Leader for today’s Ramble: Linda Chafin
Authors of today’s report: Linda Chafin, Don Hunter
The photos that appear in this report were taken by Don Hunter unless otherwise credited. Photos may be enlarged by clicking them with a mouse or tapping on your screen. Not all of Don’s photos from today’s ramble made it into the ramble report, so be sure to check out his Facebook album at this link.
Nature Ramble rainy day policy: We show up at 9:00am, rain or shine. If it’s raining, we will meet and socialize in the conservatory (bring your own coffee); if there is a break in the rain, we’ll go outside and do a little rambling.
Today’s emphasis: Seeking what we find along the White and Orange Trails
Number of Ramblers today: 28
Announcements:
Emily is recruiting volunteers to supply refreshments for the opening of the “Tiny Worlds” exhibit on Sunday, August 18. Please email Emily at egenecarr@me.com if you can bring any of these items: fruit, nuts, cookies, crackers, cheese, dessert bars, and tiny sandwiches.
Linda introduced Emily James, newly named Horticulture and Plant Records Manager, who will be supervising the curators in the Upper and Lower Shade Gardens, the Dunson Native Flora Garden, and the Heritage Garden. Emily hopes to have a new, full-time curator for Dunson by the end of August. She has lots of good ideas for putting a new face on Dunson, including removing much of the out-of-control Leatherwood, making the trails safer for disabled visitors, installing new signage, and replacing species that have disappeared over the years. Volunteers are needed to accomplish much of what needs to be done. Please email her at eejames@uga.edu if you’d like to help. She asked that no one start pulling weeds or invasives without first signing up with her.
The community UGArden (next door to the Botanical Garden) needs your help! Kubota Tractors awarded them a $10,000 grant and now there is an opportunity to turn it into a $50,000 grant. They already produce a yearly average of 15,000 pounds of organically managed produce that is distributed by partner organizations to Athens families facing food insecurity. This grant would expand their ability to serve more people. Voting instructions are at this link. Click on Georgia on the map. Scroll down and select UGARDEN. Enter your email address when prompted and they will send a verification code to your email. Enter code on the webpage and then use the pull down menu to register your vote! (They actually encourage voting every day.)
Bob Ambrose announced he will have a multimedia presentation “Wondrous Forms –
A Trek through Deep Time with Gaia,” in the Garden’s Visitor Center, Gardenside Room (down the ramp from the conservatory), on August 11, 2-3 pm. From the web page: “Wondrous Forms is an uplifting presentation that describes and celebrates the history of life on Earth with poetry and images. To develop a perspective on Earth’s antiquity, it uses the framework of a journey across the Earth scaled to geologic time. Poems and visuals grounded in the natural sciences bring the different ages of Gaia back to life. Key events in Earth’s four eons are featured, from the early emergence of life through the evolution of complex life forms and landscapes into the present age. The goal is to nurture a sense of wonder and connection to the immense journey of life.”
The Great Southeast Pollinator Census is coming soon! Click here for information on how to participate (as little as 15 minutes! it’s up to you) and tell one kind of insect from another. It’s a lot of fun and a worthy piece of citizen science.
Today’s Reading: We skipped a reading this Thursday in order to get out on the trail ahead of the heat, but Bob’s announcement inspires me to post this well known, but always moving, final sentence from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms, or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Show-and-Tell:
Carla brought a dead Eastern Cicada Killer Wasp, which is by far the biggest and scariest wasp in our area, up to 1.5 inches long. Its large size, clear amber-colored wings, and vivid yellow markings make this an easy wasp to identify. Females sting and paralyze Annual Cicadas which they then stuff into the cells of their nests for the larvae to eat. Both females and males are very active, cruising around looking for cicadas and nesting sites (females) and defending nest sites (males). Females sting humans only when handled. Males have a false stinger and are incapable of stinging. Adults live on nectar and other sweet plant juices.
