Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Here’s the second part of a batch of photos sent by Texas reader Rik Gern (part 1 is here). The introduction was this:
n mid-March I visited a friend on a ranch in Luling, Texas, a small town about 50 miles south of Austin and 60 miles east of San Antonio. Originally a railroad town, and once known as “the toughest town in Texas”, Luling is now a minor oil town. [JAC: It’s also the home of the City Market, one of the finest BBQ joints in Texas.]
The landscape is typical of much of central Texas; it can look monotonous on the surface, but it’s full of interesting life when you look up close. The woods, which the locals refer to as scrub brush, consists largely of Spanish Oak, Mesquite, and Elm:
You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them; Rik’s text is indented.
This looks like some kind of floating spiked orb, but it is an overhead view of a Texas thistle (Cirsium texanum).
Here is a view of the flower in bloom. If this was all there was to it and it wasn’t covered in spikes, you’d want them as ground cover all over the place!
Here are several of the plants in different stages of blooming. Still beautiful, but a little more menacing.
Bitterweed (Helenium amarum) may have been the most common flower in this field. It’s a member of the daisy family and also goes by the names of yellow sneezeweed and bitter sneezeweed. I guess I got lucky because they didn’t make me sneeze!
This pink evening primrose (Oenothera speciosa) makes for an interesting optical illusion; the light is coming from the upper right and of course the petals form a concave shape, but if you imagine the light source coming from the lower left, all of a sudden it appears to be billowing outward in a convex fashion. These are often referred to as buttercups, but are not part of that family.
As I was photographing this Winecup (Callirhoe involucrata) I noticed some movement and was surprised to get photobombed by a little spider. I didn’t realize spiders could be pollinators.
You’d think this flower would be easy to identify, but iNaturalist’s Seek app couldn’t identify it, and a web search for “yellow Texas wildflowers” didn’t help either. It’s mighty pretty though, and this picture is also photobombed, this time by two tiny critters with long antennae.
This is called a pinwheel or Indian blanket (Gaillardia pulchella) and has been photobombed by the same type of critter that found its way into the previous picture.
The sun sets on Luling; a beautiful end to a beautiful day!
To give you an idea of the richness of the landscape, all of these pictures, minus the sunset were taken within an approximately fifteen foot radius of one another. One other life form that played a major role (the villain, as it were) in these pictures was the pesky chigger (genus Eutrombicula). City boy that I am, I waded deep into the fields and got down on my hands and knees to take pictures, entranced by the beauty of the plants and neglectful of the precautions I should have taken against these little pests. Not only did I fail to tuck my pants into my boots, but I neglected to shower at the end of the day, so when I returned to my home in Austin I had bright red itchy dots all around the area covered by my sox and grundies. That was about ten weeks ago and I still have marks on my ankles. I won’t make that mistake again, but it was still worth it to see so many pretty sights!
Posting may be light today as it’s a busy day: I have to feed the dorm ducks, giving them extra water because it’s going to be hot (93° F, 34° C), and then we have to meet with Facilities this afternoon to see what the fate of Botany Pond is. I’m worried as they mentioned “duck deterrents” during the mating season. No baby ducks? Unthinkable! Besides, since the pond will be full of water there is no way in hell to keep ducks away from it.
Today sees the return of regular Mark Sturtevant, insect and arthropod photographer extraodinaire. His captions are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Here are more pictures that are mainly from the previous summer. The first two pictures are nymphs of a predatory Hemipteran known as the Masked Hunter (Reduvius personatus). As nymphs, they decorate themselves with dirt or sand for concealment. The third picture shows an adult Masked Hunter. Although the nymphs are normally very difficult to find, both the nymph and the adult were found at my porch light at night. Most members of this family (Reduviidae, or assassin bugs) are slow and plodding, but Masked Hunters are surprisingly quick on their feet.
A “fen” is a special kind of wetland that is a bit different from what one might call a bog or a marsh. I have learned that defining these things is a delicate matter, but as I understand it a fen is sustained by water that percolates up from limestone, resulting in an alkaline pH. Fens are characterized by an array of specific and interesting plants (and insects, as we shall see). There is a park about 15 minutes from my house called Seven Lakes State Park, and it has several fens. One of them can only be accessed by a Secret Path through the woods, and I’ve never seen a trace of anyone else there so it is now “Sturtevant’s Fen”.
Once out of the woods, the higher ground surrounding Sturtevant’s Fen is sprinkled with a lovely orchid called the Grass Pink Orchid, Calopogon tuberosus, as shown in the next picture. This orchid is famously described as the “upside down orchid”, but that is all part of a great deception. Orchid flower anatomy is a bit different from other flowers, and I hope I get this right (feel free of course to correct me, someone). In orchids, the sepals and petals tend to look like petals, and male and female reproductive organs are fused into a single structure called the column that can be seen in this orchid as the curved structure at the bottom. But what about those bright yellow thingies on the top-most sepal that look like male anthers? They are the deception part of the story, and also why this is the upside- down orchid. What appears to be a flashy set of anthers that promise a rich pollen reward are actually lures, aimed at tricking bees. When a bee visits this flower, it will likely go after the false anthers, and this causes the sepal they are on to suddenly hinge down and whack the bee against the column. This results in sticky and inaccessible pollen sacs attaching to the back of the bee. The bee flies off, and if it visits another of these orchids it will likely make the same mistake by going after the false anthers (bees are not smart). It will get whacked again, and this results in the pollen sacs being transferred. Darwin would have loved this orchid!
