Darwin and Botany

2009 is a big year for evolutionary biology. In a few weeks, on February 12, we will celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, and later this year marks the 150th anniversary of publication of the Origin of Species (such a smart man, I'm sure he planned it that way!). In honor of this fascinating scientist and person, I thought I would provide the best links for reading Darwin online, and mention the intersection of botany with his thinking and works.

First off, let me comment that it's not going too far to say I love Darwin; he is a fascinating person, both as a scientist and a man. His writings are an incredible treat to read, accessible and full of tremendous insight into the natural world. The first book of his that I read was the Voyage of the Beagle, and if you haven't read it, I recommend you race out immediately and buy a copy. It is an easy, fantastic, exciting, thought-provoking read. If you aren't inclined to buy, you'll enjoy the first of these links:

• The Complete Works of Charles Darwin online  This treasure-trove is exactly what it claims to be: all of Darwin's writings. All of them. That means all of his major books, including the Origin, plus his numerous papers, many of which are botanical, and page-by-page images of his many notebooks and diaries.
• The Darwin Correspondence Project   The DCP's goal is to publish all of the letters Darwin sent and received and that are extant (i.e. weren't lost or thrown out). The Correspondence is voluminous; Darwin had close to 2000 correspondents and wrote up to 500 letters a year in the years following 1859. This site has most of the letters that have been transcribed, as well as letter sets on various subjects, and guides to reading the letters of different people. It is fascinating to read his correspondence with critics and with his supporters as he fleshed out his theories.

I cannot say enough about the delight you will get from reading Darwin. He was a joyful observer of the natural world, and his enthusiasm is clear in his writings. Also clear are his modesty and desire to be understood by his reader. 

I admit that I (like most scientists) haven't read many of Darwin's less-famous papers and books, but a good many of them are on botanical subjects. Darwin suffered from illness and infirmity for most of his later life, and he took refuge in his experiments and wanderings at Down House, which he vastly preferred to the scientific fray in London. He relied on correspondence with his botanical friends for a huge amount of information in the Origin, particularly about biogeography and the immutability of species, and in his later years he increasingly turned to botanical experimentation and direct observation himself. He published books on the following botanical subjects: orchid fertilization, climbing plants, insectivorous plants, cross and self fertilization, flower forms, and plant movement, as well as dozens of papers on everything from variegated leaves to whether sea water kills seeds. All of these are available at the Complete Works of Darwin website listed above, and it is great fun to explore his writings and see the world through his eyes!

Top 100 Botany Blogs

Happy February! Online college blog has assembled a list of what they consider to be the top 100 botany and plant-related blogs: Top 100 Botany Blogs. I'm very pleased and honored that No Seeds was included! We're down at #91, in the Plant Specific section. Go check out some of the others, all are wonderful and fascinating!

Dryopteris spores

Hello! I apologize for the two-month hiatus, it was unintentional. Classes and research slowly hijacked my every waking moment this semester, and as the cold and snow settled in here in Wisconsin, there was less and less to talk about in terms of living plants. However, I did get to work on a really cool project for a plant anatomy course I took this fall, which I wanted to share. Along with one of my labmates and another grad student in our department, I undertook a study of the spores of Dryopteris (my research group), to satisfy the class's project requirement. We got to learn how to use the scanning electron microscope that lives in the botany building, and got some beautiful results. Above is a scattering of spores from Dryopteris marginalis, and below is a figure from the paper we wrote:

A = D. arguta, B = D. carthusiana, C = D. celsa, D = D. cristata, E = D. expansa, F = D. filix-mas, G = D. fragrans, H = D. goldiana, I = D. intermedia, and J = D. marginalis. The scale bar is 20 micrometers... really small! It was a fun project, and the results may prove useful to me down the road in my research. I'll try to post more often over the winter break, if I can find anything living to photograph! Happy Holidays!

Botany Photo of the Day

The UBC Botanical Garden, which I had the great pleasure of visiting while in Vancouver this summer, posts a Botany Photo of the Day, every day. If you do the RSS thing (to which I'm addicted), here's an xml link. Go have a look at Elliottia pyroliflorus.

Berry Go Round #9

The latest edition of Berry Go Round, an awesome botanical blog carnival, is up at gravity's rainbow, and I'm very pleased to say that my post on Blechnum made the cut! Go check out all the cool blogging people are doing about botany!

Dryopteris fragrans (!!)

My dissertation research is on the North American species of the genus Dryopteris, the wood ferns (I may have mentioned this once or twice before), and my goal for this past summer was to collect all fourteen or so of the species found on this continent. I succeeded, except for two: D. ludoviciana, which is restricted to the far southeast (mostly Florida, coastal Alabama and Arkansas), and D. fragrans, which occurs mostly in the far northern part of the continent, up both coasts of Canada, to Greenland in the east and Alaska in the west. My travels didn't take me far enough north or south to collect these species. Then, a few weeks ago, my advisor put me in touch with an employee of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, who had collected D. fragrans in central Wisconsin (!) a decade ago. 

If you're at all familiar with the topography of Wisconsin, you know it's mostly flat. The state was almost entirely glaciated in the last ice age, and as the glaciers eventually retreated, they grated the sandstone bedrock down to a nice smooth plane. Except for in a few places... In the center of the state, for example, a gigantic lake was left behind, dammed by ice, which eventually broke. The entire lake drained in perhaps a matter of days, and the force of the water cut channels through the rock in an area now known as the Dells. Above is a picture of part of the Wisconsin River that runs through one such channel. The Dells are very unique in terms of plant life because they serve as conduits for cold air to flow from the northern part of the state down towards the south, and provide refugia for species that normally wouldn't be found in this part of the state because it's too warm/moist. Enter Dryopteris fragrans.

Upon learning that it might still be possible to find this fern in this unique location, I borrowed a kayak from a friend and off we went up the river to the cliffs pictured at the top. Lo and behold, we found it after only a few minutes of scanning those rocks! It's relatively small, and pretty dense, as ferns go. This is a plant meant to endure cold. Its most striking feature is that it's sticky; it gets its specific epithet, fragrans, from the fact that it is literally fragrant. It smells sort of piney, almost like Christmas, and the source of the scent is hundreds of glandular trichomes, tiny modified hairs all over the lower surface of the fronds that produce a sticky liquid substance (about whose chemical composition I haven't a clue). In these last two pictures you can see the shiny sheen of the lower leaf surface, and even some individual trichomes; they look like tiny clear crystal balls emerging from the edges of the pinnae. Really cool!

Samambaia

The Portuguese word samambaia translates as fern. Apparently there is a particular fern found in the rainforests of Brazil that is traditionally known as samambaia, and a powder derived from it is used for its therapeutic properties to treat an abundance of conditions ranging from bronchitis to Alzheimer's. You can see a complete list at this site, though I have to recommend against purchasing the powder in favor of seeking modern medical advice if you have any of those ailments. It appears from the pictures I've found at that site and others that samambaia is a species of Phlebodium (which is not the same as Polypodium, despite what the linked site claims).

Whatever its scientific identity, samambaia has prompted more than medical miracles: in 2003 cellist Yo-Yo Ma released the album Obrigado Brazil, which contains a track entitled Samambaia. The piece was inspired by, you guessed it: the Brazilian rainforest ferns he encountered while in the country. 

You can hear this lovely piece of music for free, and read an NPR Morning Edition interview with Yo-Yo about the album and its inspiration at NPR's site.