge of botany. Please understand, most of my botanical colleagues are experts that can run circles around me, but only in their specific area of expertise. The Phactor is broadly knowledgeable, and also has a very good botanical memory. Telephone numbers, people's names, birthdays, anniversaries, the date, social events, these things I can't remember at all. But every place, every plant, every plant name, every bit of information, gets logged away for later recall almost effortlessly.


So, how does this go? Glad you asked. This AM my friend Bill, executive director of the Botanical Society, sends me an email and a picture. Someone wants to know what this is. The picture was taken in the Bahamas. Already I know this is probably useless information. Most people visiting the tropics for vacation see very few native plants; mostly they see UTF, ubiquitous tropical flora, a set of plants that have been moved around the world by humans for some particular use, often because the plant is attractive.

Well, there it is. Fortunately for my reputation, this is pretty easy. This is an immature fruit of a screwpine (not a real pine at all), Pandanus utilis, probably. The big long leaves with nasty saw-toothed margins are commonly used at a thatch roofing. And of course the Phactor was right, this is an old world plant, a native of SE Asia, so it is an exotic introduction to the Bahamas.

The appearance of screw pines must attact people. They are big, somewhat ungainly, somwhat palm like plants with many stems and huge stilt roots. I say this because I was asked to ID a similar species of screwpine about a year ago from a picture taken in Thailand. And it's hard to tell you how I know what this is because there is only an instant recognition of screwpine. Now if only I could get people to pay for this service.