Myrna brought a cluster of Flowering Spurge flowers. While the flowers look superficially like a typical five-petaled flower, the story is more complicated than that. What appears to be a single flower is actually a cluster of tiny green male and female flowers surrounded by five green nectar glands, each with a showy white flange that attracts pollinators. Inside the cluster there are a dozen or more male flowers, each with only one stamen, and a single female flower consisting of just one pistil. This odd flower arrangement is peculiar to plants in the genus Euphorbia, and is called a cyathium (sigh – aith – ee – um)….”endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful…”
Today’s Route: From the Children’s Garden Arbor, we passed through the Forest Play area and took the White Trail Spur downhill to the Orange Trail Spur and followed it to the river, where we took a left on the Orange Trail, following it downriver to the intersection with the Purple Trail. We made a brief diversion out into the beaver pond on the boardwalk, before returning to the Purple Trail, and heading back to the Visitor Center and some very welcome air conditioning. Heat index: 99 degrees.
Today’s Observations:
Don spotted a Versute Sharpshooter leafhopper in the plantings near the Arbor. Sharp-shooters have piercing-sucking mouthparts that they use to suck fluid from plant leaves. The nutrients are removed from the fluids in their digestive tracts and the remaining liquid is forcibly expelled from their bodies, earning the name of Sharpshooter.
After two months of drought, it was a pleasure to see the fungi that recent rains have brought out along the White Trail Spur Trail. This is a species of Amanita called Blusher.
Ochre Bracket fungi, upper surface (left) and lower pore surface (right)
A trio of Golden-gilled Gerronema mushroom grows in clusters on downed and dead branches of hardwood trees.
We were surprised to find Black Nightshade, a member of the Solanaceae Family, along the shady White Trail Spur. This family, sometimes called the Nightshade Family, includes a host of crop plants (including tomato, potato, pepper, eggplant, and tomatillo) as well as toxic or psychotropic plants such as Deadly Nightshade, Jimson Weed, Tobacco, and Belladonna. Black Nightshade is native to eastern North America. Its ripe black berries are eaten by birds but the green, unripe berries are toxic.
Turning left onto the Orange Trail Spur, we walked across the lower slope and upper floodplain, finding a mix of upland and wetland plant species in flower or fruit or being eaten by insects.
The ubiquitous Verbesinas: Yellow Crownbeard (left) with opposite leaves and Common Wingstem (right) with alternate leaves and relatively narrower leaves. Both have narrow wings of tissue on their mid- and upper stems and both are host plants for the caterpillars (below) of Silvery Checkerspot butterflies.
False Nettle is false only in the sense that it doesn’t have stinging hairs like the “true” nettles. Both this species and the stinging nettles are in the Nettle Family (Urticaceae). Like the Stinging Wood Nettle which occurs elsewhere in the Garden’s floodplain, False Nettle is a larval host plant for Eastern Comma (left) and Red Admiral (right) butterflies, below.
Lizard’s Tail is a common wetland species throughout most of eastern North America. It forms a dense mat of rhizomes and out-competes even invasive plants, making it an excellent native choice for wetland restoration projects. Gracefully drooping spikes of tiny white flowers bloom in the spring and early summer.
Less than a quarter inch long, this middle instar of a Saddleback Caterpillar can still pack a mighty punch when it stings. Not at all picky about its host, Saddlebacks have been seen eating plants in more than 41 plant families. It is the larva of a small brown moth native to eastern North America.
This shot of an Arrow-shaped Micrathena orbweaver spider reminds me of Lakshmi, one of the many-armed Hindu goddesses.
Shrubby Yellowcrest is a member of the Loosestrife Family native to Texas, Mexico, and Central America south to Argentina, where it has been used for shamanic purposes as a “sun opener.” It is planted in the International Garden and has spread to this lower slope. More info on its psychoactivity is available here.
