Confessions of a Genuine Science Geek

For the last several weeks I have been recording the pollinators of wild flowers in Birds Hill Provincial Park. One rather windy and uneventful day I was able to reflect on my chosen profession and was forced to conclude that I am a science geek. I remembered an old episode of the Simpsons where Bart discovers a comet. While searching the heavens with Bart, Principal Seymour Skinner says, “There’s nothing more exciting than science! You get all the fun of sitting still, being quiet, writing down numbers, paying attention – science has it all!” That pretty much describes what I’ve been doing for the last seven years: sitting quietly, waiting for an insect to land on a flower, and writing down the number of flowers she/he visits. In the winter I identify plants and insects, study the data I collected, make graphs, run statistical analyses, and write scientific papers. The funny part is that I really do find it exciting. It’s fun to find out if the patterns you surmised while in the field were real or indistinguishable from nature’s background noise. Plus, there’s nothing more thrilling than correctly identifying a mysterious species of sedge! Hence my revelation and this confession.

I also take solace in the fact that the specimens and data I collect will probably be studied long after I’m dead.  Not everyone can say that about their life’s work.  So even though I am a science geek, I don’t mind at all.

I recently attended the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution in Banff, Alberta. However, being stuck inside a building on several beautiful sunny days was agonizing and on several occasions I found myself gazing wistfully out the windows at the mountains beyond. Fortunately, visiting other museums while I travel is an important part of my job as it helps me to plan exhibits here at the Manitoba Museum. This trip was no exception and I was able to visit the Banff Park Museum during a long lunch break one day.

The Banff Park Museum is such an old museum (1903) that the building and its collection were protected as a National Historic Site in 1985. So basically it is a museum of what old museums used to look like. Apparently in the late 1950’s some people in the community wanted the Museum torn down and replaced with a new building and more modern exhibits. Looking around at the beautifully crafted wooden cases, hundred-year old specimens and gorgeous Douglas Fir wood panelling on the ceilings, I was thankful that cooler heads prevailed.

The Museum contains numerous “cabinets of curiosity”, as they used to be called. These cabinets contain more than 5,000 mounted birds, mammals, insects, plants and eggs collected in western Canada mainly between 1890 and 1930. Some of the “newer” exhibits created in 1914, displayed animals in their habitat, an approach that was considered radical at the time. Eventually this approach evolved into our modern-day dioramas. Nowadays some Museums are tearing down their dioramas and putting in “cabinets of curiosities” again, albeit with a modern twist. So I guess that “what goes around comes around” even in Museum design. I myself tend to think that what is most desirable is a mixture of the best of both, especially when many dioramas themselves have become worthy of preservation.

I was reading the job description of the ideal Curator in the Museum’s interpretive brochure. Professor John Macoun suggested in an 1895 correspondence that the ideal Curator should possess the following qualifications:

• “A man of wide intelligence;
• Energetic (not a hotel lounger);
• Ought to be able to skin a bird or mammal;
• Will talk natural history, mineralogy, geology or anything else to the visitor, and
• A political bloke should be the last man for that place.”

At the heart of every taxonomist is a curious little monkey who just can’t stop exploring the world around him or her, sometimes to their detriment. I was reading a great book called “The Plant Hunters” by Tyler Whittle and was amazed at the trials and tribulations that early botanists like William Dampier (1651-1715), Philibert Commerson (1727-1773), and David Douglas (1799-1834) went through. Curiosity drove them to explore the remote areas of the world under extremely difficult circumstances in the hopes of finding plant species unknown to Western scientists. Many of the specimens that these men collected can still be found in European herbaria, providing us with a valuable snapshot of the past.

If you wish to bring a specimen in to the Museum for identification, please call first to make an appointment as I am often in the field over the summer. Vascular plants and mosses can be brought fresh in a plastic bag with some moist paper towel inside, or pressed and dried between two sheets of newspaper. If you don’t have a plant press, you can use several large books to weigh it down. Try to collect specimens with leaves and flowers or fruits as you need both to identify some species.

If you wish to bring in a fungus, it should be kept in a paper bag as plastic will make it go slimy. As some mushrooms get eaten by maggots quickly, they need to be brought in soon after picking or dried using a fan, dehydrator, silica gel dessicant or a warm (140°F/60°C) oven. Since dried mushrooms change colour quite drastically and shrink in size, photographs and measurements of the cap and stem are useful. A spore print, made by laying a mushroom cap over a piece of paper and covering it with a glass or bowl for a few hours, is also useful for mushroom identification. Happy hunting!

