Oeceoclades gracillima: won't you crawl inside?

Don't you just want to crawl inside?

Oeceoclades gracillima (Schltr.) Garay & P.Taylor is an orchid native to Madagascar that has stunning maroon and black mottled foliage which is hard to capture properly on film, but you can see one of the better images here. (In case you were wondering, you pronounce the genus name ee-see-o-CLA-deez.)

I picked this one up from Michel Orchid Nursery when they were at the orchid show and sale at Longwood Gardens in March 2012. I'm so happy it finally flowered as this means I'm able to dry and press a specimen for a voucher and begin working on isolating and sequencing DNA from the leaves and flowers on the other inflorescence. It's not the prettiest flowering orchid around - the flowers are mostly small and drab - but it's got character elsewhere in the leaves.

For those of you with a sharp eye who follow the blog because of my interest in carnivorous plants, you'll notice that this species had originally been named Eulophia gracillima by the German orchid specialist Friedrich Richard Rudolf Schlechter in 1913. That name was supplanted in 1976, however, by the new combination when Leslie Andrew Garay and none other than the Utricularia expert Peter Taylor!

Taylor was also the co-author of another combination, Oeceoclades roseo-variegata, which according to the Kew World Checklist is now a synonym of O. gracillima. The former is still in use, however, and was how my plant came labeled from the nursery.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, and this little flower has a wonderful little nectar spur. Overall, a great, compact orchid that was really easy to cultivate.

Tweeting the 9th biennial International Carnivorous Plant Society conference

Participants browsing the sales area at the 8th ICPS conference (2010) in Leiden, Netherlands. Photo by kitkor.

At the end of the week I'll be on my way to my second International Carnivorous Plant Society conference, the last being held two years ago in Leiden, Netherlands. (When they said International, they meant it.) It's a relatively convenient trip from Ohio to Seekonk, Massachusetts where the New England Carnivorous Plant Society will host the international conference, the first time it's been back in North America since 2006.

Unless there are unforeseen technical difficulties, I plan to tweet along with the presentations, just like I did for several of the Botany 2012 sessions I attended. If you're so inclined, you can follow me on Twitter where I'll be using the hashtag #ICPS12 if anyone else wants to join in (#ICPS2012 was already taken by a few recent tweets on a physics conference). I've also made a resolution to do a better job at updating the blog during the conference, but of course this may prove to be difficult.

It will be great to see so many colleagues and friends, especially those I've known only through our weekly Board meeting chats via Skype for the North American Sarracenia Conservancy. I'll finally be able to meet many of you in person!

Get ready for some awesome carnivorous plant content fed into your social media.

Peer-review system failed in controversial gay parenting study

In early June a new social science study was published online ahead of print on the purported differences in children who were raised by gay parents as opposed to those raised by heterosexual parents ("How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study" by Mark Regnerus). Concerns were immediately raised about the study's sample, methodology, analysis, and therefore results. Most notably, the study characterized anyone who ever had a same-sex relationship after having a child as thereafter a gay father or lesbian mother regardless of whether they parented the child together as a couple. If you're studying the effects of same-sex relationships on the rearing of children, don't you think this would be an important detail to pay close attention to? This is just bad science.

And a new review by the journal that published the piece agrees. The editor of the journal assigned a member of the journal's editorial board to assess how such a "bullshit" paper got published in the first place. Where did our system break down? The report and the piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education is fairly damning and underscores how important our job as scientists is when we put on our reviewer hats:

In his audit, he writes that the peer-review system failed because of “both ideology and inattention” on the part of the reviewers (three of the six reviewers, according to Sherkat, are on record as opposing same-sex marriage). What’s more, he writes that the reviewers were “not without some connection to Regnerus,” and suggests that those ties influenced their reviews.

I've not yet been asked to put a reviewer's hat on - nor should I until I'm further along in my studies - but I've seen a few publications through the review process and I've seen my PIs, good, thoughtful PIs, calmly refuse to accept manuscripts because of conflicts of interest. I know it's tough sometimes; the academic nature of science is incestuous and we collaborate or have connections with just about everyone in our narrow fields who is qualified to give our manuscripts a thorough review. Or at least that's how it feels sometimes. But that's no excuse. If you're asked to review a manuscript of an author with whom you have a conflict of interest, kindly refuse to accept, simple as that.

