Cloning Plant Species for the Future

  • Biologists plant cloned Monkshood starts. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Lots of people worry about the extinction of animal species, but plant conservationists say plants are even more threatened than animals. People are starting to go to great lengths to protect them.
There are banks set up to save seeds and large-scale efforts to educate people about threats to plants. Researchers, park biologists, and others have teamed up in one state to save a type of wildflower. Julie Grant
reports:

Transcript

Lots of people worry about the extinction of animal species. But plant conservationists
say plants are even more threatened than animals. People are starting to go to great
lengths to protect them. There are banks set up to save seeds and large-scale efforts to
educate people about threats to plants. Researchers, park biologists, and others have
teamed up in one state to save a type of wildflower. Julie Grant reports:


Biologist Mike Johnson is trying to walk carefully. He’s balancing a tray of plastic
containers while hiking down damp, sun-dappled cliffs. Each container holds a few starts
of northern monkshood. These wildflowers have only been found in four states.
Johnson is in Gorge Park, one of only three places in Ohio where monkshood have been
found:


“And, in Gorge Metropark they only exist in one area, and that makes them very
vulnerable to both natural and human induced impacts.”


People who walked the Gorge in the 1980s remember seeing thousands of the blue-
hooded wildflowers. But by 2000, there were only 13 of the plants left here. Johnson
says they were being killed by the salt used to melt ice and snow on a recently built
highway. People dug a ditch to divert melted salt that washed off the road. The monkshood have
done a little better since then. There’s now a stand with 190 of them, but
conservationists want to make sure this wildflower survives long term. Today Johnson is
planting new monkshood starts on the opposite side of the River, away from the
highway:


“So the goal is to establish satellite populations throughout the Gorge Metropark, so if
for some reason they were to die out in one area, they wouldn’t die out in the park
altogether.”


You might think that Johnson and other plant people could just collect seeds from the
surviving monkshood in order to grow new plants, but the director of conservation at
the Holden Arboretum says seeds aren’t reliable enough. They often don’t grow into
plants. Brian Parsons says that when the monkshood population started to decline, the
Arboretum started looking for new ways to preserve the plant’s genetic diversity:


“The only true way to capture that is to clone the plants, so we made the recommendation
to investigate cloning because scientific literature indicated that plant potentially had the
capacity to respond to that type of propogation.”


The Cincinnati Zoo plant research program specializes in plant cloning. So it cloned the
monkshood that Mike Johnson and another biologist are planting today.


Down in the gorge, they use a trowel to dig around in the rocky soil. They’re looking for
planting conditions that will give the monkshood the best chance to survive:


“Literally, that, over there is perfect. There’s not full sunlight. The trees above are
filtering out a lot of it. Just a little sunlight is getting down to the bottom and you’ve got
cool, clear springs. And even though we have all the surrounding development, there are
still springs in the gorge that are fairly uncontaminated from urban runoff and pollution.”


Water drips onto the biologists from the overhanging rock formations. They plant a
couple of monkshoods right in the crevices of the rocks. The leaves are reminiscent of a
buttercup. They are in the same family of plants. They’re not in bloom now. In the
spring, the delicate blue flowers remind some people of a religious hood. That’s how the
plant got its name.


Once Johnson puts these small monkshood starts in the soil, it’s hard to distinguish them
from the other ground-cover. That’s not a bad thing. Johnson says it’s best if people don’t
know exactly where to find the rare northern monkshood:


Grant: “You think people would poach them or something?”


Johnson: “Yeah. Yeah. It’s possible. We don’t generally try to advertise their location.
Anytime something’s rare, it’s valuable and somebody might want to take it.”