Suddenly, Autumn Fern is everywhere – or so it seems. I’ve been hearing Atlanta plant folks complain about this species for years as a major invasive in city parks. Now I get it! We’ve begun to see it on every ramble in all different parts of the Garden. Its many, many spores are released from a great many sori (right) on the undersides of the fronds and carried far and wide by the wind. If it is sprayed or dug up wherever it is growing as soon as possible by Garden staff, we just might be able to get out ahead of this invasion.
Dodder, also known as Strangleweed and Devil’s Guts, is a group of about 100 species of parasitic flowering plants found throughout the temperate, subtropical, and tropical regions of the world. Dodder plants lack chlorophyll and roots and are therefore completely dependent on their host plants for water and nutrients. A Dodder plant starts life as a seed that germinates on the soil surface and sends out leafless stems and a few short roots. The stem quickly begins searching for a host plant, following chemical sensory cues. Once it selects and attaches to a host, the roots wither away, the stems begin to twine around the host, and tiny pegs (right), called haustoria, sink into the vascular system of the host plant, diverting water and nutrients away from the host. Dodder is a much feared agricultural weed in many areas of the globe; fortunately the nine species that occur in Georgia are natives not known to prey on crop plants.
While photographing the Bur Cucumber vine (left), Don noticed a group of tiny, coppery insect eggs on the underside of a leaf. Bill has taken them home to rear them in his lab and will report back on what emerges.
One of these days I’ll count the number of vine species growing in the Garden’s floodplain – it will be a long list. Jackson-briar, a high-climbing vine in the genus Smilax, is in flower now, an unusual sight at eye-level since these vines typically flower in high the tops of trees. Unless they are growing on porches, a common practice in Athens’s older neighborhoods where the evergreen leaves provide shade in the summer and decoration at Christmastime.
While zooming in on the Jackson-briar, Don spotted this caterpillar, possibly a cutworm or Dart moth caterpillar.
A Virginian Tiger Moth caterpillar munching its way to the tip of a Yaupon twig.
At last, Cranefly Orchids! There is a lot to say about these wonderful little orchids and Dale summed it up best in a ramble report from July 25, 2019 (lightly edited): “Ramblers are most familiar with the Cranefly Orchid in fall and winter, when each plant is visible as a single, oval leaf (2-4 inches long) rising directly from an underground corm. The leaf is pleated, dark green, and dotted with black warts on the top surface, and a rich velvety purple on the lower surface. The leaf appears in the fall and overwinters, photosynthesizing via the sunlight that shines through the bare canopy. After the canopy trees leaf out in the spring, the orchid leaf withers and disappears. Then in late July or early August, one leafless flowering stem appears, bearing up to 40 tan to brownish-purple flowers. The spike-like flower cluster is really hard to spot amongst the brown leaf litter from which it emerges. The delicate flower, with its thread-like stalk and narrow spreading petals and sepals, must have reminded an imaginative someone of a cranefly (the genus name, Tipularia, is also the genus name of the Cranefly, an insect). As with most orchids, Cranefly Orchid pollen is packaged in a sack called a pollinium, each containing thousands of pollen grains. Every Cranefly flower has 4 pollinia. The flowers are pollinated by noctuid moths, and when a noctuid moth visits the flower for nectar it bumps into the pollinia, gluing them to its eye. The pollinia will be transferred to the next flower the moth visits, where it gets scraped off and the contained pollen fertilizes thousands of tiny orchid seeds.”
If the idea of pollination-by-eyeball seems a bit far-fetched, check out these photos taken last week by Bill Sheehan.
Cranefly Orchid pollinia stuck to the eyes of a noctuid moth
As the moth probes the spur petal for nectar, the pollinia are stuck to its compound eyes. Ideally, the pollinia are then rubbed off on the stigma of a flower on another Cranefly Orchid plant, effecting cross-pollination.
For more on Cranefly Orchids, Mary Anne Borg’s The Natural Web has some great photos and life history info.