In reality, only two respondents lived with a lesbian couple for their entire childhoods, and most did not live with lesbian or gay parents for long periods, if at all. The information about how parents are labeled is in the paper. Regnerus writes that he chose those labels for “the sake of brevity and to avoid entanglement in interminable debates about fixed or fluid orientations.” Sherkat, however, called the presentation of the data “extremely misleading.” Writes Sherkat: “Reviewers uniformly downplayed or ignored the fact that the study did not examine children of identifiably gay and lesbian parents, and none of the reviewers noticed that the marketing-research data were inappropriate for a top-tier social-scientific journal.” [emphasis mine]

And I suppose this is where it all comes down to: flawed peer-review in this case failed to identify severely flawed social science.

Thecostele alata wants to give you a hug

I received this cute little orchid from Gines Orchids last week for my research on genera allied to Dipodium and Cymbidium. Like most species in this group of orchids, Thecostele alata (above) is native to Southeast Asia. Those two slender upper petals sort of look like they're reaching out to give you a hug, don't they? And is it just me or does the column resemble the head of a floppy-eared dog (at least from this angle)? Perhaps I've been staring at this for too long.

New study on carnivorous plants makes headline writers batty

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Before we get started, let me say that I forgive those who write headlines like pollution makes carnivorous plants go vegetarian and carnivorous plants go vegetarian in response to pollution and new study finds that pollution turns carnivorous plants into vegetarians. They know not what they do. It's also tempting to go after the flashy, attention-grabbing headline. Just try to do a better job next time, ok? And while we're on the topic, let us thank those that presented reasonable titles, like the one by Liat Clark at Wired.co.uk: carnivorous plants capture less prey in polluted bogs. Thank you for getting it a bit better! It would also be a terrible oversight if I neglected to mention that the Southern Fried Scientist took this issue to task a few days ago. Bravo!

So, on to the science at hand. What's all the fuss about?

Drosera rotundifolia at Triangle Lake Bog, Ohio. Photo by kitkor.

Drosera rotundifolia, the round-leaved sundew. Or common sundew. Or "bloody hell that thing is everywhere." And it is: North America, Europe, Asia... Here in Ohio it is the most common species of Drosera that you'll bump into - the other being Drosera intermedia, but several sites it had been known from have now been developed. For those unfamiliar with carnivorous plants, you might be peripherally aware that it is thought that these species have evolved in nutrient-poor environments. Given this idea and our knowledge that most species possess a good deal of phenotypic plasticity in response to environmental cues, researchers decided to further test earlier experimental observations that Drosera rotundifolia reduced its investment in carnivory (as measured by stickiness in units of force used to remove a piece of filter paper from the leaf) when grown in the presence of more nitrogen (Thorén et al., 2003).

Here in the new study, the researchers, a team including J. Millett of Loughborough University, B. M. Svensson and H. Rydin of Uppsala University, and J. Newton of the Scottish University Environmental Research Centre, were more interested in the relative amount of nitrogen that came from prey captured by normal means and from the roots as a result of increased nitrogen available from atmospheric deposition due to increased air pollution.

Briefly, the authors identified three bogs in Sweden that represented a gradient of mostly pristine to somewhat polluted in terms of nitrogen deposition. Fifteen specimens were removed from the bogs, dried, and analyzed for stable isotopes of nitrogen. Once they had their isotope data, all they did was subtract surrounding Sphagnum isotope data from Drosera and divide that by (insect - Sphagnum), where insect represents the mean isotope number for prey captured on the plant at the time of collection. And there's an easy ratio!

So conclusions from this? Well, the authors state it very clearly in the abstract, which many of the headline writers must have missed: "Drosera rotundifolia plants in this study switched from reliance on prey N to reliance on root-derived N as a result of increasing N availability from atmospheric N deposition." (emphasis mine) No, headline writers, these plants were not "OMG BECOMING VEGETARIANS!" Wouldn't that be a plant eating plant matter? And, as strange and wonderful as nature is, we have two possible examples in Nepenthes ampullaria and Utricularia purpurea where the former seems well-adapted to catch leaf litter and the latter appears to primarily cultivate algae in its bladder-like aquatic traps. No, dear headline writers, increased pollution will not turn Drosera rotundifolia into a vegetarian. It may, however, given this work and that before it, be the cause of changing priorities in nitrogen uptake from primarily prey-derived to primarily root-derived. It should be noted, however, that the authors did not set out to assess prey capture rates in these areas, so any statement has to be carefully worded and specifically related to nitrogen assimilation from different sources. We don't know if the plants in areas with more nitrogen capture fewer arthropods. It's entirely possible that the plants that incorporate more nitrogen from their roots capture the same number of prey but preferentially assimilate the nitrogen from the roots.

