Bowl of puffed rice image courtesy of Lisa Vargues.
In December 1901, Nathaniel Lord Britton, the New York Botanical Garden’s Director, reportedly (and understandably) appeared to be a little worried when a succession of blasts, sounding like gunshots, erupted from a third-floor lab in what is now the Library building. Thankfully, nothing was amiss. Botanist Alexander Pierce Anderson was immersed in a successful experiment that would not only prove a scientific theory but also transform breakfast for millions of people.
With suitable precautions, Anderson had used a hammer to crack open hermetically sealed and heated glass tubes, each containing corn starch, wheat flour, and, later, rice and other grains. All of the starch particles in the tubes had exploded, proving the theory, proposed by plant physiologist Dr. Heinrich Meyer, that a starch granule contains a miniscule amount of condensed water within its nucleus.
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.
Stephen Gottschalk, a former Project Coordinator for the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium, is now a graduate student in the Commodore Matthew Perry Graduate Studies Program at The New York Botanical Garden.
The NYBG team at work in the Dominican Republic
Though many botanists specialize in Caribbean flora, few have so thoroughly documented the plant life of a single island, especially a large one, as has Thomas Zanoni, Ph.D., who lived and worked in the Dominican Republic for 13 years. His collections number in the tens of thousands and come from nearly every corner of Hispaniola, which comprises the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Last year, my colleagues Stella Sylva and Brandy Watts and I traveled to the Dominican Republic to work on a project at the Dr. Rafael M. Moscoso National Botanical Garden (Jardín Botánico Nacional Dr. Rafael M. Moscoso) in Santo Domingo. Our purpose was to image the field books of Dr. Zanoni.
Making a collection as large as Dr. Zanoni’s digitally available to botanists across the globe is challenging. If one person were to work 40 hours a week typing out the information on each of his specimen labels, the job would likely take more than a year. Of course, that doesn’t include the time it would take to first find each of Dr. Zanoni’s 30,000-plus specimens, which are dispersed throughout not only our 7.4-million-specimen William and Lynda Steere Herbarium but also herbaria in other countries.
Lichens, those often colorful and sometimes exotic-looking organisms found growing on rocks, soil, and the bark of trees, have not gotten the respect they deserve, but a new book from The New York Botanical Garden Press may help change that.
Designed to be a user-friendly reference for non-specialists, Common Lichens of Northeastern North America is a light and easy-to-use field guide that covers the rich lichen flora of northeastern North America. Amateur naturalists, nature interpreters, forestry workers, land surveyors, researchers, and anyone who is interested in learning more about lichens will benefit from this book.
What are lichens, and why are they important?
Straddling the boundary between plants and fungi, lichens are composite organisms formed by the combination of a fungus and a plant-like component—usually an alga or a type of bacteria that contains chlorophyll. They are important to the full functioning of an ecosystem, and their presence or absence is an indicator of the health of that ecosystem.
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.
The Britton Cottage as it looks today at Historic Richmond Town
A recent Science Talk post told the story of the Staten Island origins of our founder, Nathaniel Lord Britton, who came from a long line of Staten Islanders. Remarkably, the Britton house, which was built in about 1670 and expanded twice in the 18th century, is still standing.
Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Vice President for Conservation Strategy, Director of NYBG Press and Science Outreach, and Bassett Maguire Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden.
Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., spent the vast majority of his long, distinguished career at The New York Botanical Garden, having arrived here in 1975 as Research Associate working with Dr. Ghillean Prance on the systematics and ecology of the Brazil nut family, Lecythidaceae. Last fall, some four decades later, he retired as Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany in the Garden’s Institute of Systematic Botany.
Michel Ribeiro is a Brazilian specialist in the Brazil nut family (Lecythidaceae) and a Ph.D. candidate studying for an advanced degree at the National School of Tropical Botany of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden. 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.
On this first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, we wanted to share a photo that captures the beauty of a rain forest tree that comes into its own during early spring in the Southern Hemisphere.
A sapucaia tree growing in a coffee plantation in eastern Brazil displays its springtime color. Photo by Michel Ribeiro.
In a previous post, the second author described the life history of this magnificent tree, the sapucaia (Lecythis pisonis). Reaching 120 feet in height, it is pollinated by carpenter bees, and its seeds are dispersed by bats. The sapucaia drops it leaves in the Southern Hemisphere spring, remains leafless for 10 to 15 days, usually produces pink new leaves and flowers at the same time, and after flowering the leaves turn green.
During this time, the sapucaia tree is the most spectacular tree in the forests of eastern Brazil. The new leaves cover the tree, making it look as if its entire crown is full of flowers. Although purple flowers are present and beautiful, they are hidden by the pink leaves, which most likely play a significant role in attracting the pollinators. Bees visit most of the flowers to gather pollen, but, surprisingly, only two percent of the flowers yield fruits. We hypothesize that the reason for this is that the trees probably produce only enough carbohydrates for the flowers to develop into a limited number of its giant woody fruits, the size of a child’s head, as well as the large seeds they contain.
For more information about the phenology—that is, the cycle of leafing, flowering, and fruiting—of species in the Brazil nut family, visit the Lecythidaceae Pages and type “phenology” into the search box.