Out on the fen proper, the ground becomes firm sand that is always under about a quarter inch of water. Your shoes will get wet. And among the dense stands of coarse sedge grasses are three different species of carnivorous plants! Most obvious among them are the numerous Pitcher Plants, Sarracenia purpurea, which are shown in the next two pictures. Early in the season, these have tall flower stalks with weird flowers. A feature of carnivorous plants is that they do not want to eat their pollinators, so they keep their flowers well away from their insect traps. I wonder if the weird shape of the flowers themselves are also designed to keep their pollinators from falling to their doom. Of course, the watery trap in each pitcher plant holds syrupy water with digestive juices and often lots of dissolved insects. Once I found a live maggot living inside one that was evidently there to feed on trapped insects.
Crowding around the bases of the pitcher plants are Sundews, another insect-eating plant shown in the next picture. They of course trap and digest insects with sticky hairs on their leaves. The Sundew here I think is Drosera rotundiflora. They too try to not kill their pollinators with flowers on tall stalks, but I have yet to see those.
How those two carnivorous plants trap prey is pretty obvious and well known. The third carnivorous plant is more subtle about it. Dotting the fen landscape are much scarcer but very distinct flowers, one of which is shown in the next picture. These belong to the horned bladderwort (Utricularia cornuta). Bladderworts are more aquatic, and they have tiny specialized vessels among their roots that trap and digest small aquatic prey.
But for me, the real attraction of my private fen is a very special little dragonfly. These are Elfin Skimmers (Nannothemis bella), and they are by far the smallest dragonfly in the U.S. The world’s smallest dragonfly is a close relative found in China, and it is not much smaller! Elfin Skimmers abound in Sturtevant’s Fen, which is as it should be. First, here is a female. These are suspected to be wasp mimics. Next is a male.
Although those tiny dragons were perched on grass blades, it may still be hard to convey how incredibly tiny these are for a dragonfly. So just for this post, I made a special trip back to Sturtevant’s fen with a butterfly net and very carefully captured the young female shown in the last picture. Look at your index finger. The body of that little dragon will hardly stretch across the width of your finger!
I have many promises from readers to send photos in, but I haven’t called in the promissory notes. Do send me any good wildlife photos you have.
Today we have part 4 of Tony Eales’s recent safari to Botswana (part 1 is here, part 2 is here, and part 3 is here). To me this is the culmination: Victoria Falls!
Tony’s narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Safari Part IV: Chobe and Victoria Falls
Chobe is an amazing national park famous for its large population of elephants and having lions that specialise in hunting elephants:
Our best viewings of wildlife were along the Chobe River, the south side of which is in Botswana and the opposite shore, Namibia. Young giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis ssp. giraffa) sparring on the banks of the Chobe River.
And young impala (Aepyceros melampus) also sparring:
From the high banks we could watch giant herds of buffalo:
The riverbank also had a large troop of chacma baboons (Papio ursinus ssp. griseipes) allowing close up views of family like and squabbles.
And by the riverside the sunsets were amazing as the large mammals started to get active again:
On the Zimbabwe border we bid farewell to our guides and safari truck and after processing we got into a minibus and went to the tourist township of Victoria Falls. Several of the group decided to hire a taxi together and visit the falls that afternoon. The entrance had long lines and where the taxi dropped us hawkers came and asked us if we wanted to hire a raincoat for 3USD. Most were thinking “How wet can it really be?” but I thought that it was probably a good idea and in the end we all hired raincoats. The entrance looked cheesy with faux rocks and vines rendered in concrete giving it a bit of a discount Flintstones look, and entry for foreigners was an eyewatering 50USD each. We got in and went through the kiosk and gift store, following the rising sound of the falls and the ever-present sound of helicopters.
All I can say is that $50 seems cheap now, the first glimpses of the falls were jaw-dropping. we looked out on massive thundering falls with unmeasurable amounts of water plummeting into invisible depths, obscured as the bottom was by the clouds of spray. Above it all a great rainbow.
Picking up our jaws from the floor we soon realised that this represented perhaps a tenth of the falls and only the first of some 20 odd viewing spots along about a kilometre and a half of cliff-face that looked across directly at the face of the falls.
We were all giggling and babbling, almost running from one viewing spot to the next, through a rainforest created entirely by the spray of the falls:
Each viewing spot got progressively more of the spray until the last spot was basically like a tropical downpour:
And that was the trip. We saw so much wildlife, experienced a world very different from the one I grew up with or that I see represented anywhere on tv or in the media and marvelled at landscapes at once familiar but also alien.
I’ve travelled a lot of the world and you could say that about anywhere, the world is a wonderful and awe-inspiring place but even so, there’s something extra special about sub-Saharan Africa that’s not like anything I’ve seen before. What a place!
