The Plant You See Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

When you look at an iceberg floating on the ocean, you see just the top bit. Tucked beneath the water lies the other 90% of it—the hidden behemoth. Would you believe that looking at a plant could be the same? It's hard to imagine that when looking at house plants. Their pots are so tiny! But out in the wild, the root system of a plant can extend for metres and metres—as tall as you are— even though the leaves and stems and flowers may be only a few centimetres high.

This plant, liverwort or "church steeples," stretches 51 cm above ground—barely brushing an adult's kneecaps. That's the part you see. But under the earth, it extends its roots down three times that far, and out 69 cm in every direction!

In folklore from different countries, this common agrimony was said to ward off witchcraft or to make someone sleep as long as it was beneath their pillow.

Three researchers in Austria literally unearthed these findings over the last 40 years by digging out the fragile roots of plants with a tiny jeweller's tool a lot like what a dentist's hygenist uses to clean teeth. 

Imagine spending 40 years digging in the dirt with these fine "scribers".

Below is the researcher's drawing of a liverwort's roots beneath the earth. The 1000 drawings they created showing the incredible reach of a plant's roots can be seen online in the seven volumes of the Wurzel atlas. 

Illustration of Agrimonia eupatoria's root system reaching 155 cm into the ground and 69 cm out from the centre.

To explore all 1000 of the root drawings, visit the online collection.

Did You Know! The same is true of mushrooms and other fungi too: what we see is just the tip of their iceberg. Check out this earlier article on the blog.

by Adrienne Montgomerie 

Learn Latin Names of Common Plants

By Helen Mason

A recent trip to Ireland reinforced for me the importance of learning Latin names of common plants.

Of course I recognized my old friend Taraxacum sighted here at Mellifont Abbey in County Louth — and in numerous fields. Although we in North America don't think of dandelions as an invasive species, they are native to Eurasia and have been spread around the world by settlers who likely planted the seeds to make use of the plant's many medicinal and nutritional uses.

Dandelion at Mellifont Abbey. (Helen Mason photo)

I also knew that this bird fishing in the waters outside Ashford Castle in County Mayo had to be a member of the heron family. It's a grey heron (Ardea cinerea), a species native to temperate parts of Europe, Asia, and parts of Africa.

The herons around my Georgian Bay cottage are great blue herons (Ardea herodias) — same genus, different species.

Grey heron fishing in County Mayo. (Helen Mason photo)

What puzzled me, however, was a flower I found while exploring County Clare's Craggaunowen, a tourist site with re-creations of the various types of housing used in Ireland's past — from a Crannog or lake-dwelling from the Bronze age, to a ring fort from the 4th and 5th Centuries, to 1400s-era castle.

Walking through the woodlands below the fort, I admired this blossom.

The Irish jack in the pulpit: Arum maculatum. (Helen Mason photo)

Not recognizing it, but thinking it might be related to something I did, I asked the guide.

"Jack in the pulpit," she responded, "sometimes called lords-and-ladies."

This is where common names can run us into trouble. To me, a jack in the pulpit is a shy blossom that covers is reproductive parts.

The Canadian jack in the pulpit: Arisaema triphyllum. (Helen Mason photo)

In fact, these two jack in the pulpits belong to the same family but not the same genus or species.

The Irish plant is Arum maculatum, a woodland species common to Europe, Turkey, and the Caucasus. Like many plants, it has a number of common names — snakeshead, adder's root, Adam and Eve, and lords-and-ladies, as well as jack in the pulpit.

The Canadian plant is Arisaema triphyllum, a native of moist eastern North American woodlands. Like its Irish distant relative, this jack in the pulpit has other names, including bog onion, brown dragon, Indian turnip, and American wake robin.

Common names change from locale to locale. They can provide interesting information about the use of the plant or the social history of the namer. The Latin term is unique. It identifies one genus and species, and only that one.

The Ghost Plant: Monotropa uniflora

Jan Thornhill

Any day now—if it ever rains here in Ontario—a most peculiar character will start poking out of the ground in the forest beside my house. The Ghost Plant or Indian Pipes, known as Monotropa uniflora to the scientific community, confuses people every year. No part of it is green, which means it has no chlorophyll, so obviously it's not a plant, right? 

Wrong.

Monotropa uniflora flower close up. (Walter Siegmund)

Monotropa uniflora is, indeed a plant, but it has evolved into an entity that no longer needs chlorophyll to produce energy for itself. Instead, it steals energy from other plants—specifically from trees. It does this in a tricky, roundabout way by joining its roots with the mycelia of mushrooms that, in turn, are networking symbiotically with the roots of nearby trees. The Ghost Plant is a parasite. The mushrooms involved, are not.

This Russula could unwittingly be aiding a parasitic Ghost Plant.

Many species of forest fungi have symbiotic relationships with trees. Their mycelia—networks of root-like threads—intertwine with a tree's roots, helping the tree obtain water and essential minerals from the soil. In return, the fungus receives the energy it needs to grow in the form of sugars from the trees. Both parties benefit. 

The Ghost Plant, which can't provide food for itself through photosynthesis the way chlorophyll-producing plants can, sneakily takes advantage of the relationship between a mushroom (usually a Russula species) and a tree by tricking the mushroom into forming a mycorrhizal relationship with its own roots. In this way, the Ghost Plant receives photosynthetic energy without doing anything at all. It's a total freeloader. The mushroom gets nothing in return, nor does the tree, but no one is harmed in the process, so feel free to enjoy this spooky looking oddity next time you come across one in the woods.