In order to get my degree in environmental studies I had to take six classes in economics so that I would have some understanding of how the economy worked. In reality, I only needed three weeks of economics to understand that much of what they were teaching was a load of bunk. When I asked my professor how pollution and environmental degradation were accounted for in the economic theories she was teaching us she replied that those things were “externalities” and would not be discussed, as if we as a society could somehow pretend that they didn’t exist. I decided that perhaps nature would be a better teacher of economics.

So what have I learned about economics from the study of ecology? First of all diversity is a good thing. Although some species of plants rely on only a few pollinators, most are serviced by a wide variety of insects. This means that even if one species is doing poorly, others can fulfill the same functional role. Diverse systems are more resilient, can continue to function under atypical circumstances and recover faster from perturbations. The globalization of our economy means that we increasingly depend on just a few companies or countries to produce certain goods in the name of efficiency. Unfortunately when disaster strikes, as it just did in Japan, key parts that only Japanese companies manufacture are now in short supply, threatening the functioning of other companies half way around the globe! Imagine for a second that we were suddenly unable to rely on China for manufacturing? Would anyone else in the world be able to produce the things we need in the quantities we need them in? Species that are highly specialized are efficient but that efficiency comes at a price and that price is resiliency. With an unpredictable global climate confronting us, it is the resiliency that comes from diversity that will prevent ecosystems and economies from totally unravelling.

Another lesson I’ve learned is that EVERYTHING is interconnected. The rare Western Prairie Fringed Orchid is a fascinating plant in terms of its interconnections. In order to grow it depends on a mychorrhizal fungus found in certain soils. To reproduce, it requires the pollination services of a few species of moths. The larvae of those moths require trembling aspen trees for food. We cannot save the orchid without also saving the fungus and the moth and the aspen and all of the other organisms they in turn are connected to. We Canadians like to think that we are isolated from the troubles in the rest of the world but, as the recent collapse of the banking system and subsequent decrease in the value of every Canadian’s retirement savings has shown, we are not. The fact of the matter is that we are all in this crisis together so we’d  better start getting along.

The last thing I’ve learned is that every system has its breaking point. Yes, diversity can buffer an ecosystem from extreme changes but that only goes so far. Once too many species are lost, cascading extinctions due to the interconnectivity of the world’s ecosystems will bring just about everything down. Sure there will be a few hardy survivors left behind to evolve into new and wonderful creatures in a couple million years, but they are unlikely to be the ones that humanity needs to survive. Unless you really enjoy eating jellyfish and cockroaches, I’d be concerned! The fact is 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct; we know this through the fossil record. It is inevitable that humans will one day follow in the footsteps of the dinosaurs to a rocky grave. The only questions are when and how. That is what humanity has just a little bit of control over. The good news is that you have a little bit of that control too. Every day, through the choices you make, you alter the destiny of humanity for good or ill. Which one will it be?

It’s that time of the year when I’ve finished writing reports and analyzing data and actually get to look at all the stuff I collected last summer. I’ve just finished identifying my vascular plants and now I get to look at the fungus! Using the photographs I took of the fresh mushrooms and the notes I wrote up in the field, I settle down at my desk with a hand lens, a ruler, and a big stack of mushroom books to try and figure out what I’ve got.

Mushroom identification is a bit different than plant identification because you need to use your sense of smell. After determining that one of my mushrooms is some kind of Russula, I move onto the species descriptions. One of the distinguishing characteristics of a candidate species is that it smells “fruity when young and dirty when older” while the other is only “slightly dirty”. Hmm, how does one ascertain the level of dirtiness? I’m stumped and decide to move on to the next character on the list: taste. One candidate species is described as tasting “very sharp and burning” which sounds more like a description of a bladder infection than a gustatory sensation to me. I decide to skip over the taste part too; I’ve read too many articles about exactly what happens to you if you eat the poisonous ones. You probably don’t want to know the details: it’s not pretty. After reading more of the descriptions I finally settle on Russula alutacea and my work on this species is done.