Don’t forget to send in any good wildlife photos you have lying about!
Today’s plant photos are from reader Dan Fromm. His captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them:
Our Texas rain lilies.
In the early ‘oughts my wife and I visited a friend in Austin, TX, a native Texan and a retired ichthyologist, who took us to visit Pedernales Falls State Park where Pat, who is our family’s gardener, dug up a few bulbs of a rain lily. Jim told us that the plant was Cooperia drummondi.
www.itis.gov, my preferred reference for taxonomy, says that C. drummondi Herb. is an invalid synonym of Zephyranthes chlorosolen (Herb.) D. Dietr. and that Z. drummondii D. Don. is also valid. I’m not as clear as I’d like to be about how to tell the two apart but believe with no good justification that ours are Z. drummondii.
We brought Pat’s wild rain lilies back to New Jersey. She potted them, set them out on the patio and hoped for the best. The plants bloomed, the flowers were pollinated by our local bees and we had seeds. Some fell into their parents’ pot; Pat selected others and put them on top of the soil in new pots and in the garden.
Since our winters are more severe than Texas Hill Country winters, Pat brings her potted rain lilies in for the winter. They usually go out in mid-spring. She doesn’t water them at all while they’re indoors. After they’re outside and watered they bloom. We have more plants than we started with, not a surprise.
Pat has continued this cycle for more than twenty years. 2023 started slowly for our rain lilies, who stayed indoors until June 27th. We had rain that day, and on the morning of 29th we had three trays of lovely white blossoms. The trays bulge because the plants’ bulbs have grown. The largest are fist sized.
In the morning of the 30th the white blooms had turned pink. By the end of the day the blossoms had begun to collapse.
On the morning a July 1st we had a few new white flowers. The older ones had pretty much shed their petals. Later that day developing seed pods began to appear and the pedicels started to fall off.
On July 4th the pods were larger but some pedicels remained.
On July 8th the pods were well developed but not ready to dehisce.
On July 14th the pods were open and ready to shed seeds. They might have begun to open a day or two earlier but I wasn’t up to visiting them then. Gastroenteritis, not recommended. After I photographed them Pat harvested the seed pods and spread some seeds on fresh soil in a new tray.
July 18:
Finally, by July 23d the seeds had germinated and the sprouts were well on the way.
Today we have a photo-and-text story by Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His topic: plants and gnats. His text is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Pesky little helpers
“He could put up with his meaningless office-life, because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent. God knew how or when, he was going to break free of it (…) The types he saw all around him, especially the older men, made him squirm. That is what it meant to worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an aspidistra!” (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936).
In George Orwell’s (1903-1950) novel, Gordon Comstock leaves a successful career in advertising (‘the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket’) to become a poet. But Comstock’s literary shortcomings push him slowly and inexorably into poverty, so the idealist and bitter writer pontificates about the materialism, dryness and mediocrity of the English middle class. And nothing could better symbolise society’s predictability and pedestrianism than the common aspidistra, aka bar room plant, iron plant or cast-iron plant (Aspidistra elatior). A native of Japan, the common aspidistra is widely cultivated as a houseplant around the world. Because of its sturdiness and tolerance to neglect, it became a favourite in English homes in Victorian times, although its popularity has since waned a bit.
W. F. Harvey (1885-1937), the Quaker author of macabre and horror stories, told the tale of Ferdinand Wilton, who tried unsuccessfully to destroy aspidistras, only to get some creepy just deserts… Image from Tatler magazine, 1930, British Library:
Orwell would be pleased to know that other characters could have embodied dullness and obscurity in Comstock’s social narrative: gnats.
‘Gnat’ is a loose term to refer to small (usually less than 1 cm), unremarkable and poorly known flies in the suborder Nematocera, which include crane flies, mosquitoes, black flies, and midges. Gardeners will be familiar with one particular group: the dark-winged fungus gnats (family Sciaridae). These tiny black flies make a nuisance of themselves by flying erratically and in great numbers around potted plants, often finding their way to rubbish bins, kitchen drains, window panes, and fruit bowls. The adults feed on nectar or on nothing at all (they have very short lives), and the larvae eat mostly fungi or organic matter in damp soil – that’s why potted plants are ideal for them. Fungus gnats are largely harmless, but if their larvae became too abundant, they may start to feed on plants’ tender roots, damaging them or transmitting pathogens. Seedling ‘damping off’ is a sign of possible fungus gnat infestation. Predictably, if you search for ‘gnats’ in the internet, most pages will be focused on ‘how to get rid of’.
Fungus gnats may be an occasional headache in households, but these uninvited guests represent a minute portion of their fauna. Besides the 2,500 or so species of Sciaridae, there are more than 4,500 species in the family Mycetophilidae and numerous species from related groups. Most of these fungus gnats live in shady, damp spots under forest canopies, along water courses or wetlands – places offering ideal conditions for their larvae. These permanently moist environments may be great for gnats, but are not so good for most pollinating insects, who require warmer, drier habitats and open spaces. So plants in fungus gnat territory. such as Aspidistra spp., have to find alternatives.
