Botanist Blown Away

This September I was thrilled to be able to go on a tour of southern Manitoba with my colleagues here at the Museum. Our mission: to learn more about the people, places and wildlife that calls this part of the province home to generate ideas for new gallery exhibits.

Fruiting Dotted Blazingstar in the prairie near Miniota.

Hawk's-beard in fruit.

One of the most memorable things about our trip was neither a person, nor a place, nor an organism. In fact, it wasn’t even an animate object-it was a force: the wind. For anyone who has spent time on the treeless prairies you know what I mean when I say that the wind has an almost tangible physical presence. Standing on the Assiniboine River valley slope on a lovely patch of mixed grass prairie near Minota, I almost felt that I would get blown away along with the Dotted Blazingstar and Hairy Golden Aster seeds. On a windy day such as that, it was easy to understand why so many prairie plants evolved wind-dispersed seeds. Plants in the Aster family are particularly adept at becoming windborne due to the extreme modification of their sepals.

Cocklebur has animal-dispersed fruits.

In most plants, the sepals are tiny leaves that simply dry up as the fruit develops. But plants in the Aster family have sepals that are highly modified into special structures called pappi. In some species, like beggarticks, the pappus consists of spines that help the fruits catch onto the fur of passing animals; cocklebur fruits have hooked prickles to achieve the same goal. In most of the prairie Asters however, the pappus is a ring or puff of feathery hairs that act like a parachute. Under very windy conditions, Aster fruits can travel many kilometres away from the parent plant. This adaptation enables plants with wind dispersed fruits to more readily colonize bare areas of soil and maintain greater genetic variability.

Most of us have picked a dandelion and blown the fruits away but we rarely examine them closely or truly appreciate their beauty and functionality. Next time you see a dandelion look a little closer before you blow and admire one of the innovations of nature.

Goat's beard has the largest wind-dispersed seeds in Manitoba

Some Buggy's Watching Me

One of my favorite photographs is the one of a young chimpanzee reaching out to touch Jane Goodall’s face.  This photograph was taken many months after Jane has started quietly and patiently observing the chimpanzees.  Eventually her patience paid off and the chimps felt safe enough to make contact.  I love the idea of being so close to nature that nature wants to touch you back.

Last month I had a wildlife encounter of the entomological kind.  I was in Spruce Woods Provincial Park to observe the insect pollinators of the rare Hairy Prairie Clover (Dalea villosa) plant.  Like Jane, I found that that the best way to ensure good observations was to simply sit down, keep still and shut up.  Movement, especially sudden ones, and noise frightens the insects away.  Fortunately for me it doesn’t take months for insects to become accustomed to you.  After a few minutes of sitting still all sorts of marvelous insects the like of which I’ve never seen before were swarming over the plants.

As it turns out I wasn’t the only creature interested in observing strange animals.  I was the subject of much curiosity by my backbone-challenged subjects.  A long-legged wasp investigated my camera bag.  Then, a shiny copper bug landed on my hand and probed me with its proboscis.  A grasshopper jumped on my shoe and began delicately nibbling one of my laces.  A large cicada landed on my hip with a loud thump to check me out.  But the most thrilling moment was when a beautiful black butterfly landed on my wrist and started licking me to get the salts in my sweat.  It tickled and I giggled.  Then I sobered and got a bit teary: this lovely creature trusted me enough to make contact so that it could obtain something it needed to survive.

Read any scientific paper and you are presented with cold, hard facts and stoic observations.  Emotions do not belong in scientific journals.  Conclusions are restricted to what the data can tell you.  Scientists are trained to do this but it gives the public a distorted perception of what we are really like.  I don’t know any field biologists that don’t love nature, and haven’t been deeply and profoundly moved by what they’ve seen.  Jane Goodall learned something a long time ago: just as the animals being observed are changed by their experience, so is the observer.  In observing nature, you grow to love it and are compelled to help save it because you see the truth of our reality: we are all connected, and in losing a species we lose a part of ourselves.