As you can probably tell I get a little “office-bound” and antsy this time of year. It’s actually quite enjoyable to open up the containers that I placed the fungi in earlier in the year because the scent becomes concentrated. When the container is opened the wonderful earthy, spicy fragrance of the fungus is released and I am transported back to that mossy forest floor where I found it–a nice place to be (even if it is only in my head) on a cold, grey, February day. Unfortunately, smelling these fungi tends to make me hungry. Right now I’m craving linguini with mushroom cream sauce and bacon. Oh well, I guess I know what I’m having for dinner tonight!

Botanically speaking, a fruit is the plant part that contains seeds. Before the invention of modern refrigeration, fresh fruit was only eaten when it was in season. To enjoy fruits at other times of the year, preservation was necessary. Drying fruits by burying them in sand or sun-drying them is the oldest method, beginning in ancient Egypt over 6,000 years ago. Plums, currants and cranberries are all native to northern Europe and Canada, and would have been the most common dried fruits in these areas. Raisins were being imported to northern Europe in the 11th century, and dates and figs in the 13th. Dried, rather than fresh, fruits are key ingredients in many traditional northern European and Canadian Christmas dishes.

(Vaccinium spp.)

For many people, a Christmas turkey dinner would not be complete without cranberry sauce. Cranberries are closely related to blueberries and grow in similar habitats: sandy and peaty soil. Cranberries are sometimes harvested by flooding the entire field and scooping up the floating cranberries. The North American cranberry (V. macrocarpon) is larger than the European cranberry (V. oxycoccus) or lingonberry. Dried cranberries are used as substitutes for raisins and currants in fruitcakes, and are sometimes added to the Austrian fruit cake Kugelhopf. Cranberry kisel is a popular dessert in Russia. Cranberry or lingonberry sauce is a traditional accompaniment to roast turkey or goose.

(Ribes spp.)

Although similar in appearance to raisins, currants are more closely related to gooseberries than to grapes. Confusing the matter, a variety of small, dark raisins are called currants as well. Currants are native to North America and Europe, and grow on shrubs that reach 1-metre. Many currants have spiny stems and are easily identified by their lobed, palm-like leaves. Historically, dried, wild black currants were put into fruitcakes and fruit breads by Canadian women before foreign fruits became common.

This blog is part of a series on The Botany of Christmas. Learn more in:

Christmas Nuts

Christmas Spices

The spices we typically associate with Christmas baking, like nutmeg and cinnamon, all grow in tropical areas. Before the shipping of spices became reliable, they were rare and expensive in Europe, and for this reason used only for special occasions like weddings and holidays. Many traditional Christmas desserts are made with a variety of exotic spices. Mulled beverages, like wassail, are prepared by heating the liquid with a mixture of whole spices wrapped in cheesecloth or placed in a tea ball. The most popular spices are described below.

(Cinnamomum spp.)

Cinnamon and Cassia are trees native to India and Ceylon. Cassia is cheaper than cinnamon but not as flavourful. Once Cinnamomum trees are three years old, the outer bark is harvested. This distorts their growth forms into dense shrubs rather than trees. Cinnamon and Cassia have been popular for a long time; Egyptians imported it from China in 2000 B.C.! Cinnamon is a common spice used to flavour Christmas puddings, cakes, cookies, and the Danish pastry Klejne.

(Zingiber officinale)

Ginger is the rhizome (an underground stem) of a tropical herbaceous plant native to southern Asia. Ginger has been cultivated for over 3,000 years! In Asia, ginger is mainly used fresh or pickled in savory dishes, like curries and stir-fries, but in Europe it was traditionally used dried, in desserts like gingerbread and gingersnaps. This is because, until recently, ginger was not sold fresh in other parts of the world. Ginger is also sold crystallized and coated in chocolate, another popular Christmas snack.

(Crocus sativus)

Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice, costing over $10,000 per kilogram!  The tiny orange threads are actually the stigmas, or pollen-receiving organs, of a crocus flower that is native to southwest Asia.  The stamens on these tiny flowers must be hand-harvested, which is extremely expensive.  Fortunately, very little saffron is needed to add flavour and colour to a dish.  The Scandanavian Lussebulle or saffron buns are traditionally made on St. Lucia’s Day, December 13, and served by young women dressed in white.