Flowers of the common aspidistra are nothing to look at. Oddly shaped, fleshy and coloured with a purple-reddish hue, they emerge directly from the rhizome at ground level or are sometimes hidden underneath the litter. People may not even notice their potted aspidistra has bloomed. And no aroma wafts from this plant: only a faint musty odour that some people can’t even detect. Everything from this flower gives it a mushroom appearance, so it’s far from ideal to bees and butterflies. And there’s more to put off run-of-the-mill pollinators: to access the pollen, they have to squeeze by a large stigma (the female part of the flower) to reach the pollen-producing stamens tucked underneath; only the smallest insects can do it. You probably can see where this is going.
The common aspidistra and related species cannot self-fertilise, but their pollination mechanism remained a mystery for years. Slugs, snails, springtails and other ground-dwelling invertebrates have been suggested as potential pollen vectors, but none of these candidates were backed up by data. Enter Suetsugu & Sueyoshi (2018), who spent two years investigating the common aspidistra in Kuroshima Island, Japan, where this plant grows wild. Their efforts paid off: they recorded two species of fungus gnats covered in pollen leaving and landing on flowers, and observed the successful development of fruits in gnat-visited flowers. These observations suggest the puzzle has been resolved. The researchers proposed, reasonably, that Aspidistra have evolved flowers that look and smell like fungi, thus becoming irresistible to fungus-eating gnats.
Flies are considered the second most important group of insect pollinators after bees; house flies (Muscidae), blow flies (Calliphoridae), flesh flies (Sarcophagidae) and especially hover flies (Syrphidae) pollinate a range of crop and wild plants. Some flies are essential pollinators in high altitudes, where bees are scarce or absent. Fungus gnats are hardly thought as members of the pollinators club because they don’t seem to have what it takes: they are too small to carry a decent pollen load, their ‘hair’ (bristles) – an important pollen-carrying apparatus – are puny, and they are weak fliers. Yet, pollination by fungus gnats occurs in 20 genera of eight plant families over the world.
Fungus gnats and other small dipteran insects such as midges and drosophilid flies are diverse and abundant, but we know very little about most of them because they are difficult to identify and study in the field. Worse yet, many species are nocturnal, and the flowers they visit are inconspicuous. So just like the midge-pollinated cacao, the gnat-pollinated aspidistra suggests there are many discoveries to be made about these pesky little flies.
Today’s photos of Costa Rica come from reader Leo Glenn. His narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:
Here are some photos from my recent trip to Costa Rica. We spent most of our time on the Pacific side in the northwest region, in Guanacaste Province. The Pacific side has more distinct dry and rainy seasons, in contrast with the Caribbean side, which receives considerably more rainfall year round. Although slightly smaller in land area than the U.S. state of West Virginia, Costa Rica boasts 32 national parks, over 50 wildlife refuges, and over a dozen forest and biological reserves. This creates tension, of course, between preservation efforts and ecotourism, which is the country’s largest source of income.
The view from a higher elevation, about 20 minutes from where we stayed.
The local beach, Playa Avellanas, was a short walk from our lodging via a boardwalk that traversed a mangrove swamp, comprised mostly of White Mangrove (Laguncularia racemosa). After an earthquake in 2012, the land along the coast rose one meter, which closed off the mouth of the river, causing the water in the mangrove swamp to stagnate and kill all of the trees (thus the many dead trees in the foreground). A restoration effort was undertaken to restore the area and replant the mangroves. It appears to have been largely successful, though it will be years before the new trees mature and the ecosystem returns to something close to its pre-earthquake state.
The shallow and drier areas of the swamp were populated by several crab species, including the Racer Mangrove Crab (Goniopsis pulchra).
The forested areas on the path to the beach were dotted with numerous small burrows, inhabited by Red Land Crabs (Gecarcinus quadratus), which would freeze when approached, before slowly slinking backwards into their holes.
A juvenile Atlantic Ghost Crab (Ocypode quadrata). They were lightning fast, and very hard to photograph.
Some Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis), flying over the beach. There were quite a few more in the line. Apparently, a group of pelicans can be called a pod, a pouch, a scoop, a squadron, or, if fishing as a group, a fleet.
Although colorful butterflies were abundant, I lacked the skill, patience, and hardware to photograph them, unless, as in this instance, I got lucky when one happened to land in the swimming pool. We rescued it immediately, of course, and after a few minutes spent drying its wings, it took flight. Theona Checkerspot (Chlosyne theona).
I did manage one halfway decent photo of an Apricot Sulphur (Phoebis argante).
A Crested Caracara (Caracara plancus), described on Wikipedia as “a bold, opportunistic raptor, often seen walking around on the ground looking for food,” which is exactly what this one was doing.
A nest of Northern Warrior Wasps (Synoeca septentrionalis), in a tree outside our lodging. According to Wikipedia, “It is a swarm-founding wasp that is also eusocial, exhibiting complicated nest structure and defense mechanisms.” The nest was about 30 ft up in the tree, and without a telephoto lens (or a very long stepladder), this was the best photo I could get. Its high location in the tree was a comfort to us, being so close to our rental house. Though not a particularly aggressive species, they are reported to have a very painful sting.