Plant specialists believe each plant species provides a purpose in nature, and might hold
some promise for pharmaceuticals or some other use. They’re just not sure yet what
people can learn from the northern monkshood. That’s why they want to make sure it
survives.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

The Foibles of Suburban Lawn Care

  • Although a well-manicured lawn offers certain benefits... not everyone thinks it's worth the effort. (Photo by Ed Herrmann)

One of the great rituals in suburban America is mowing the lawn. A manicured lawn seems to say that the house is well cared for, that it belongs to the neighborhood. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Ed Herrmann wonders whether this obsession for the perfect lawn is worth the effort:

Transcript

One of the great rituals in suburban America is mowing the lawn. A
manicured lawn seems to say that the house is well cared for, that it belongs
to the neighborhood. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Ed
Herrmann wonders whether this obsession with the perfect lawn is worth the
effort:


(sound of evening insects)


It’s a late summer evening and at last I can go outside and enjoy the
sounds of the neighborhood. There’s a little breeze, the air is cooler. The
chorus of insects is soothing, gentle but insistent, an ancient throbbing
resonance. Much better than during the day…


(roar of lawn machines)


Summer days in the suburbs are the time of assault, when people attack their
lawns with powerful weapons from the chemical and manufacturing
industries. Anyone who uses the words “quiet” and “suburbs” in the same
sentence has never been to a suburb, at least not in summer.


It takes a lot of noise to maintain a lawn. Besides the mower, you’ve got edgers, trimmers,
leaf blowers, weed whackers, core aerators, little tractors, big tractors, slitting
machines. I don’t know whatever happened to rakes and hand clippers. One
thing’s for sure. This quest for lawn perfection wouldn’t be possible without
the industrial revolution.


(machines stop)


So where did we get the idea that a house should be surrounded by a field of
uniform grass kept at the same height?


Well, with apologies to the Queen, I’m afraid we must blame the British. It
seems that, along with our language, our imperial ambitions and our
ambivalent morals, America also gets its notion of what a lawn should look
like from the English. Of course, the estates of the English aristocracy were
tended by a staff of gardeners. England also has a milder climate, and the
grass that looks so nice there doesn’t do as well in North America. In the
1930’s the USDA came up with a blend of imported grasses that would
tolerate our climate. Since these grasses are not native, they need help, and
that calls for fertilizers, pesticides and lots of extra water. Since normal
people can’t afford gardeners who trim by hand, that means lawn machines.
American industry to the rescue.


(mower starts up, fades under next sentence)


A quick Google tells me that today we have 40 million lawn mowers in use.
Each emits 11 times the pollution of a new car, and lawn mowers contribute
five percent of the nation’s air pollution. Plus more than 70 million pounds of
pesticides are used each year and over half of our residential water is used
for landscaping. Don’t you love those automatic sprinklers that come on in the
rain? Add to that all the time that people spend mowing and edging. Of
course the two billion dollar lawn care industry is thrilled about all this
enthusiasm, but I gotta ask, “Is it worth it?”


Call me old fashioned, but I actually prefer the looks of a meadow with mixed
wildflowers and grasses to the lawn that looks like a pool table. My own lawn
is somewhere between. It’s mowed, but it’s what you might call multicultural.


There are at least five different kinds of grass with different colors and
thicknesses, plus clover, dandelions, mushrooms, a few pinecones, and a
rabbit hole or two. There’s also some kind of nasty weed with thorns, but even
that has nice purple flowers if it gets big enough.


Clover, by the way, used to be added to grass seed because it adds nitrogen to
the soil. Now we just buy a bag of nitrogen fertilizer, so who needs clover?
And what’s wrong with
dandelions? You can eat them, some people even make wine out of them,
they have happy yellow flowers; yet to most people they indicate your yard is
out of control. So I’m down on my hands and knees pulling dandelions. I’m
not sure why, but I hope it keeps the neighbors happy.


One thing I won’t give in to, though, is the chemical spraying trucks, painted
green of course, that roll through the neighborhood.


I can only hold my breath. (sound of trucks and mowers) Try not to listen. And
wait for the evening. (evening insects)


(air conditioner starts up)


Although, with all these air conditioners, even the night’s not too quiet.


But that’s another story.


Host tag: “Ed Herrmann is an outdoor enthusiast living in the
suburbs of Detroit.”

