By Susan Sprout

Don’t you just love the spring? Migratory birds passing thru or staying, plants poking up, leaf and flower buds plumping and ready to pop! I cannot help getting excited at the birth and regrowth of the plants and trees here in Northcentral Pennsylvania. My curiosity about plants, their names, and lifestyles (how they live and survive) doesn’t just stop when I leave Pennsylvania. Oh, no, it probably gets worse – so many new ones to discover when traveling! I would like to introduce you to a new one with the remarkable “super power” of greening up again after being dried up and crunchy.

Appropriately named, Resurrection Fern (Pleopeltis polypoidioides) is one of as many as 1300 different species of plants that can tolerate extreme desiccation of their tissues during the absence of rainfall, full-blown droughts, or totally freezing. New studies are identifying more of them. Researchers will undoubtedly continue learning from these plants’ genetic make-up how the molecules they create in normal growth are used against dehydration-induced stress. With fluctuating weather patterns creating changes that damage many food crops, knowledge of how the sugars and lipids of resurrection plants keep them alive and growing may be useful in some way. One protein, dehydrin, allows for the folding up of cell walls in a way that can be easily reversed.

The Resurrection Ferns I found were a grey-brown, curled-up mass on the huge spreading branches of a Live Oak In Fort Myers, Florida. They are called epiphytes or “air plants” and live on tree bark in the south, starting in Virginia. They are not considered parasitic because they get their nutrients for growth from dust and rainwater on the outside of the tree bark. Sometimes, lichens and moss colonize tree branches first before the tiny air-born spores of the fern move in and start to grow. Careful not to detach the whole plant, I pulled off three dead-looking fronds for a closer look and decided to experiment with one of them by placing it in a bowl of water. Checking throughout the day as the frond slowly unfurled, I noticed that the undersides of it had been curled up over the top, exposing them first to any rainwater. Smart! After being in water overnight, it was totally back to its soft, green fern leaf self. You can see the results on the photo I took.

This species of Resurrection Fern is a neotropical native of the warmer parts of the Americas and southern Africa. It does not grow in Pennsylvania currently. It did and it may again, but not at this time.

Fossil remains have been found dating it back to about 300 million years ago. One reference called its existence “a triumph of adaptive evolution.” It can tolerate the loss of 95% of its cellular water content and exist that way for many years, then be back to normal after a few hours of rehydration. Amazing! 

By Susan Sprout

The sunny and bright-blue Thursday afternoon last week had me convinced – spring had sprung! Exploring creekside to see which plants were erupting from sand tucked around the beach rocks, I was amazed and delighted by an aerial bombardment of the riffles there. Yes! And I made all the appropriate vocalizations to go along with that surprising display – a downward “eeeerow” and an explosive “bsssh” when contact was made with the water’s surface! Hundreds of tiny female insects were diving, submerging, and letting go of yellowish egg sacs emerging from their backsides. Had to find out more about them.

I already knew about types of insects that live underwater because I have tied flies for fishing that mimicked various forms of “aquatic” insects. They live, eating and changing through their life stages, sometimes for several years, before they swim or crawl or fly out of the water all grown up and ready to mate. Obviously, the ones I saw had completed that last step and were seeding the creek with the next generation. For a while, I thought maybe the flights were a kamikaze-type with no survivors. Soon after, as I kept watching, the flying insects became swimming insects, landing on shore to sit on rocks in the sun. Were they resting before the next flight or had they completed their missions and would die there? Time for photos!

It turns out those ten to twenty millimeter long insects are (or were) members of the Leuctridae Family of Stoneflies. This family consists of over 390 species found on all continents of the Northern Hemisphere. So tiny! Their slender transparent wings didn’t just fold across each other down their backs to lie flat, but were cylindrical and appeared to wrap around the sides of their bodies. They are commonly known as Rolled-wing Stoneflies, also Needleflies or Willowflies. Adults develop in early spring unlike some other kinds of stoneflies that make their transitions later in the spring and summer. The adults I saw looked light-colored in the air as they flited toward the creek from their resting places on nearby tree branches. Once on the rocks, they appeared dark brown or black with their wing veins showing nicely.

I have never seen the yellow-colored larval forms of Rolled-wing Stoneflies. Illustrations show they are very thin for slithering between layers of leaves piled up underwater. They are considered “shredding detritivores” because they pull apart decaying leaves and gather nutrients that grow upon them, like fungus, algae, and bacteria. I have touched leaves submerged for long periods of time and found them covered with a slippery film. That must be what the larvae eat.

The adults are not very strong fliers according to some resources. I was able to snatch one out of the air as she flew by me. That was when I looked under her wings and discovered the egg sac on her backside!

