Maya Jaffe graduated from Florida International University and has had an internship at the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, where she has worked on a project to digitize macrofungi, the largest types of fungi, including mushrooms.
[Illustration by Geo. E. Morris (1906), property of NYBG]
I sit behind drawn curtains in a dark room, illuminated only by light tents that are used for taking pictures. It’s another day on the job as an intern in the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, where I am helping in an effort to digitize the New York Botanical Garden’s macrofungi. As I make my way alphabetically through the Agaricaceae family, I come across a shaggy ink cap specimen, Coprinus comatus, with a beautiful illustration.
A Schefflera plant, shown in its native habitat on New Caledonia, an island in the South Pacific
In 1912, the eminent horticulturalist Harry James Veitch helped move the Royal Horticultural Society’s Great Spring Show to the Chelsea section of London, where his family’s famous nursery firm, James Veitch & Sons, was headquartered. The show was thereafter known as the Chelsea Flower Show, an annual event that is considered the world’s most famous horticultural exhibition. But while Harry was busy running the family firm, his brother John Gould Veitch was one of a select group of Victorian explorers who traveled the world seeking new plants to bring into cultivation.
One of these plants was Aralia elegantissima, which was first introduced to the world during the Great Spring Show of 1873. Since then, it’s been called by many other names, including Dizygotheca elegantissima, Schefflera elegantissima, and Plerandra elegantissima. As the common element in those names suggests, its leaves are “most elegant,” with slender, dark-green and smartly toothed leaflets, not unlike those of Cannabis. As it turns out, wild populations of this “False Aralia” are entirely restricted to the South Pacific island of New Caledonia, where Veitch originally discovered it. Today, it’s widely cultivated as a “tropical foliage plant,” gracing shopping centers and fast-food restaurants from New York to London to Tokyo. John Veitch would be duly proud of the success of his introduction. Unfortunately, the plant has not fared as well in its native New Caledonia, where it is on the brink of extinction due to habitat loss.
The dictionary in my office defines an alkaloid as “one of a large class of organic, nitrogen-containing ring compounds of vegetable origin and sometimes synthesized that have a bitter taste, are usually water-insoluble and alcohol-soluble, that combine with acids without the loss of a water molecule to form water-soluble hydrochlorides, hydrobromides or…”
Need I continue?
Based on this definition, you might conclude that a blog post about an alkaloid is as exhilarating as collecting paperclips. Who could blame you? But alkaloids are nothing if not incredible. Mind you, this is coming from a man who, I’m ashamed to admit, spent much of college chemistry struggling to stay awake or attempting to secure a date with the brunette in the front row (both hopeless endeavors).
I’d be willing to bet most of you love alkaloids, too…or at least one in particular. It’s okay to admit an alkaloid is on your mind the instant you wake in the morning, during that staff meeting or interminable chemistry lecture. It doesn’t make you a bad person. Better than 80% of Americans are in the same boat, because eight out of 10 Americans simply can’t live without their daily coffee. As a recent and very reluctant convert to decaf, I can attest to the fact that without caffeine (an alkaloid!) the world is a far different place. Navigating The City that Never Sleeps without caffeine is like entering a NASCAR race on a rusty tricycle with a broken wheel and no seat. Sure, it can be done—but the risks are incalculable.
Robin Sleith, a Ph.D. candidate in the Commodore Matthew Perry Graduate Studies Program at The New York Botanical Garden, is researching algae under the direction of Kenneth G. Karol, Ph.D., Associate Curator in the Cullman Program for Molecular Systematics and the Botanical Garden’s specialist in algae.
The 400 lakes surveyed in the summer of 2014 Credit: Robin SleithThe star-shaped bulbil of Nitellopsis obtusa that gives rise to it common name, starry stonewort Credit: Robin Sleith
This summer, a team from The New York Botanical Garden will set out for the second year to document the diversity of green algae that live in hundreds of lakes in the northeastern United States and determine the distribution of an invasive freshwater alga species, Nitellopsis obtusa, or starry stonewort.
Starry stonewort, which is native to Europe and western Asia, is replacing native plant species and threatening the habitat and food sources of small fish and invertebrates in the lakes where it is found. Growing to a height of seven feet in water as deep as 30 feet, starry stonewort forms dense mats that out-compete native species.
First discovered in the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1978, it has spread at an alarming rate through the Great Lakes and into inland lakes in New York State. It is easily transported from lake to lake as plant debris caught in boat trailers.
Graduate student Robin Sleith with starry stonewort (Nitellopsis obtusa). Note the setting: this alga is often found in areas of high human traffic. Credit: Robert Stewart.
Last summer, we surveyed 400 lakes throughout New York State for starry stonewort and other green algae. Grappling hooks in hand, we traversed the state on week-long excursions, averaging 10 lakes per day. At each lake, we used the grappling hooks to gather algal specimens and also collected water-chemistry data and documented physical characteristics. There was no shortage of excitement on our journey, owing to multiple tornado warnings, many bear-sightings, and countless beautiful vistas.