Today sees the return of Robert Lang, physicist, origami master and, today, photographer. Robert’s narration is indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.
More local animals
The Los Angeles basin is a vast urban/suburban metropolis, but its natural boundaries of ocean and mountains are abrupt with sharp transitions created by water and steepness. The northern boundary is formed by the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains (collectively, the Transverse Ranges) and they rise steeply from many back yards along the range. My studio is about 20 feet from the edge of the Angeles National Forest; this gives rise to many wildlife encounters, both at the studio and on the trails that climb up from the back property line. Most of these pictures are fairly recent.
One from last fall that I’ve been saving for RWP is this California Tarantula (Aphonopelma sp.). Probably a male, because he was out and about; in the fall, the males go on walkabout looking for females (who mostly stay hidden in their burrows):
Then we turn to a couple of reptiles. The Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) is one of the most common lizards around; just walking down the front steps, I’m likely to see one (although it’s rare that they stay still enough to be photographed). They are highly variable in color, and the same lizard can appear either light or dark. In the morning, they are dark to absorb the sun’s rays; then in the afternoon, after they’ve warmed up, they lighten their skin and their lovely iridescence becomes visible:
I was pleased on a recent hike to see a Blainville’s Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma blainvillii) at an elevation of about 4000 feet. They used to be more common in the San Gabriels, but earlier in the previous century their numbers were reduced by collectors gathering them for the curio trade, and they’ve never fully come back. I really should have taken a wide-angle photo of this one; it would have been a great candidate for the “Spot the …” series, as it was so perfectly camouflaged against the sand and gravel I nearly stepped on it:
Another reptile that I’m glad I didn’t step on was this Southern Pacific Rattlesnake (Crotalus oreganus helleri), who was stretched out across the trail. He was pretty chill, though; didn’t budge as we approached, and so we gingerly stepped past. A nice set of rattles on that one!
We have three kinds of squirrels around; ground squirrels, gray squirrels, and the (introduced) Fox Squirrel (Sciurus niger). The local rattlers are happy to dine on any of them.
We also have both crows and ravens; crows are more common down in the neighborhoods, while ravens like this Common Raven (Corvus corax) dominate up in the chapparal. This one is perched on the top of one of last year’s blooms from the Whipple Yucca (Hesperoyucca whipplei):
Larger creatures sometimes come visit the meadow behind the studio. A not infrequent visitor is the coyote (Canis latrans). Although this one was (barely) within the National Forest, they come far down into the adjacent neighborhoods, where they find plentiful food in the form of dropped fruit, loose garbage, and the occasional domestic animal whose owners ill-advisedly allow them to roam free:
Another frequent large visitor is the California Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus californicus). This time of year, the bucks are in velvet, like this one. We had a very wet spring, so there is a lot of browse in the mountain canyons and not much to lure them into the meadow, but in the fall, when the acorn crop starts to fall, they’ll be visiting twice a day:
In much of California, the urban/wilderness interface usually exists in one of two states: (1) recovering from the last wildfire; (2) stocking up for the next wildfire. A year ago we had a relatively small wildfire just across the canyon; fortunately, it was a cool day with not much wind, and the fire crews held it to just a few acres:
I spent the afternoon watching the firefighters dragging hoses for hundreds of yards up the ridges while helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft dropped water and fire retardant. I am in awe of the firefighters, who were clambering up cliffs that I wouldn’t even try to scramble under the best of circumstances, while they were wearing and/or carrying 50 pounds of kit and dragging hoses. Within a few hours, they had things under control. The drifting smoke and red fire retardant gave things an almost surreal appearance as they were mopping up:
That was a year ago. One thing about the chaparral is it recovers quickly from fire (indeed, many plants rely on it), and after this spring’s wet rains, the formerly bare ground is covered in new growth, and the burned bushes have resprouted. They’re getting ready for the next fire, which is bound to happen sometime; it’s the nature of this bit of Nature.
Today we have part 2 of Tony Eales’s recent safari to Botswana (part 1 is here). Tony’s narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Botswana Safari Part II
After we left the Okavango Delta camp, we moved northeast into the Moremi Game Reserve, still mostly in the delta. Being winter, the nights were cold and mornings brisk but the days warmed up nicely. It was strange to Australian eyes to see a forest in a landscape much like Australia but with deciduous trees. There’s only one species of deciduous tree native to Australia so it looked very off to our eye. In addition, the forest looked like it had been trashed by heavy machinery and had regrown from broken trunks and suckers. Of course, the heavy machinery in question was elephants—major shapers of the habitat.
Here’s a baby begging for food from mum. There were so many baby elephants around when we were there all of them acting in the most cute and silly ways:
Moremi was perhaps my favourite place, it was varied with pools and swamps as part of the delta as well as large grasslands, forests and thickets. one shallow waterhole in particular was a haven for birdlife with two species of pelicans and African Skimmers (Rynchops flavirostris) both of which were on my bucket list for Africa. here’s a shot of a skimmer with Great White Pelicans (Pelecanus onocrotalus) in the background:
It was here that I realised that if you looked closely at most of these large waterholes, you’d see the eyes and nose of (Southern African) Nile Crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus ssp. cowiei) poking out. We also saw many out basking on the banks.
