A Crash Course in Pollinator Identification

Surprising to many people is the fact that a wide diversity of flies are pollinators. In fact they are second in importance to bees (take that butterflies!). Flies tend to like open (not tubular) flowers that are white or yellow. Flower flies (Syrphidae) often look similar to bees with yellow or orange and black stripes while bee flies (Bombyliidae) look like tiny pussy willow catkins with wings. Soldier (Stratiomyiidae) and blow flies (Calliphoridae) are often bright green in colour and not very hairy, while parasitic (Tachinidae) and Muscid (Muscidae) flies look very similar to house flies with black or grey bodies and long, coarse hairs.

The key ways to tell these insects apart though are:

• Two wings only;
• No waist;
• Large eyes near the front of the head;
• Short, club-like antennae;
• Unbranched hairs, if any;
• No pollen-carrying structures;
• Straight short or long tongues.

Great web pages with image of pollinators can be found at BugGuide, here, and Xerces Society, here.

Happy pollinator watching!

The loss of biodiversity and plight of wild pollinators has been all over the news lately. If you’re interested in doing something to make life easier for these creatures, you might want to consider making your garden more pollinator friendly this year. Pollinators have three basic needs: food, nesting/breeding habitat, and shelter.

The best thing you can do is grow at least some native plants in your yard. Native plants have the correct flower shape to fit the local pollinators and typically produce highly nutritious nectar and pollen. Cultivars of native plants, like bee balm (Monarda), and Echinacea (Echinacea) may be OK, but some research indicates that they may produce lower quality nectar and be less frequently visited than native species (Learn more here). Cultivars that are highly modified (e.g. double bloomed species), or lack nectar and pollen (e.g. sterile hybrids) are useless for pollinators. To provide a regular food supply, ensure you have selected a sequence of plants that flower all through the growing season. Helpful ecoregional planting guides have been created by Pollinator Partnership Canada and can be found here. Good plant choices for southern Manitoba are noted below.

Flowers for spring insects

Shrubby cinquefoil (Dasiphora fruticosa), strawberries (Fragaria), three-flowered avens (Geum triflorum), native or domesticated cherries and plums (Prunus spp.), wild roses (Rosa acicularis), native or domesticated raspberries (Rubus), meadowsweet (Spirea alba), native violets (e.g. Western Canada violet (Viola canadensis)), and Alexanders (Zizia) all bloom in early May or June. Queen bees, butterflies and/or flower flies will visit these species. Pansies are pretty but typically the wrong size for native pollinators.

Flowers for summer insects

Wild legumes like prairie-clover (Dalea), leadplant (Amorpha canescens) and Indigo bush (Amorpha fruticosa), as well as giant hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), milkweeds (Asclepias), fleabanes (Erigeron), wild mint (Mentha arvensis), obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana), black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) and Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) are good choices for summer. They will attract all kinds of bees, butterflies and flower flies.

Flowers for fall insects

Native composites such as coneflower (Echinacea), blazingstar (Liatris), white aster (Oligoneuron album), goldenrods (Solidago), and asters (Symphyotrichum) are great for fall bees.

Flowers for hummingbirds

To attract hummingbirds specifically, tube-shaped flowers that are red, pink, or orange are good choices. Grow plants like wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), fireweed (Chamerion angustifolium), wild iris (Iris versicolor), western red lily (Lilium philadelphicum), lilac-flowered beardtongue (Penstemon gracilis), and wild bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) to attract them, and consider putting a hummingbird feeder nearby for extra nourishment.

Pollinators need places where they can spend the winter or undergo metamorphosis. In general, pollinators like “messy places” like tall clumps of grass, bushes, and leaf, rock, or wood piles. Identify an area in your yard that you don’t use regularly and designate that as your pollinator “messy place”. Leave small wood piles there and in fall, rather than raking up every last leaf, create a leaf pile there. Another thing you can do is delay some of your yard clean up till spring. Instead of pruning all your perennial flowers and throwing the dead stems in the compost, leave them standing up until spring. This dead vegetation will help to insulate overwintering queen bees and butterfly larvae from the cold.

Happy gardening and good luck with your project! In my next blog, I’ll be giving a crash course in how to identify all those fascinating little pollinators that will be coming to your new pollinator friendly yard.

I personally feel a little sorry for plants. When plants want to have sex they can’t just go to a bar to meet someone; they are stuck in the ground. So what’s an amorous plant to do?