We found starry stonewort in lakes across New York, from Jamestown to Potsdam, but did not find it within the boundaries of Adirondack Park. This is good news for the millions who visit the Park annually. The Adirondack region has a strong Watershed Stewardship Program, and we are partnering with this program to raise awareness about starry stonewort and the measures that can be taken—such as cleaning and fully drying boats and gear—to keep this invasive out of Adirondack lakes and ponds.
Now we are taking our grappling hooks to New England to conduct a similar survey of lakes, so stay tuned for more updates.
What a pleasure it is to stroll through The New York Botanical Garden, especially during springtime. The landscape varies from hills to low places, from exposed vistas to the isolation of the ancient Thain Family Forest. Then there are the textures: deep rich soils, jagged bark, scoured bedrock outcroppings, and wide flat lawns. And throughout this season, it has been impossible to ignore an explosion of color—carpets of yellow daffodils, spires of white magnolias and pink cherries, and the deep purples of grape hyacinths—all set against the backdrop of the vibrant spring-greens of the renewed trees and grasses. Simply amazing.
But there’s more than one way to look at the Botanical Garden and the beauty of the plant world. In part, that’s what the Garden’s scientists do every day.
To understand this better, consider what it is like to stroll through a great art museum, such as the Louvre in Paris. Like the Garden, the Louvre is filled with great treasures for the eyes. The museum itself provides the great landscape, through which we can appreciate the various textures, ranging from the hard stone of Greco-Roman statues to the soft canvases of Renaissance paintings, the pliable wood of native arts, and the smooth, rich gold of the decorative arts. And like spring in the Garden, the museum is ablaze with color. In each gallery, we can experience this variety in landscape, texture, and color on a purely aesthetic level—truly one of life’s great pleasures.
What does the sun do? That question was posed recently by Science Friday, the incomparable science news program that airs on public radio stations nationwide. To kick off its latest Science Club education activity, the program asked a number of scientists and solar experts for their thoughts about why the sun matters.
As you might imagine, how you think about the sun depends largely on what you do. Ernest Moniz, the U. S. Secretary of Energy, talked about the sun as a source of energy. A psychiatrist talked about the sun’s influence on our mood.
What about a botanist? The program asked Barbara A. Ambrose, Ph.D., who is Cullman Associate Curator for Plant Genomics at The New York Botanical Garden, to ponder the role of the sun in the world of plants. Here’s her thought-provoking answer:
What does the sun do?
The sun provides energy. Plants transform the sun’s energy into stored chemical energy during photosynthesis. This is an amazing process in which plants take carbon dioxide, water, and the sun’s photons and produce carbohydrates and oxygen. These carbohydrates are the stored chemical energy that allows plants to grow and develop into the food we eat and the flowers we enjoy. Plants have evolved for hundreds of millions of years to harness the energy of the sun efficiently and effectively, something we humans have yet to perfect. What’s really cool is that a byproduct of this reaction is oxygen–the air we need to breathe.
You can read the responses of other experts, as well as hear Dr. Ambrose read her explanation, at the Science Friday site here. You can also share your own thoughts on that page’s comments section or in our comments box.
And if you talk about this with your friends, just remember: the oxygen you’re using to speak came from a sunbeam striking a leaf.
Scott A. Mori, Ph.D, is a Curator Emeritus associated with the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. His research interests are the ecology, classification, and conservation of tropical rain forest trees.
If you have noticed a plant forming a green veil over utility poles or vegetation along roads and parkways in the New York metropolitan area, you probably thought that it was the notorious kudzu vine, a member of the pea family that has been well publicized as a fast-growing invasive plant.
Although kudzu has been reported in New York, it is not the invasive plant found along the Saw Mill River Parkway and other roadways. This plant is a member of the grape family (Vitaceae) and is called the porcelain berry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) because of its beautifully colored fruits. These two invasive plants can be distinguished from one another by the porcelain berry’s simple, lobed leaves; presence of delicate tendrils; small greenish flowers; and berry fruits. By contrast, kudzu has compound leaves (a leaf divided into separate leaflets); robust tendrils; larger, pea-like flowers; and legume fruits resembling peapods.
The porcelain berry, introduced from Asia as an ornamental plant, escaped from cultivation and has become one of the worst invasive plants in our area. The veil of green that it produces deprives all other plants of sunlight, water, and nutrients.
In early spring the porcelain berry appears as a massive tangle of stems, sprawling over low vegetation along the roadside and up into trees. The plant’s tendrils facilitate its climb into tree tops. The flowers produce abundant nectar that attracts swarms of small bees, wasps, and other insects, thereby facilitating the production of fruits.
The plant’s fruits are small, spherical berries with a pulp surrounding the seeds. They are multicolored, ranging from white to lavender to blue, with dark spots adorning their outer surfaces. The fruits are consumed by animals, especially birds, which disperse their seeds into new areas. Currently, the leaves have not yet flushed out, so it is possible to see that few, if any, other plants are able to compete with the porcelain berry.
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The accompanying images show the stages that the porcelain berry goes through during the year. The first image shows how the porcelain berry looks now. To limit this invasive from invading new habitats, do not cultivate it and pull out any young plants that you encounter! Once the porcelain berry becomes established, it is extremely difficult to eradicate.