Also nearby, we got great close-up views of the famous Marabou Stork (Leptoptilos crumenifer):
Close to the Third Bridge Camp Site we saw zebra (Chapman’s ZebraEquus quagga ssp. chapmani), wildebeests (Connochaetes taurinus ssp. taurinus), ostriches (Struthio camelus ssp. australis) and a lone young spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) moving quickly through:
My son—this trip was a combined 18th and 21st present for him—was absolutely in love with the mongooses. We mainly saw Banded Mongoose (Mungos mungo ssp. ngamiensis) and Slender Mongoose (Herpestes sanguineus):
And of course, no one can leave a safari without the obligatory photo of the Lilac-breasted Roller (Coracias caudatus ssp. caudatus). A jaw-droppingly beautiful bird.
I’ll finish with a pic of a giant herd of Cape Buffalo (Syncerus caffer ssp. caffer) that we saw in amongst dead leadwood trees near sunset. It made for some stunning photos.
All the biological misconceptions we’ve discussed involve forcing preconceived beliefs onto nature. This inverts an old fallacy into a new one, which we call the reverse appeal to nature. Instead of assuming that what is natural must be good, this fallacy holds that “what is good must be natural.” It demands that you must see the natural world through lenses prescribed by your ideology. If you are a gender activist, you must see more than two biological sexes. If you’re a strict egalitarian, all groups must be behaviorally identical and their ways of knowing equally valid. And if you’re an anti-hereditarian—a blank slater who sees genetic differences as promoting eugenics and racism—then you must find that genes can have only trivial and inconsequential effects on the behavior of groups and individuals. This kind of bias violates the most important rule of science, famously expressed by Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
And, unfortunately, one of the institutions that’s succumbed to the “reverse naturalistic fallacy” is the venerable Kew Gardens in London, site of a ton of famous botanical research, including work by Darwin, who requested material from Kew. As Wikipedia notes, Kew is home to
the “largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world”.[1] Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the herbarium, one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London’s top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.
How sad, then, that Kew, bending to the ideological winds of the time, has put on an exhibit, “Queer Nature”, whose aim is to show that, yes, plants are “queer”. In so doing, it apparently hopes to show queer humans that “queerness” is instantiated in plants, too. And this is supposed to empower queer humans.
First, though, what, exactly does “queer” mean in this context? As I commented to a reader below,
Q – Queer: queer is a broad term that includes all sexual orientations and gender identities within the LGBTQ2S+ community, including those who don’t identify with any other identity in LGBTQ2S+. The term queer can be both positive and negative. Historically, queer was used as an insult, but it has been reclaimed by the LGBTQ2S+ community to self identify in a positive way.
In other word, it appears to cover all the initials.
But “queerness” is a social concept concocted by humans and has nothing to do with plants. (And I hasten to add that I see nothing wrong with queerness in humans; my point is to show that Kew is trying to impose a human concept onto nature, which is one of the points of my paper with Luana.) The Kew exhibit is at once cringe-making and patronizing.
Here’s the tweet.
The more we learn about nature, the more we uncover how wildly diverse it is.
This autumn, join us in celebrating the diversity and beauty of plants and fungi with an inspiring new festival, Queer Nature.
Click on the screenshot to read this short and misguided description from Kew, which appeared four days ago:
Here are a few quotes demonstrating what I mean:
The natural world is anything but straight-forward.
Scientists have named over 350,000 plants species and almost 150,000 fungal species but it’s impossible to find a way of classifying everything into a simple binary system.
Take flowers, for instance. Many plants have flowers with both stamen and stigma, reproductive organs that are sometimes called the ‘male’ and ‘female’ parts of the flower.
Whilst other plant species have ‘male’ and ‘female’ individuals that only grow one type of flower on a single plant. The monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana), for instance, grows with either pollen cones or seed cones.
First, note that “male” and “female” are put in scare quotes? Why? Male and female plants are similar to male and female mammals: each individual is a member of just one sex. This is like saying “humans have two sexes comprising ‘male’ and ‘female’ individuals.” Casting doubt on the sex binary much??
The fact that flowers are hermaphrodites doesn’t either buttress or denigrate “queerness”. These are hermaphrodites, and hermaphrodites are not known in humans in a form that is fertile as both male and female. (We do have some human hermaphrodites, but they are almost vanishingly rare and are never fertile as both male and female.) They are not a third sex but have bits of reproductive apparatus evolved to produce sperm and eggs. More:
Ruizia mauritiana can actually change sex depending on the temperature of the environment. In hot conditions it grows male flowers, while in cooler conditions it produces female ones.
Similarly, some species of Cycnoches orchids, better known as swan orchids, produce separate male and female flowers on the same plant, depending on how much sunlight it receives.
Temperature-dependent sex determination is known in animals (turtles are one example), and environmental determination of sex is known in other animals (the famous clownfish, in which males can become females if the alpha female dies). Again, what does this do to justify, or even mirror, queerness in humans? As far as I can see, nothing. Humans don’t have environmental determination of sex, and none of these “queer” plants or animals show the social or psychological concomitants of queer humans. They also mention fungi, which have “mating types” that can number in the hundreds, but this is the exception among organisms and not seen as “sexes” by biologists. Even if they were, would you call fungi sexually “queer”?. All vertebrates and vascular plants show male or female sexes, in plants with the male and female functions sometimes combined into one individual.