This blog is part of a series on The Botany of Christmas. Learn more in:

Christmas Nuts

Christmas Fruits

For many people, roasting chestnuts and snacking on fresh nuts is a Christmas tradition. Besides humans, the only other animals that can effectively crack the shells of nuts are those with strong, chisel-like teeth, namely rodents. Rodents, like squirrels, harvest nuts in the fall and store them for the cold winter months just like we do. Nuts are a good source of protein and contain many vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats. Not all nuts are alike; some nuts, like hazelnuts, are fruits with thick outer shells. Other nuts, like almonds and walnuts form a hard pit in the centre of a fruit called a drupe, like a peach or a cherry. Sadly, many people in North America have developed life-threatening allergies to nuts.

(Bertholletia excelsa)

Brazil nuts grow in clusters of 12-24 inside coconut-like capsules. Native to South America, Brazil nuts are popular snacks in Europe and North America. Brazil nuts are not commercially grown outside South America as they perform poorly in monocultures, relying on wild bees for pollination. One of the only animals that can eat Brazil nuts is the Agouti, a large rodent. Agoutis use their sharp incisors to open the hard capsule and shell. Since Agoutis hide nuts they don’t eat, they disperse them into new habitats. Brazil nuts are commonly added to South American fruitcakes.

(Carya illinoensis)

Pecan is a large, wind-pollinated deciduous tree native to North America that can reach heights of 170 ft. The nut is encased in a leathery, green husk that cracks open when ripe. A single tree can yield over 400 lbs of pecans each year. Pecans were harvested extensively by eastern Indigenous peoples. European settlers quickly embraced the pecan, eating them plain, spiced, or in baking. Pecan pie, often served at American Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, is a classic example of pioneer “fusion” cooking. Pecans are sometimes added to Canadian butter tarts instead of raisins, as well.

This blog is part of a series on The Botany of Christmas. Learn more in:

Christmas Spices

Christmas Fruits

I come from a long line of European women who did a lot of baking: fresh bread and buns, pies, squares, cookies, and strudels. Although my mother and grandmother baked throughout the year, Christmas was my favourite time because that’s when the really special treats were made, things that you didn’t eat just every day: hot roasted chestnuts, fruitcake, butter tarts, honey cake, shortbread, and chocolate Yule logs.

Learn more on:

Christmas Nuts

Christmas Spices

Christmas Fruits

When people find out that I study and collect wild plants I suspect that they have visions of me tromping through the woods to study beautiful orchids and majestic wildflowers. The fact of that matter is that attractive plants, orchids in particular, are pretty well-studied compared to many other groups.

Orchids attract a devoted cult of nature lovers who, for fun on their weekends and vacations, wander through bogs and remote forests in the hopes of discovering new species or taking a perfect photograph of a rare Lady’s-slipper. In fact Manitoba has three non-profit organizations (Nature Manitoba, Native Orchid Conservation Inc. and Conserve Native Plant Society Inc.) that are involved in some way or another in the appreciation, documentation and conservation of orchids. So I’m not too worried about the orchids-I know that they are being meticulously documented by their legions of fans.

What I am worried about are the ugly plants-the wind-pollinated ones with tiny flowers that grow in very specific microhabitats. These plants are either completely overlooked or regarded as weeds and stepped on. They are like neglected younger siblings in a large family that only get attention when they do something bad, like grow in someone’s garden or in a crack in the sidewalk. We don’t know much about the distribution and ecology of these ugly species and since they are unattractive and sometimes hay-fever inducing, no one loves them enough to study them. No one but me. I’ve developed and odd fondness for these homely plants because they are a challenge to locate and identify. I find it very satisfying to be able to identify plants that most amateur and even some professional botanists ignore.

One of my recent projects has been to identify “taxonomic gaps” in the botanical collection here at the Museum. I prepared a list of plants that I know have been found in Manitoba but that we don’t have many (or any) specimens of. Most of them were “ugly” wind-pollinated sedges, rushes, grasses or exotic, naturalized “weeds.” Others were rare native annuals that don’t germinate every year and can be hard to find. Some were at the edges of their North American ranges and not present in high numbers. Quite a few are aquatic plants (like pondweeds) that grow in lakes, sloughs and rivers. Not a single native orchid though is unrepresented in our collection. In addition to our collection of specimens we also have a slide collection which features mostly pretty plants; there are 300 photographs of orchids but only one slide of goosefoot plant.

So I don’t really need a lot beautiful wildflowers in my collection (unless they are from a part of the province that hasn’t been visited before). What I DO need are the weeds growing by the side of the road, the pondweeds that cling to your leg when you’re going for a swim in the lake and the grass-like plants that grow in damp, muddy areas. But no orchids please, they’re just not ugly enough.