For most of the earth’s history plants lived in water. When they wanted to have sex they just released their sperm into the ocean where it would swim around for a while before fertilizing some eggs. Pretty simple. But as the oceans got crowded some plants looked with envy at the land, where there was plenty of room to grow and plenty of sunlight for photosynthesis. So about 470 million years ago (mya) in the Ordovician period, some enterprising young plants decided to head for the hills. These plants were mosses, ferns, club-mosses and horsetails.

What most people don’t know about these plants is that they still need water to have sex.  For that reason they are actually the botanical equivalent of amphibians.  They can live on land but they still need water for reproduction.  During wet times of the year, these plants release tiny sperm into the environment that swim through the water on the forest floor to fertilize the eggs of another plant.

For about 80 million years all the plants on land still needed water to complete their life cycles. But it started to get a little crowded in the swamp. Fortunately, there was still a lot of land available where no plants grew. The only problem was, it was too dry. About 390 mya in the mid Devonian some plants looked to the skies for inspiration and noticed something interesting: wind.

A few adventurous species decided to release their sperm into the air all wrapped up in a water-tight, yet aerodynamic little package, kind of like a tiny ping pong ball. This structure is called pollen and the first plants to make pollen were the gymnosperms, better known as conifers or evergreen trees. Gymnosperms are the botanical equivalent of reptiles, which were the first animals to no longer need water for reproduction.

About 125 mya yet another group of plants evolved and they had a distinct advantage over the gymnosperms: they could reproduce a lot faster. Gymnosperm reproduction takes a long time: about 15 months for most species to produce a ripe seed. In contrast, some flowering plants can complete their life cycle in a just a couple of months. The very first flowering plants also used wind for reproduction.

Bees are wasps’ vegan cousins and because they rely exclusively on plant nectar and pollen to survive, they are among the most faithful and effective pollinators in the world.  In Manitoba over half of all pollinator visits in the prairies and parklands are performed by bees.  It is because bees are such good pollinators that scientists have been so worried about declining bee populations.  Although we don’t always notice pollinators, they fertilize about 87.5% of the worlds’ flowering plants (Ollerton et al. 2011) so the loss of our planet’s pollinators would truly be a disaster.

If you think your sex life is complicated, you don’t have anything on plants. Some plants have separate males and females just like people (e.g. buffalograss (Buchloe dactyloides), salt grass (Distichlis stricta), willows (Salix spp.), Manitoba maples (Acer negundo), etc.). But some of these plants, like sweet gale (Myrica gale), can switch their sexual orientation from year to year; female one year, male the next. Most plants are hermaphrodites, producing both sperm AND eggs. Furthermore, plants can reproduce themselves without even having sex. Some plants can self-pollinate, or even skip the pollination process altogether and grow a cloned seed. The pads of prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.) can detach and form completely independent plants-essentially little clones. This would be like you detaching your arm and having it grow into a clone of yourself.

Pollen is everywhere: in the water, in the sky and covering many of the animals. As pollen grains contain sperm and germinate when they land on the stigma of a flower, they are essentially tiny, little male plants. This spring, when you’re walking outside and you see pollen falling around you I want you to remember that sometimes it really does rain men!

Reference:

Ollerton, J., R. Winfree, and S. Tarrant. “How many flowering plants are pollinated by animals?.” Oikos 120.3 (2011): 321-326.

I’m a landlubber I admit it. How could I not be? I’m from Saskatchewan. That’s the driest place in the country! Not only is it completely devoid of coastline, but its largest lake is practically in the arctic. Before I came here I did field work in Grasslands National Park, a place where the Frenchman “River” is shallow enough to wade across. Then I did field work in the Great Sand Hills, a place where there is no water at all, just sand.

Being a prairie girl, I was attracted to the idea of doing field work in tall grass prairie, an ecosystem that I was unfamiliar with but that I assumed (incorrectly) would be dry. So I got permission to do some pollinator research out at the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in 2004. When I got there, I could barely find any prairie that wasn’t soaking in at least a foot of water. Eventually I found out about Spruce Woods Provincial Park and its famous sand dunes. “Now that’s my kind of park” I thought “dessicatingly dry”. But as it turns out Spruce Woods ain’t no Great Sand Hills. Sure there are dunes there, but they’re surrounded by spruce forests, wetlands, a river and little springs bubbling out of the sand. Even the deserts in Manitoba are wet!