Here is where the ideology becomes clear; we’ve already learned that Kew’s use of “queer” doesn’t simply mean “odd” or “unusual”:
This autumn, we’re celebrating the diversity and beauty of plants and fungi with an inspiring new festival, Queer Nature, at Kew Gardens.
Step inside Kew’s iconic Temperate House to discover a large-scale suspended artwork at its centre.
Created by New York based artist Jeffrey Gibson, House of Spirits is an immersive installation fusing vibrant colour and pattern.
The intricately-crafted collage of printed fabrics incorporates botanical illustrations alongside language and patterns informed by Gibson’s own perspectives on queerness, and the endless diversity of plants and nature.
Gibson draws upon his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage as well as queer theory, politics and art history as part of his multi-disciplinary practice.
. . .Breaking the binary
Elsewhere in the Temperate House, visitors can discover a newly-designed garden titled Breaking the Binary, created by Patrick Featherstone in collaboration with Kew’s Youth Forum.
Sorry, but plants don’t break the binary of two sexes, male and female (see below). But wait—there’s more!
Raising queer voices
British artist and designer Adam Nathaniel Furman will design an immersive space to house a film-based installation, featuring interviews with over a dozen horticulturists, scientists, authors, drag artists and activists as they explore what Queer Nature means to them.
, , , Queer plants of the Temperate House
. . . Inside the house, you’ll find the sex-switching Ruizia mauritiana, which is now believed to be extinct in the wild. Kew is now the only place in the world with it in cultivation.
You’ll also be able to see species of Banksia, Australian wildflowers that begin as female, then shift over time to become male.
Here we have the clownfish of plants. But again, Banksia has nothing to do with human sex roles or identification.
Finally, we have the declaration that all of nature is queer:
What makes nature queer? [JAC: I’ve put the last two lines in italics to emphasize them.]
As well as refusing to conform with socially-constructed binaries that science has applied to them over the years, plants and fungi have also been used as symbols for LGBTQ+ groups throughout history.
The green carnation became a symbol for homosexuality in the early 20th century, due to Oscar Wilde’s wearing of it, at a time when being openly gay was still a criminal offence.
Since the mid-20th century, the colour lavender was used to represent gay communities across the world.
Looking at plants and fungi through a queer lens sheds a new light on the complexity and infinite possibilities of nature, highlighting the vital importance of conserving biodiversity and protecting the natural world.
That’s why it’s the perfect time to celebrate Queer Nature. Why not join us this autumn and discover the true diversity of the natural world?
I don’t identify as queer, but I bet if I did I would find this infinitely patronizing. You don’t need to find “queer” plants in nature, which aren’t even close to being “queer” in the human sense, to justify your existence as a queer human and your demands for and rights of moral and legal equality. What Kew is doing here is trying to tell queer people that they shouldn’t feel bad because, after all, there are queer plants. And if queerness can be seen in plants, it must be okay!. How dumb and patronizing can you get? And shame on Kew for such a pandering and biologically inaccurate presentation.
Finally, I’ll give the take of one reader, a botanist, who wrote the following to me (quoted with permission):
At the Kew link, they bang on about the ‘diversity’ of plant sexual systems, as a way of implying that plants are ‘queer’. In addition to the commandeering of words like “diversity” and “queer” to mean other things, this really makes me both angry and sad. Sad, first, to see such a venerated institution as Kew go the way of Lysenko, joining other scientific organisations on this issue that you’ve been drawing attention to. Angry, because they seem to be misrepresenting plant sex as something it isn’t—for political purposes.
Their chief claim here is a relatively mild one, but totally false: that plant sex isn’t binary. The implication is, I suppose, that botany supports transgenderism and homosexuality.
Except plant sex IS binary.
First, all land plants are anisogamous, producing two and only two types of gamete: sperms and eggs. Binary.
Second, every sexually-produced plant embryo results from fusion of one sperm and one egg. Binary.
In land plants, it’s the gametophyte generation that produces gametes. In seed plants the gametophytes (male pollen grains and female embryo sacs) are unisexual and remain so throughout their short lives. Binary.
Of course, the plants most people are familiar with, the roses and cabbages in the garden, are sporophytes, not gametophytes. Sporophytes produce spores, not gametes, and in most plants, spores are sexed, anisospory. In seed plants, they’re always so, either male or female. Binary.
Most seed plant sporophytes produce both kinds of spores. That doesn’t make them queer or non-binary; they’re just hermaphrodites—like many other living things—producing both types (binary) of spore instead of just one. There are many ways that hermaphrodite sporophytes separate their male spore and female spore production in both space (herkogamy) and time (dichogamy).
But in the end, whether plant sex is binary or not says nothing about what humans do, still less about what humans should do. Sex involves two gametes because sexual organisms are diploids, and usually these gametes are differentiated into male and female.