More troubling, however, is that with increased nitrogen availability in these once off-limits landscapes, opportunistic species may find it easier to overcrowd the poor little perennial carnivorous herbs. (Of course, the increase in nitrogen in this study was not very large and probably would not be enough to allow non-bog-adapted species to thrive.) Most carnivorous plants are low to the ground and depend on high light conditions to thrive; if shaded too much, they may soon succumb to succession. Of course this is only a hypothesis and needs to be studied! I wonder what the headline writers will say then...

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References

Millett, J., Svensson, B., Newton, J., & Rydin, H. (2012). Reliance on prey-derived nitrogen by the carnivorous plant Drosera rotundifolia decreases with increasing nitrogen deposition New Phytologist, 195 (1), 182-188 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8137.2012.04139.x

Thoren, L., Tuomi, J., Kamarainen, T., & Laine, K. (2003). Resource availability affects investment in carnivory in Drosera rotundifolia New Phytologist, 159 (2), 507-511 DOI: 10.1046/j.1469-8137.2003.00816.x

A sundew makes a hasty retreat

I'm not yet ready to send out the heralds and call this a success on my first go at cultivating tuberous sundews, but I'm closer now than I was before. If you recall, I originally purchased a lovely specimen of Drosera peltata from California Carnivores in January 2012 and first posted about it in March. It started out as a cute little rosette of carnivorous leaves, then bolted to produce two lovely 6-inch tall stems bearing those irresistible peltate leaves. And then throughout the last few months it was happily going about the business of, well, what sundews do best: capturing prey to collect nutrients.

Most of the tuberous sundews are native to Australia where the winter is rainy and the summer is hot and dry as a bone. This lineage of sundews has evolved the handy adaptation of giving up trying to survive as a full-fledged leafy herb during that hot, dry, unforgiving summer. Instead, they retreat into the soil, packing up their nutrients into root structures called tubers, not unlike a potato in many ways though much smaller.

In just the last few weeks as we approach the hottest late May and early June weather in the Northern Hemisphere here in Ohio, this particular specimen I had was finally ready to make its scheduled retreat. The leaves and stem quickly browned from the tips in a matter of days, my cue to stop watering and let the soil go bone dry lest the tubers succumb to rot as they form. And then, a few weeks later, out of curiosity and because I knew the soil surface in the pot was much too hard for the new growth to break through next year, I dug through the soil to find the tiny tubers:

Those little cream-colored pearls are definitely not perlite! A closer look:

In the above photo, the two tubers toward the top were still attached to the root, the dark brown object leading from center to the bottom right. It was a bumper crop! After sifting through the remainder of the soil, I found ten tubers in all:

The next challenge will be keeping them in a nice, dark place until next fall when they begin to stir. I think the hardest part will be remembering that I have them stuffed away somewhere!

And also, thanks to my friends at Botanical Oddities, I now have tubers from Drosera auriculata. Thanks, guys! Here's hoping I have success with both as I imagine the difficulties of growing tuberous sundews arise when preparing the new soil mix - the sand can't be too sharp or the new growth will be torn up on its several inch ascent from below. It will, at least, be a fun challenge.

Drosera peltata bit off more than it could chew

I found this grisly scene out in the greenhouse when I got home today. It looks like my Drosera peltata got a little overzealous, trapping this fly (ID? I'm hopeless at identifying anything with legs) by the head. It's at the end of this tuberous sundew's growing season, so all of that energy derived from this meal will be going directly to the tuber that should be forming several centimeters below the soil.

Drosera - Reach out and touch someone grab someone by the head.

Go read: Asking permission

Evolutionary biologist Jeremy Yoder who blogs over at Denim and Tweed just posted what I consider to be one of the best narratives of a volunteer for a campaign to defeat one of these repugnant state constitutional amendments that would ban same-sex marriage, this one in Minnesota. He recounts some of his experiences and conversations with Minnesotans who, as he says, are capable of being "astonishingly, densely homophobic, even when they're being Minnesota nice." It's worth the full read.

Ohio may have it's own gay marriage battle brewing, but possibly not until next year. Ballot language was just approved last week so that the Freedom to Marry Coalition is allowed to begin circulating petitions, hopefully gathering the 385,253 valid signatures needed for the issue to be placed before the voters on the November 2013 ballot. Why use the ballot initiative when it seems like an uphill battle? Well, the only way to allow gay marriage would be to repeal the constitutional amendment passed in 2004.

In 2004 62% of Ohioans voted in favor of enshrining discrimination in our state's constitution by banning same-sex marriages and civil unions. It has often been cited as one of the most restrictive amendments in the nation. It reads:

Only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this state and its political subdivisions. This state and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.