Image: The dunes at Spruce Woods Provincial Park are actually pretty wet. There are rivers, lakes and springs in the park as well as sand dunes.

Then one day I was asked to prepare a collections assessment report to identify gaps the Museum’s plant collection. I found out that of the 562 species of native plants that are underrepresented in the collection, a whopping 43% of them grew in some kind of wetland: a bog, a riparian area, a lake, or a marsh. Clearly, reducing the gaps in the collection was going to require that I get wet. But I was reluctant to dive in to aquatic plant botany, never having done it before so I decided to focus my research on pollination ecology and ugly little rare plants that grew in sand dunes. As a result, I was able to avoid wetlands for many years.

Then one day a man named John Wiersema called me up. John is an American water-lily expert who helped write the volume on those plants in the Flora of North America. He had discovered several unusual herbarium specimens of water lilies from Canada, including one on the Minago River, which he thought might be a different species. But he needed fresh material to do genetic work to make sure. Was I willing to come along with him to search for this species? I was wary. We might need a boat. I don’t really do boats. “Perhaps we could just walk along the river bank?” I suggested.

Well that turned out to be a terrible idea as the banks of the Minago River just off of highway 6 contain the densest collection of deadfall and brush that I’ve ever bushwhacked through. I can’t recall how many times I tripped and very nearly impaled myself on a fallen log. Fortunately, John determined that that part of the river seemed unsuitable for this particular water-lily so we cut our surveys short. We decided to go further north to where the Minago crosses the highway leading to Manitoba Hydro’s Jenpeg Generating Station. Although no one at Manitoba Hydro was available to take us out on the water that day, they generously offered to fly us up at a later date and arrange a boat trip down the river. It was on that trip that I was to see what a real aquatic botanist was made of.

This summer I began the field work necessary to understand the province’s floral diversity so that I can write a book on the Flora of Manitoba. At last I was going to have start looking for and collecting those aquatic plants that we know so little of. This summer I was going to have to get wet. But there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

It’s amazing how many aquatic plants you can collect from a shore line without actually stepping in the water. I spent many days combing shorelines for aquatic plants that had washed up so I wouldn’t have to go in the water. Out at Turtle Mountain and William Lake Provincial Parks I discovered the joys of lake docks and wetland boardwalks! I was able to collect all sorts of plants by just lying on my belly and reaching as far as I could. When necessary I used my trusty hiking pole to capture a few things that were just out of reach. I even went boating to collect a few things. Paddle boats are great for this. I know they’re the goofiest looking boats invented but for a botanist that wants to collect aquatic plants they are awesome. All in all I was pretty pleased with myself for avoiding the water.

Image: Boardwalks are great places to reach submerged aquatic plants. This one is in Hecla Provincial Park.

P.S. Collecting plants in national and provincial parks is illegal (with the exception of berries and mushrooms) unless you have a permit (which I do).

Last week I spent some time looking for rare and under-collected plants in the “Turtle Mountains” of Manitoba. First off let me say that I think the term “Manitoba mountain” needs its own definition in the dictionary. To most people the word “mountain” conjures up images of snow-capped peaks and sure-footed Mountain Goats clambering up rocky screes. Climbing a mountain is to risk life itself due to treacherous terrain, exposure to harsh weather and utter physical exhaustion. In contrast, climbing a “Manitoba mountain” is to risk breaking out in a light sweat, if it’s a hot day-a really hot one. Now please don’t get me wrong, I love the Turtle Mountains. I just don’t think they should be called “mountains”. But I suppose perspective is everything and the people who named them were likely so tired of the monotony of the Red River Plain that something that you could see rising up slightly in the distance was good enough to be called a “mountain”.

In Turtle Mountain Provincial Park, I hiked several trails searching for rare sedges. I was also interested in seeing if the brome (Bromus) and wild rye (Elymus) grasses that I was searching for in the Otterburne area in June might occur here instead. Jackpot! I discovered that the brome and wild rye grasses I was looking for are present in the park, likely because human disturbances that favour non-native grasses are minimal here. I may have found some of the rare sedges, although I won’t know for sure until my plants are completely processed here at the Museum as they have to be thoroughly dried, and then frozen for pest control purposes before I can look at them closely.