Related Links

Biologists Find Deer Devouring Rare Flowers

  • Largeflower bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora) is one of the wildflowers declining at many of the sites studied by University of Wisconsin researchers. (Photo courtesy of Dave Rogers, UW Herbarium)

Most of us think of the white-tailed deer as a graceful and cherished part of the natural scene. But it turns out when there are too many deer, it’s bad for some of the plants in the forest. New research suggests deer may be a prime culprit in a worrisome loss of rare plants in the woods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

Most of us think of the white-tailed deer as a graceful and cherished
part of the natural scene. But it turns out when there are too many
deer, it’s bad for some of the plants in the forest. New research
suggests deer may be a prime culprit in a worrisome loss of rare
plants in the woods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie
Hemphill reports:


Gardeners in many suburbs and rural areas know deer are good at
mowing down hosta, tulips and other favorite plants. In the woods,
deer munch on the small plants that live on the forest floor… plants
such as orchids, lilies, and other wildflowers.


Fifty years ago, researchers at the University of Wisconsin surveyed
hundreds of acres in the state, and made careful records of the plants
on those sites. In those days, the deer population was a lot lower
than it is now. In the last couple of years, two biologists went back to
many of those same sites and counted the plants living there now.


Tom Rooney says at most sites they found fewer different kinds of
plants.


“It tends to be the same species occurring over and again on the site.
You’re losing the rare species and picking up more and more
common species.”


He says they tried to link the decline in rare species to the fact that
the forest is getting older. But they found no evidence for that.
Instead, lead researcher Don Waller says the evidence points to
deer, which have increased dramatically over the last fifty years.


“The worst changes we’ve seen, ironically were in a couple of state
parks and a protected natural area, that showed losses of half or
more of species in 50 years. However, in these sites there was no
deer hunting, implying high densities of deer may be causing a lot of
the effects we see in the woods.”


Plants that rely on insects for pollination declined more than other
types of plants. Waller thinks it might be because the insect-
pollinated plants have showy flowers, which could catch the eye of a
wandering deer. As the flowering plants decline, the insects and
birds that rely on them for food could decline as well – bees, moths,
butterflies, and hummingbirds.


Waller says it’s worrisome because scientists don’t know how
particular insects and plants work together to support each other.


“As we’re losing parts of the ecosystem, we’re really not sure what
their full function is, they might play some crucial role we’re not aware
of and only too late might we become aware of the fact that this loss
led to an unraveling or threats to other species.”


Waller says the only places they studied that still have a healthy
diversity of plants are on Indian reservations. The Menominee Tribal
Forest in northeastern Wisconsin is pretty much like it used to be fifty
years ago.


(forest sounds under)


In this forest, there are only about ten deer per square mile. That’s
about as low as the deer population gets in Wisconsin. It’s not that
the tribe is hunting more deer; it’s the way the forest is grown.


Deer find lots to eat in young aspen woods; there’s less for them to
eat where pines and oaks and maples grow. Don Reiter is the wildlife
manager here. He says in the 360 square miles of the Menominee
forest, there’s really four different types of woods.


“We have pulpwood, we have northern hardwoods, white pine, red
pine, and again, the forest ecosystem as a whole, there’s plenty of
food out there for the deer.”


And because there aren’t too many deer, young pines and hemlocks
– and orchids and lilies – have a chance to grow.


In the upper Great Lakes states, wildlife officials have been trying to
thin the deer herd for several years. That’s because state officials
have been aware deer were causing problems by eating too many
plants. The recent study provides dramatic evidence.


In Minnesota, for instance, hunters are shooting four times the
number of deer they shot fifty years ago.


Steve Merchant is forest wildlife program consultant for the
Minnesota DNR. Merchant says the agency has liberalized its rules,
to encourage hunters to kill even more deer. But the number of
hunters hasn’t gone up in recent years. And lots of private
landowners post no-hunting signs.


“We need to have some help from people, people still need to get out
and hunt deer, and landowners need to provide that access for
people to harvest deer.”


Merchant says Minnesota is gradually trying to restore pine forests,
which were cut down for lumber and replaced with fast-growing
aspen. More pine forests could cut down on the deer population…


“But as long as we still have the strong demand for the aspen
markets that we do, and we manage those aspen forests in a
productive manner for wood fiber, we’re going to create a lot of good
white-tailed deer habitat.”


Merchant says it would take decades to change the woods enough to
reduce the deer population. And in the meantime, we’re losing more
and more of the rare flowers.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Related Links