We made a short detour onto the beaver marsh boardwalk to catch the Water Hemlock, above, in flower. Its domed inflorescence, called an umbel, is a good indicator that it belongs to the Carrot Family, along with many other culinary species including Parsley, Parsnip, Cumin, Coriander/Cilantro, Fennel, Dill, Anise, Asafoetida, Caraway, Celery, Chervil, and Celeriac. Many lovely wildflowers belong to this family as well, such as Meadow Parsnip, Angelica, Lovage, Golden Alexander, Queen Anne’s Lace, Rattlesnake Master, and Sweet Cicely. Water Hemlock has been called the most toxic plant in North America. For livestock who browse this plant, death is nearly instantaneous. For humans, convulsions and vomiting are followed by death – or life with a permanently damaged central nervous system. The toxic ingredient is called cicutoxin and is present in all parts of the plant at all seasons of the year, but is concentrated in the root. There is no antidote for cicutoxin poisoning, only palliative care. This plant ain’t fooling around! Water Hemlock, a native of North America, looks almost identical to Poison Hemlock, a native of Eurasia. Poison Hemlock is equally poisonous to both humans and livestock, and is probably the plant used to execute Socrates in 399 BC. Both Water Hemlock and Poison Hemlock occur in wetlands throughout Georgia. Black Swallowtail butterflies use the North American species in this family as host plants for their caterpillars, even the toxic species. The caterpillars sequester the toxic chemicals they ingest from the host plant and pass the toxins along to the adults who also become distasteful to the birds that would otherwise eat them.
We spotted lots of mushrooms on our way back to the Visitor’s Center along the Purple Trail and hoped for more rain to bring the Chantarelles along.
Above, left to right: American Slender Caesar, an unidentified species of Amanita, and Smooth Chanterelle.
Three views of Golden-gilled Bolete
Three views of Salmon Milkcap
SUMMARY OF OBSERVED AND DISCUSSED SPECIES
Eastern Cicada Killer wasp Sphecius speciosus
Flowering Spurge Euphorbia corollata
Versute Sharpshooter leafhopper Graphocephala versuta
Blusher Amanita Amanita rubescens
Ochre Bracket fungi Trametes ochracea
Golden-gilled Gerronema Gerronema strombodes
Eastern Black Nightshade Solanum ptycanthum, synonym Solanum emulans
Jack-in-the-Pulpit Arisaema triphyllum
Common Wingstem Verbesina alternifolia
Yellow Crownbeard Verbesina occidentalis
Silvery Checkerspot butterfly Chlosyne nycteis
False Nettle Boehmeria cylindrica
Eastern Comma butterfly Polygonia comma
Red Admiral butterfly Vanessa atalanta
Lizard’s Tail Saururus cernuus
Saddleback Caterpillar Moth Acharia stimulea
Arrow-shaped Micrathena Orbweaver Micrathena sagitata
Shrubby Yellowcrest Heimia salicifolia
Autumn Fern Dryopteris erythrosora
Dodder Cuscuta sp.
Bur Cucumber Sicyos angulatus
Jackson-briar Smilax smallii
Cutworm or Dart Moth caterpillar Family Noctuinae
Virginian Tiger Moth Spilosoma virginica
Yaupon Holly Ilex vomittoria
Cranefly Orchid Tipularia discolor
Wrinkled Cap Psathyrella Psathyrella rugocephala
Joro Spider Trichonephila clavata
Geometer moth caterpillar Family Geometridae
Water Hemlock Cicuta maculata
Poison Hemlock Conium maculata
Black Swallowtail butterfly Papilio polyxenes
American Slender Caesar amanita Amanita jacksonii
Unidentified white amanita mushroom Amanita sp.
Smooth Chanterelle Cantharellus lateritius
Golden-gilled Bolete Phylloporus pelletieri
Salmon Milkcap Lactarius salmoneus