By Susan Sprout

It’s Sphagnum Moss, for Pete’s sake! And when it has been decayed and dried, it is called “peat moss.” I found some, alive and well, growing in quite a few places in my lawn and wondered if living on what used to be an old creek bank had anything to do with the moss’s being comfortable (successful and expanding) there. I found out that some species of sphagnum do grow in small patches in drier conditions, getting required moisture from local rainfall. But mostly, they live in wet bogs, coniferous forests, and moist tundra. There may be as many as 380 species growing worldwide. Peat bogs occur in almost every country of the world and on all of the continents, where they account for nearly half of the world’s wetlands. With some ranging as deep as fifty feet, bogs cover 3% of the world’s surface. According to various resources, they can store an amazing 30% to 44% of the earth’s soil carbon.

Sphagnum mosses are a true moss (Phylum Bryophyta) that have no internal vessels for carrying water or nutrients, and are therefore limited in height. At the top of a plant is a dense cluster of young leafy branches. Small leaves that gather a majority of the plant’s energy do not have a mid-rib. They are made up of two kinds of cells – small, living, green ones that photosynthesize and larger, structural dead cells that have a huge water holding ability. Sphagnum can hold from sixteen to twenty-five times its dry weight, depending on the species.

Sphagnum is also non-flowering and reproduces by spores that form in capsules about a half inch above the ground. When matured and dried, the built-up tension within the capsule blows the lid off, dispersing minute spores (50 microns) in a vortex ring that travels at a speed of twelve feet per second. The donut-shaped spore cloud, similar to the smoke rings produced by cannon fire and cigar smokers, has been verified by high-speed photography to carry them upwards to heights of four to eight inches. Just what they need in order to catch the breeze for a good, long flight! On landing, the spores produce tiny, thread-like filaments that will bud and grow into more leafy moss plants. The plants especially in bogs can also reproduce by fragmentation. When a person or an animal slogs through, breaking apart the mosses and distributing the pieces, they float away and keep on growing. New plants eventually bury old plants. The acidic and watery and low oxygen conditions slow down the process of decomposition of the dead plants that keep being pushed down and compacted by what is growing above. Layer after layer of this slow buildup creates peat moss at the rate of about a millimeter a year. Carbon from the atmosphere captured and locked into the sphagnum’s tissues by photosynthesis makes peat bogs the largest terrestrial store of carbon in the world. The opposite occurs, of course, when people mine, drain, and dig up the peat bogs which have taken thousands of years to form. It adds a whopping two billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which is 5% of the carbon total yearly.

Peat bogs provide habitat for a wide variety of peatland plants that like acidic living conditions – wild orchids, carnivorous plants, huckleberries, cranberries, as well as for plants that need a stable and dependable water supply like black spruce and hemlock seedlings. Turtles, frogs, insects, birds, benefit, as well. Twigs of acid-loving shrubs that grow in or near the bogs provide browse for deer, rabbits, and moose in the north. Muskrats and beavers and their predators visit, too. In the United States, about one-third of the country’s endangered and threatened species live in wetlands such as bogs. With low rates of decay, botanists and scientists that study weather patterns can look at preserved plant fragments and pollen to figure out past environments.

For more information, please check out the following:
            World Wetlands Day instituted by the United Nations, and celebrated every February 2nd. (I should have written this article two weeks ago.)
             SWAMP Sustainable Wetlands Adaptation and Mitigation Program, a joint program through the Center for International Forestry Research, US Forest Service, Michigan Tech and Oregon State University.

By Susan Sprout

A “Cigar Tree” or Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) used to grow in a yard along my route to and from elementary school. We kids loved it and pretended “smoking” the long, bean-like seed pods if we were lucky enough to find some that had fallen to the ground. Kids! What can I say?
Now that the Catalpas have lost their large six to twelve inch leaves, you can easily look up and identify them by the “cigars” that have been left hanging there until springtime. Botanists use the name “silique” when referring to this type of dry fruit that splits in half between the two chambers where the seeds develop. The slender siliques range in length from ten to twenty inches. When pulled apart, the revealed seeds are flat with papery wings at each end and fringed with fine hairs – perfect for wind dispersal.

This particular species of Catalpa is the northernmost New World example of its tropical family – Bignoniaceae or Trumpet-creeper Family which has about 700 different flowering plants and trees in it that are mostly native to warmer places than Pennsylvania! Northern Catalpas can grow as tall as sixty feet with branches spanning from twenty to forty feet. The perfect shade tree for a large yard. Their dense foliage provides great shelter for birds when it rains. In late spring, large bunches of white trumpet-shaped flowers with purple spots and stripes inside entice hummingbirds and bees in to pollinate them.

Early settlers planted Catalpa for its straight-grained wood that was good for fence posts, RR ties, telephone poles, and furniture. It is a fast grower topping twenty feet in ten years and blooming in about three years. Its important medicinal uses back then were for bronchial problems and swellings. Pharmacological research today has shown that some tree parts have diuretic properties. 

Both Catalpas, Northern and Southern species, are host trees of the Catalpa Sphinx Moth (Ceratomia catalpa) that lays eggs on the leaves. The caterpillars grow nice and fat feasting on the leaves…so juicy and plentiful that people, especially in the southern parts of their range, plant lots of Catalpas in order to have plenty of “Catalpa worms” to bait their hooks when fishing for Largemouth bass.