While I was in the area, I decided to search for rare plants along the Turtle’s Back trail in William Lake Provincial Park, a small park adjacent to Turtle Mountain Provincial Park. At the summit (84 m above nearby William Lake), I discovered that this area was visited by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years as it is the highest point of land for many kilometers, providing an excellent view of the area around it. It was humbling to know that in climbing this peak, I was following in the footsteps of First Nations from long ago, and those who still visit here today.

For the last 13 years I have spent part of my summer studying beautiful plants; plants with big displays of nice-smelling flowers. The reason I was studying them was because I was interested in learning which insects like to visit them for their nectar and pollen. However, this year I realized that for too long I have been neglecting the ugly plants; you know the ones that we step on without a care.

Some grass flowers such as this Fringed Brome (Bromus ciliatus) are actually quite attractive.  The colourful uppermost leaves (=glumes), which cover the flower parts, are purplish and covered with fine hairs.

So why am I studying them? Well, we must remember to not confuse appearance with ecological importance. Although ugly plants aren’t always particularly nice to look at, they play extremely important roles in the functioning of ecosystems. Grasses with their enormous root systems, remove tremendous quantities of carbon from the air and lock it underground in the form of soil organic matter. Unlike the carbon in trees, this soil carbon will not burn up in a wildfire. Grasses also provide livestock and wild animals with an abundant source of food. In wetland habitats, the dense roots of grasses, sedges and rushes filter the water, removing contaminants and nutrients like phosphorus, which would otherwise cause algal blooms in our lakes.

Unfortunately, some of these plants are in trouble. While searching for several historically collected grasses, Wiegand’s Wild Rye (Elymus wiegandii) and Hairy Woodland Brome (Bromus pubescens) in southern Manitoba this June, I was upset to realize that the habitats where these plants once occurred have been completely taken over by weedy Eurasian species like Smooth Brome (Bromus inermis) and Quack Grass (Elymus repens). These aggressive, invasive species have benefitted from the soil disturbances associated with human activity and have been able to spread into native grasslands and woodlands, displacing pretty much everything else. I will continue my search for these elusive species during my next field trip further north in the hopes that I will still find them somewhere in the province.

I was watching an old episode of “The Big Bang Theory” and Sheldon asked Stephanie what her favorite fruit was. Stephanie said “strawberries” to which Sheldon replied “technically NOT a fruit”. My daughter turned to me and asked “is that true” and I said “yes, sort of.” Let me explain why.

Plants have sex. The evidence of their many dalliances lands on our lawns and patio furniture in the form of pollen in the spring and later on in the year as spores, seeds, and fruits. What’s the difference between these structures? Well, pollen is like sperm in a tiny ping pong ball, a spore is like a naked baby, a seed is like a naked baby with a bottle and a fruit is like a baby with a bottle wearing clothes (or sometimes even driving a vehicle). So at this point you’re probably thinking, “Eeww, I’ve touched that stuff” but let’s cut plants some slack cause if they didn’t have sex, they’d go extinct and that would be bad for us given that we can’t photosynthesize!

Spore-producing plants, including mosses and ferns, are terrible parents: they just abandon their children to the whims of fate with nothing to eat and not a stitch on their backs! Cone-bearing plants (=gymnosperms) like spruces, pines, and junipers, are better parents as they provide their babies with something to eat. Giving their babies a source of food enables these plants to grow in drier, less fertile habitats than spore-producing plants can. However, as their babies are “naked” with no protective covering, they are vulnerable to thieves that want to steal their “bottle”: animals!

Flowering plants (=angiosperms) include most of the plants we are familiar with: grains, fruit trees and yes, strawberries! These species don’t let their children go out without a snack and a coat on. However, not all fruits are fleshy and edible as we are accustomed to think. Nuts are actually a type of fruit with a hard shell to protect the baby from hungry animals, kind of like a tank. Grasses give their babies clothing that sticks to their bodies and won’t come off. Maple trees give their kids hang gliders to help them soar away from their parent on the wind!

There are a variety of fleshy fruits as well. A berry is a multi-seeded fruit that includes some plants that we call berries, like blueberries and Saskatoon berries, but also some that we don’t think of as berries, like grapes and tomatoes. Raspberries and blackberries on the other hand, are not true berries, they are aggregate fruits: basically a bunch of tiny fruits clustered together on the enlarged tip of the flower stalk. Stone fruits have a single, hard seed (=drupe) inside; they include peaches, plums, and cherries. Citrus fruits are berries with a tough, leathery rind called a hesperidium. These fruits, according to Sheldon are “true” fruits.