A 2006 analysis on the effects of marriage equality on children reported in the journal Pediatrics by James G. Pawelski et al. notes the following on the Ohio law:

As a result, judges around the state have dismissed or reduced charges in domestic violence cases, because Ohio's domestic violence law recognizes the relationship between an unmarried offender and victim as one “approximating the significance or effect of marriage,” thereby representing a direct conflict with the amendment's prohibition against such recognition, thus rendering it unenforceable. [Their reference was this Cincinnati Post article]

 It's clear that the language of the 2004 amendment, specificially "legal status ... that intends to approximate...", has caused the most problems. This can be interpreted widely to include any contract my partner and I create that would "approximate" the qualities normally attributed to marriage. What exactly does this mean? It could be a will, or a private contract, or a medical directive like a power of attorney. And some judges have clearly taken it to mean unmarried partners in domestic violence cases do not require the same protections as married ones.

Unknown to the authors of the cited study above, Municipal Judge Paul Spurgeon of Mount Vernon, my adopted hometown since 2007, went so far as to deny several temporary protection orders in domestic violence cases, often a very necessary and important step regardless of the sexual orientation of those involved, based on his belief that granting temporary protection under the "person living as a spouse" condition would mean recognition of same-sex marriage. Motion denied. (I'm honestly surprised there wasn't more outrage over this.)

I guess the point is that this law is doing real harm and causing a fair amount of chaos in some court proceedings related to domestic violence. But... the effort to repeal the ban and replace it with one that allows marriage faces its own chaos. Apparently, not all organizations are on board and the focus is split, with critics suggesting we should put our energy into obtaining housing and employment nondiscrimination rights first. ("No state has passed gay marriage that has not first had protections in housing and employment," or so I heard on NPR this morning.) And then there's the local perspective. Rick Santorum won my county's Republican primary, but I do have hope that the pendulum is slowly swinging the other direction. This local news story from Marietta, a small town on the Ohio River in Southeast Ohio not known for being liberal got the opinion of four locals. The only dissenting voice was, naturally, from the Catholic priest. The others, ages 19 to 42, said they support the measure and that it didn't matter to them if gay people can get married or not. I'm not sure if the petition efforts will amount to anything and then if the general public will actually vote for the measure in 2013, but, inspired by others, I might put in my own volunteer time.

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Pawelski, J. (2006). The Effects of Marriage, Civil Union, and Domestic Partnership Laws on the Health and Well-being of Children PEDIATRICS, 118 (1), 349-364 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2006-1279

The shield sundew

Encouraged by a Facebook post from California Carnivores and on a whim I decided to get my first tuberous sundew a few months ago. These are plants with a decidedly curious habit unfamiliar to those of us where winter normally equals dormancy. During the winter, more accurately described as the wet season, the plant will spring up out of the soil and produce first a flat rosette of leaves and then begin to bolt, sometimes attaining a height of 50 cm. Once the high heat normally associated with the Australian dry season arrives, the plant withers and retreats to a tuber some 4 to 6 cm underground. I suppose this unfamiliar habit is the reason why tuberous sundews get the reputation of being quite difficult to maintain - they must be kept wet but not soaked in the winter and nearly bone dry in the summer. Luckily, California Carnivores occasionally stocks Drosera peltata, the shield sundew, so named for the shield-shaped leaves, reportedly one of the easiest tuberous sundews to grow. A beginner's plant, if you will.

So far, I'm thrilled with it! I just hope that I'm able to keep the tuber viable through the summer.

As a bonus, I also received the above dainty flowering plant, Utricularia bisquamata. Known as a prolific weed of the carnivorous plant world, I'm not sure if I should torch it or try to contain it. If I don't do something, it is nearly guaranteed that it will end up taking over every single pot in my collection.

Berry Go Round #49

Oops. Looks like I've been neglecting the link-back duty. At the end of February, Bora Zivkovic over at A Blog Around The Clock posted the results of all submissions from February botany-related posts. Among the gems this month were not one but two (Elizabeth Preston and Ed Yong, respectively) discussions of the news that scientists were successful in resurrecting a living plant from seed tissue hidden away by squirrels 30,000 years ago. And then there's the provocatively-titled Are Sheep Better at Botany than the US Government? by Jason G. Goldman of The Thoughtful Animal. And you must not miss the wonderful post by Colin Beale, The paradox of the prickly: Why grow thorns if they don't work? at one of my favorite group blogs, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! And for the chemically-minded, there's a great post by Andrea Wills titled, Why "Natural" isn't always better: almond extract and cyanide.

Well, you get the point. Go check them all out! And if you have any plant-related posts, consider submitting them or nominating someone else's for the March compilation, which will be hosted by Greg Laden over at ScienceBlogs.