A pink Ghost Plant grows in western North America. (Stephanie Searle)

References:

The Ghost Plant as Tom Volk's "Fungus" of the Month

Mycorrhizas on Tree of Life

It’s an Animal! It’s a Plant! No, It’s a Slime Mold!

by Jan Thornhill

Dog Vomit Slime. Pretzel Slime. Wolf’s Milk Slime. Insect Egg Slime. These are just a few of the wacky names people have come up with to describe different species of myxomycetes, a group of peculiar miniature “critters” commonly known as slime molds.

A variety of slime mold fruiting bodies, including
Pretzel Slime (the snakey one) and Wolf’s Milk Slime (the pink cushions).

Photo credits: Laurence Acland, John Carl Jacobs, Jan Thornhill

Slime molds make me happy – and not just because of their wacky names. They make me happy because almost everything about them is odd. One of their oddities is that they spend part of their lives behaving like animals and another part acting like plants or fungi.

To see slime molds, it helps to get down on your knees in the woods, especially beside rotting logs in places were it’s damp and dimly lit. This is where many types of slime mold begin their lives as a loose sack of liquid, a huge single-cell with multiple nuclei. In this slimy form, called a “plasmodium,” the organism oozes slowly over and under dead leaves like a mammoth amoeba, speeding along at about a millimeter an hour. While it moves it feeds by engulfing and digesting bacteria, fungal spores, and even other slime molds. What’s really impressive is that this network of slippery muck behaves as if it has intelligence. It makes choices, veering towards food as if it’s hunting. In the lab, some slime molds are even able to figure out the shortest path to escape a maze. Stranger still, if the plasmodium is chopped into bits, the separated pieces will slowly migrate back together again!

When food runs out, or the environment becomes too dry, slime molds search out a high spot, such as a log, to do their plant-like trick of sprouting fruiting bodies and releasing spores. This is the stage where they get fancy. The giant plasmodial cell divides itself into innumerable single cells that then form the fruiting bodies. In many species, some of these cells seem to sacrifice themselves for the good of the others by creating a stalk that will hold the spore-producing structures high enough to catch a breeze. When mature, the structure bursts open and the powdery spores are carried away by wind or passing animals.

In only 7 hours, the slimy yellow plasmodium of Insect
Egg Slime(Leocarpus fragilis) transforms itself
into hard-shelled orange fruiting bodies.

More than 1,000 different slime molds have been identified, and they come in a startling variety of shapes and colors. Some look like mini wieners-on-a-stick or ice-cream cones or pretzels, though at a size only a cricket could enjoy. Others have shimmering, metallic coats, or are encased in a cracked white crust. Yet others look like delicate coral. One of my favorites, Wolf’s Milk Slime, will squirt pink goo at you if you poke it with a stick. There’s even one that can grow so large, and is so ugly, that some people blame their neighbor’s dog for its appearance in their garden or on their woodpile. That one’s scientific name is Fuligo septica, otherwise known as – you guessed it – Dog Vomit Slime.

A small, mature Dog Vomit Slime (Fuligo septica) releasing its spores.

Check out:

Artist Heather Barnett’s video-taped experiments with slime molds:

http://www.youtube.com/HeatherBarnett?gl=GB&hl=en-GB

Tons of pictures of slime mold fruiting bodies at:

http://slimemold.uark.edu/fungi/WebForms/ImageSearchForm.aspx?letter=A

http://naturalhistory.uga.edu/~gmnh/mycoherb_site/myxogal.htm

http://www.janthornhill.com

http://www.facebook.com/wonderfulwildmushrooms

I like lichens!

By Claire Eamer

Lichens add colour to a stone wall.

Have you ever noticed big splotches of white, green, or even red and orange on rocks and tree trunks? The white ones look a bit like bird poop, but they aren’t. (Well, actually, they might be – so look closely!)

Mostly, those splotches are lichens. And they’re actually pretty amazing.

To begin with, lichens aren’t one thing, but two. As the excellent guidebook Plants of Northern British Columbia puts it, lichens are fungi that have discovered agriculture. The basic structure of the lichen is provided by a fungus, a relative of mushrooms and puffballs. That structure is a kind of factory, filled with willing workers. Inside each fungus factory is a colony of algae, and that’s what creates the lichens’ sometimes-garish colours.

Lichens on an ancient standing stone.

Colour isn’t all the algae contribute. Safe inside their fungus, the algae work away at what they do best: converting sunlight into carbohydrates, vitamins, and proteins through photosynthesis, the same process plants use. The fungus, which can’t produce its own food, takes a share of what the algae produce as a kind of rent.

The arrangement works so well that the fungi and algae are inseparable, so they go under the single name of lichen. The kind of relationship the two partners have is called symbiotic, which means neither partner dominates the other and the arrangement benefits both of them.

The splotchy lichens (like the lichens on this ancient standing stone in northern Scotland) are just one form, called crustose or crust lichens. There are also lichens shaped like overlapping scales, and others shaped like curling dried leaves, miniature bushes, tiny clubs, or even fine hair. The floor of the boreal forest, which stretches across much of Canada, is so littered with lichens of all shapes and sizes that it’s sometimes called a lichen forest.

Lichens in the Yukon forest.

All those shapes, sizes, and colours have led to some pretty entertaining names. Spraypaint lichen, dog’s tongue lichen, chocolate chip lichen, and toad pelt are just a few. And there are plenty more. About 14,000 species of lichen have been identified so far, and there are still thousands more to find and describe.

Interested? Here are a few links:

A general online guide to lichens.
Ebook guide to lichens in Canada’s west coast forest. 
Ebook guide to lichens in Canada’s mixed hardwood forests.
And for lots of information about lichens, as well as some beautiful photos, The Lichen Guide.