Water-lilies are often confused with pond lilies (Nuphar spp.). However, pond-lilies have bright yellow flowers that smell a bit like mango and oval leaves with feather-like veins. Water-lilies have round leaves with all the veins arising from the center of the leaf, like the palm of your hand.

If you’re out on a boat in one of Manitoba’s many lakes this July or August and you see a water-lily, take a picture and send it to me (DRobson@ManitobaMuseum.ca) along with the location where you found it to help improve our knowledge of these species. Don’t forget to flip a leaf over and take a picture of that too!

Most of the plants in the Museums’ dioramas are real plants that have been preserved and often painted. However, in some cases the preserved plants can simply not be used. This is especially true if the diorama is set in spring (e.g. wolf diorama in the Boreal Forest Gallery) or summer (e.g. bog diorama in the Boreal Forest gallery). In such cases, we make our own plants.

The process required to create a realistic fake plant is a long and laborious one. The first step is to actually obtain a real, live plant of the species that you want to reproduce. First off, a location as close to the Museum as possible that contains the species required is identified. Then, landowner permission or government collecting permits are obtained. When the plant is at the right stage of flowering, a field trip to collect it is planned, usually first thing in the morning. An appropriately sized plant is chosen, and photographs and notes on the colour are taken. Then, the entire plant, along with a good chunk of sod, is dug out, placed in a bucket, watered to keep it from wilting too much, and driven to the Museum. This is the phase of the project that I, as the Curator, are typically involved with.

The remainder of the work is now with the Diorama Artist. She removes each part of the plant and makes molds of them. Then the molds are used to create fake leaves, stems and flowers or fruits. The fake parts must all be painted to the correct colour and then attached together using glue and wire in the correct way. It’s kind of like building a complex 3D puzzle. When the model is complete it is almost indistinguishable from a real one. I’d love to do a field trip where I would place the model in a real ecosystem and then see if anyone could actually find it. I’m pretty sure the Diorama Artist would kill me if I did that though (what if we couldn’t find it again!). Right now, several completed plant models are waiting in storage or on temporary display, for eventual installation in our new exhibits.

The mini dioramas in the Museum are even more challenging than the full scale ones because you can’t use real plants in the same way. Although real branches are used for the trees, they have to be coated with wax, carved and painted to look like a real tree in miniature. Creating leaves and branches is even more difficult. In the Duck Bay mini diorama in the Parklands Gallery, the Diorama Artist used stair-step moss (Hylocomnium) as the branches of spruce (Picea glauca) trees. Baby’s breath (Gypsophila), a non-native plant used extensively in the cut flower industry, was used to create the leaves of the deciduous trees and the shrubs along the forest floor.

The Manitoba Museum prides itself on the quality of our dioramas. Every time I look at them I see some new detail that I never saw before. The next time you come to the Museum, pay close attention to the plants in the dioramas and see if you can tell, what’s real and what’s not. You will gain a new appreciation of the talent and patience of our dedicated team of staff and volunteers.

When people come to the Museum and see our dioramas they are usually impressed with the majestic, taxidermied animals in them. But what they really ought to be impressed with are the plants. I find it amazing that the trees in the elk diorama are perpetually in the process of shedding their leaves.

To create our dioramas, real plants and fungi were identified and collected from natural areas (with permission from the landowner of course) and then pickled, glued, and preserved in various ways. This preservation process, which takes many months to do, is essential to make it look like the plants are still alive; taking short cuts would destroy the illusion that you are in a real place. There are various problems that have to be overcome to ensure that our plants look right. For one, wood has a tendency to dry out and crack when you bring it into a building. That is why we have to pickle our trees to prevent this from happening. Another thing that happens when you bring a tree into a building is that the leaves fall off, unless it is in a pot and being watered. To prevent our leaves from falling off, special glues are applied to ensure they stay attached. We also need to make sure that the “floor” of the diorama looks real. We do this by attaching pieces of real sod to Styrofoam blocks that can easily be installed, removed and repaired.

This piece of sod from the Ukrainian Rye Farm diorama in the Parklands Gallery was temporarily removed for maintenance.

But not all the parts of a plant or fungus can be dried and painted. Plants in summer scenes have to possess flowers and fruits but these structures usually look terrible when they are dried out. So what do we do in those situations? In my next blog I will describe the process used to create plants from scratch.