For information about another invasive plant that is currently flushing new leaves, click on Japanese barberry.
Jessica L. Allen is a graduate student at the Commodore Mathew Perry Graduate Studies Program, and James C. Lendemer, Ph.D., is an Assistant Curator at the Institute of Systematic Botany, both at The New York Botanical Garden. Lichens are their primary research interest.
This composite image shows, on the left, a lichen-covered tree in a healthy forest in the Black Mountains of North Carolina and, on the right, how most trees in New York City look.
Most trees and rocks in New York City look naked, while trees in wilder parts of the United States wear a vibrant, colorful coat. What causes that? It’s because after centuries of changes to the environment, many lichens have been pushed from our urban or suburban landscapes and into the wilderness.
Lichens are fungi that, in addition to forming beautiful mosaics on trees and rocks, are critical to maintaining healthy environments. Unfortunately they are also extremely sensitive to air pollution and disturbance. That is why if you grew up in New York, and many other cities, you might think that bare trees and rocks are normal.
The good news is that, like the oysters that are slowly returning to New York harbor, there are more lichens in New York City now than there were 30 years ago. Yet there are still hundreds of species that were once found in the metropolitan area and are no longer here. We decided to investigate whether or not more lichens could survive in the city if we just gave them a little help getting here.
Genelle Diaz-Silveira is a master’s student in biology at New York University who is completing her thesis at The New York Botanical Garden.
Harpagophytum procumbens (a.k.a. Devil’s Claw)
In a world saturated with technology, it’s hard to remember the importance of plants to our daily lives. We depend on them for oxygen, food, medicine, clean air, and aesthetic pleasures, yet we devote less mental energy to them than we do to our smartphones and social media accounts.
Luckily, scientists at The New York Botanical Garden do spend some time thinking about plants. By documenting how plants function, how they are related to one another, and what they require from their environment, we aim to learn more about how life evolved on Earth and how we can continue to sustain it.
As a student researcher at the Botanical Garden, I’m doing my part by constructing a phylogeny—an evolutionary family tree—of the plant family Pedaliaceae. Commonly known as the sesame family, Pedaliaceae is rich in species that are both economically and medicinally useful. Examples include Sesamum orientale, which is cultivated for sesame oil, and Harpagophytum procumbens, which is used to treat joint pain caused by arthritis.
Harpagophytum procumbens gets its colloquial name from the plant’s hooked fruit.
It’s the latter species—colloquially called “Devil’s Claw” due to its hooked fruit—that has inspired scientists here to resolve the muddied Pedaliaceae family tree. If we can paint a clear picture of how the family relates to its members as well as to those families closest to it, we may be able to forge a path to future drug discovery.
To elucidate the evolutionary history of Pedaliaceae, I’m primarily using molecular techniques. I’ve extracted DNA from multiple species—at least one representative of each genus—and begun to sequence different genes for each plant sample. The sequences will reveal genetic similarities and differences among my specimens. By analyzing the DNA data, I can come up with a good idea of how Pedaliaceae fits into the mosaic of plant life.
On its face, this may seem like a fairly straightforward endeavor. I obtain samples, extract DNA, sequence the DNA, and make a tree with the data. In actuality, the project has been full of mystery. That is to say, there are only a few contemporary scientists who have devoted time to Pedaliaceae, and herbarium specimens can be hard to come by in the US. These extra difficulties have made the journey extremely exciting.
Evolution can be messy; genetic distinctions among plant species are not always made clear by their physical characteristics. Unresolved families like Pedaliaceae often tentatively include orphan species that don’t clearly fit into one group or another. As this will be one of the first molecular studies of Pedaliaceae, I hope my results will provide enough evidence to definitively place those species. For the time being, I’m just happy to add to the naturalists’ tradition of cataloguing life.
[Editor’s note: Easter is the second-biggest holiday for candy sales in the U.S., according to the National Confectioners’ Association, with sales of $2.1 billion in 2012. Each year, candy companies produce 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies.]
Moniliophthora perniciosa mushrooms on a cacao pod. (Photo: Google Images)
Chocolate lovers beware! Witches’ broom disease is your worst enemy. This fungal disease attacks Theobroma cacao, the tree from which chocolate is derived, and it has so altered chocolate production that in a generation no one may remember what chocolate as we knew it once tasted like.
T. cacao grows in the tropical rainforests of South America and West Africa. Here at The New York Botanical Garden, several cacao trees can be found in the Lowland Rain Forest Galleries of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, and there are preserved, dried specimens in the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium.
Humans unknowingly set the stage for the spread of Moniliophthora perniciosa, the aggressive fungus responsible for witches’ broom disease. To maximize the supply of cacao beans, which are used to make cocoa powder and chocolate, large monocultures of cacao trees were planted in South and Central America in the early 1900s from a selected handful of seeds, chosen for their delectability. This unintentionally placed the trees in a fragile position, since genetically similar populations are more at risk of succumbing to devastating pathogens. The fungus first appeared in Ecuador in the 1920s and has since spread throughout the Neotropics. Ten years after first being spotted in Bahia, Brazil, nearly 75 percent of the native cacao trees have been eradicated.