Today we have another photo-and-story piece from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior. His narrative is indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:
Flavour of the month
Many things can be ‘plain vanilla’, but vanilla is not one of them. This spice comprises a complex mixture of vanillin and other organic compounds that produce its distinctive flavour and aroma. The main source of vanilla, the flat-leaved vanilla orchid (Vanilla planifolia), is native to Central and South America but grown commercially in tropical areas around the world; Madagascar is by far the largest producer, followed by Indonesia.
Vanillin is found in the orchid’s ‘beans’ (botanically speaking, its fruits), and it’s not easy to get. The vanilla orchid grows as a vine that can extend for 20 to 50 metres, so it needs supporting structures to spread out. In its native range, the vanilla flower is pollinated by bees; elsewhere, it is hand-pollinated (you can watch how this is done). The operation has to be quick because a flower remains receptive for about 24 hours. If not pollinated, it wilts and falls to the ground. The beans take six to nine months to mature; when ready, they are hand-picked, dipped in hot water and dried for up to a month. So it’s not surprising that such a labour-intensive crop doesn’t come cheap: as spices go, only saffron costs more by unit of weight.
So how come your run-of-the-mill vanilla ice-cream or cake is not particularly dear? Because about 99% of all vanilla products (food, beverages, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals) are flavoured with synthetic vanillin, which can be obtained from wood pulp, clove oil, coal tar and other petrochemicals, and it’s about 20 times cheaper than natural vanilla. Chefs, bakers and food buffs debate the organoleptic differences between natural and synthetic vanilla. Whatever their verdict, the food industry is under growing pressure to reduce artificial flavours from their products, so production of natural vanilla remains strong and tends to increase.
The growing value of natural vanilla is promising to small farmers in Madagascar and other developing countries, but there are clouds on the horizon. Almost all natural vanilla comes from a single species cultivated as a monoculture in a few areas around the globe, and all plants are obtained by cloning (cuttings). These distribution and propagation patterns promote genetic uniformity, which is a risk to vanilla production. A simplified and impoverished genetic base makes the crop vulnerable to diseases and pests, which are similar threats to those hanging over the genetically homogeneous bananas available to European and American consumers.
One way to reduce these risks is in-situ conservation, that is, the protection of flat-leaved vanilla orchids in their places of origin. These areas are natural gene banks, potential sources of genetic material that could be incorporated into crops to help them adjust to new environmental stresses. And here, bees may have a lot to contribute.
In the wild, flat-leaved vanilla orchids grow in isolation deep inside mature forests, climbing from one tree to another. When plants reach a certain size, they produce only a handful of flowers. A pollinator needs special skills to locate a flower in the chaotic, crowded environment of a tropical jungle. This is a job for orchid or euglossine bees (tribe Euglossini). Females gather pollen and nectar like any ordinary bee, but males spend a great deal of their time collecting volatile compounds, primarily from orchids; they can fly for dozens of kilometres in pursuit of the right scent. Males store a variety of these chemicals, and the resulting aromatic bouquet advertises their prowess to females. Many orchids take advantage of this perfume obsession: they are especially adapted to transferring pollinia (pollen packets) to the bodies of visiting male orchid bees.
Orchid bees are the main, or possibly the only, pollinators of the flat-leaved vanilla orchid, although we have only sketchy details about specific species. These bees play another role in the orchid’s life, one that has been recognised only recently: as seed dispersers.
Seed dispersal is as important as pollination. By having its seeds spread out over large distances, a plant does not have to compete with its seedlings. Dispersed offspring also has a better chance of escaping predators, diseases or environmental misadventures that may befall the parent plant. Herbivores play a big part in dispersal: the seeds in the fruits they eat will end up in a steamy, fertilised pile somewhere. But mammals and birds are not tempted by most orchids because their fruits are not particularly nutritious. It makes no difference for most orchids; their seeds are easily uplifted and dispersed by the wind: for some species, 3 million seeds weigh as little as 1 g.
But things are different for Vanilla spp. and a few other orchid genera: they produce fleshy fruit whose seeds are protected by a hardened coat and not easily carried by the wind. These characteristics suggest zoochory (seed dispersal by animals), and indeed rodents and marsupials eat the fruits of flat-leaved vanilla orchids, later passing the seeds. Karremans et al. (2023) discovered that some male orchid bees and female stingless bees (tribe Meliponini) join the feast: they take seeds away when the fruits split open naturally. So the flat-leaved vanilla orchid is likely to be part of a select group of plants with mellitochorous seeds, i.e., dispersed by bees. Mellitochory is not common, but this could reflect our lack of knowledge more than rarity of the phenomenon. Most recorded cases involve seeds hitching a ride when stingless bees collect resin or other nest-building material. Later these seeds fall off or are chucked out of the bees’ nests, germinating on the ground.
To summarise: there’s a global craving for natural vanilla, which is extracted mostly from one species of orchid whose populations are vulnerable to genetic homogeneity. Protecting native orchid habitats would allow bees to give a hand by pollinating flowers and dispersing their seeds, thus helping safeguard commercial flat-leaved vanilla against future vicissitudes. This intricate tale is anything but plain vanilla.
