Ferns and Charles R. Knight

Hello all! The long, cold Wisconsin winter appears to be drawing to a close, which means spring, flowers, and ferns can't be far off. This past week was spring break for my university, so an escape to regions southward seemed in order. We made it as far as Chicago. This was the first time in four years of living three hours away that my husband and I have made it to the Windy City, and we had a great time. One of the highlights was definitely the Field Museum, which I've had a goal of visiting for years. Sue was wonderful, but our favorite exhibit ended up being Evolving Planet, a huge stretch of space that wanders through nearly a quarter of the upper floor of the museum, and leads you through the evolution of life on earth starting hundreds of millions of years ago. One of my favorite parts of the exhibit was a large and beautiful mural above a stretch of display cases showing ancient fossil plants, mostly lycophytes and some ferns. Here's the mural:

You may or may not be able to make out, in the bottom lefthand corner, the author's signature: Chas. R. Knight. I was admiring all the lovely tree ferns and horsetails when my husband pointed this out to me, and I was thrilled! The museum I used to work at in Ithaca, NY did a big exhibit on Knight while I was there, and his prehistoric art is phenomenal. He is perhaps singlehandedly responsible for shaping our collective vision about the prehistoric world. No other artist before him had painted as prolifically, vividly, and accurately the earth's long extinct inhabitants. Jurassic Park wouldn't have been nearly as exciting and mesmerizing if Knight hadn't implanted a fascination for prehistory in our collective unconscious. I've seen several of his smaller pieces, but it turns out that in the 1920s he was commissioned by the Field Museum to paint 20-something of these huge murals for their new fossil halls, which became the Evolving Planet exhibit that we enjoyed the other day. His murals are all gorgeous, and they add a depth to the fossils on display that allows you to picture these plants and animals still alive and roaming their native habitats. You can learn more about Knight and his work for the Field Museum here. And here are some close-ups of the ferns that first caught my attention:

Fern Rap

Several of my fellow TAs in the Botany Department are teaching Introductory Biology this semester, a giant, 1,000-student mega-class. One of the professors offered the students the opportunity to write a song to get extra credit... and one of the results is an absolutely phenomenal effort by a group of these students. My fellow grads let me know about it, for soon-to-be-obvious reasons, and the professor gave me the audio file and permission to post it here. I hope you'll join me in appreciation of these students' efforts and their scientifically accurate (but for a tiny detail or two) composition putting the fern life cycle to song. I (well actually they) give you the Fern Rap.

For your reading/following-along pleasure, here arethe lyrics:

I’m a fern in the world, just trying to grow

Fertilization and cell division is all that I know

I just want to survive and spread my spores

And know I’m not a peach but my life is hard core

They say I’m a monilophyte but you can call me a fern

My life’s been a long one, with many twists and turns

Sometimes it’s hard to discern what stage I’m in

Let me welcome you to my world, let the story begin

I started out as a spore, on the bottom of a leaf

Grew up in a sporophyte, my release was a relief

I had many brothers and sisters, and some of them didn’t make it

But sometimes life is hard, and the goal is just to stay fit

I was a small little guy, all alone and homeless

But I soon started to grow I guess you could say mitosis

And pretty soon fertilization became my focus

But I knew finding a mate for me was pretty much hopeless

I’m a fern in the world, just trying to grow

Fertilization and cell division is all that I know

I just want to survive and spread my spores

And know I’m not a peach but my life is hard core

So I fertilized myself just not to remain childless

I really didn’t care that all my kids would be homozygous

It really wasn’t hard there was no pandemonium

I just put sperm from my antheridia into my archegonium

So now I was a zygote, yeah from 1N to two

The best years of my life, and upwards I grew

The increase in my size was all in my genetics

And it also didn’t hurt that I was photosynthetic

I grew and I grew and it seemed like overnight

I reached my final stage and became a sporophyte

So now I’m making sporangium all on my own

And just hoping my little spores, will all find a home

To bed for the winter...

Hi all! As usually happens during the winter months, I expect a lull in my blogging output from late November through mid-spring (which, in Wisconsin, is around late April). I just wanted to post a putting-to-bed message so you don't think I've shut up shop. I'll post sporadically over the winter months and will be back full-force in the spring. Wish me luck with winter's primary activity: writing proposals to try and secure funding for my next field season! Happy holidays to all.

Huntington Botanical Gardens, CA

Usually the start of the fall semester signals the end of big botanical field trips for me, but this year was an exception. A few weeks ago I went to Anaheim, CA to recruit graduate students for my department at a conference. There was another botany grad with me and we had a few hours free to explore one afternoon. The best attraction we could think of was the Huntington Library & Botanical Gardens in San Marino (take that, Disneyland!), where many of our friends and colleagues have visited and/or worked. Since our time was limited, we did a whirlwind tour of the garden, spending the most time in the Japanese and Desert sections. Alas, there were no ferns in these parts, but some beautiful other plants nonetheless. The bonsai collection was particularly impressive (shown above), as were the extensive cacti in the desert, below.

Last but not least, we saw some pollination in action!

Fall find

There are no ferns in this post, but there is someone green... found on a recent field trip to Spring Green, Wisconsin. This photo was taken by fellow UW-Botany grad student Brent Berger. I provided the finger-perch. Happy Fall!

Robert Treman State Park, NY

The last field trip I took while in Ithaca was to Robert Treman State Park. This is a beautiful place with many miles of trails connecting the Upper entrance, descending past waterfalls and through gorges, to the lower entrance several miles away. We started at the upper entrance and hiked down past Lucifer Falls, in search of a grove of Dryopteris goldiana that was known to occur near the base of this waterfall. We found it growing happily in a lush carpet of Vinca:

Farther along, we also came across some Asplenium trichomanes growing on a little shelf in the rock wall, and near the end of the trail, back at the upper parking lot, we spotted a patch of Cryptogramma stelleri, which I hadn't seen in the wild before. Two photos of each are below. All in all, a great trip to upstate New York!

East Malloryville Preserve, Ithaca, NY

After visiting Thurber Preserve I was eager to see how the other populations of Dryopteris around Ithaca were doing, so I went next to one of my very favorite nature reserves, the von Engeln or Malloryville preserve. This is a beautiful place with a very nice, easy to hike trail system. The trails start on top of glacial eskers and wind downhill into swamp and bog, which are traversed by boardwalks. There are many, many ferns here and I was happy to find several Dryopteris that I had been hoping to discover here, but hadn't seen previously, including D. goldiana: