A trip to Meadowlily to teach kids about biodiversity

On Wednesday I was given the opportunity to teach about 200 grade 3-5 students (ages 8 to 11 or so) about biodiversity and why it's important. The students got to visit four stations (catching butterflies, a walk through the forest to learn about trees, catching snails and other ground-dwelling insects, and planting meadow plant species) and at ours they learned about why plants rock, why native species are important, and why maintaining (if not increasing) biodiversity is important. Since kids LOVE monarch butterflies and snails, we used them to illustrate two important points: if we decrease biodiversity by planting grass everywhere then monarchs won't have their food and shelter plant and so they'll disappear, and if we continue to introduce invasive species then we'll continue to see a decline in our native species that we know and love. The kids loved helping Chen round up the invasive snails (he ended up with the equivalent of a 10-gallon bucket FULL of them...it was ridiculous) for his research, and I was surprised to see how much they loved planting wildflowers with Sandra and I.

Now, I say that I was given the opportunity to do this...which might sound weird to many research-intense academics. As a professor at a university (which I'm not; I'm a graduate student), most are required to dedicate 10% of their overall work duties to outreach in some form. Many do within-department outreach (often involving talking to undergraduate students), a few do inter-departmental outreach, some have a consulting gig on the side which is considered community outreach. But there seems to be an ever-decreasing number who truly love doing "real" community outreach: bringing science outside the ivory tower to the general public, whether that be a class of grade 3 students or a special-interest seniors group at a retirement home. The reasons for this I'm sure are vast, and I don't attempt to pretend I know why this is (decreasing funding, increasing student load and increasing teaching load all contribute, along with personal motivation and other intrinsic factors are my guesses), but I think this is doing a real detriment to science in general. When there's an outcry by scientists on Parliament Hill in Ottawa about slashes to government funding for science research, we hope that the general public is behind us and supports our plight. Science research is invaluable and can lead to so many amazing discoveries, and so it should be supported. But if we're not educating the public about the awesome "stuff" we're doing...why do we expect their support? Sure, a lot of people know about tar sands, where they are, what they are, the kind of impact it has to the Canadian economy and even the environmental impact they have. But what about the population genetics of spicebush swallowtail butterflies? What about the diversity of mosses present in nutrient-poor bogs in northern Ontario? What about the plastid genome size of green algae present in a lake in Chile (which may or may not be the same species as the green alga with the same name present in a lake in Australia...)? If we don't tell people why they should care about these research projects, why should we expect them to support us when our funding has been cut? I feel that science outreach is so, so important. This helps foster the scientists of tomorrow! It helps people understand why what we dedicate our life to is important! Plus...the look on a child's face when they learn something new for the first time about something they were blissfully unaware about previously is one of the most rewarding feelings on this planet.

This outreach activity that I did on Wednesday was originally started as a partnership between the Thames Talbot Land Trust (you can visit their website HERE to learn more about them) and a teacher at the local school board. He started a club for high school students called the Environmental Leadership Program, and Dr. Jane Bowles (you can read all about Jane in one of my previous blog posts HERE) helped him come up with activities that the high school students could do with elementary school students at one of TTLT's stewardship properties in the city. The program occurs every year in June, and each year two new elementary schools are given the opportunity to participate in this program at no cost to them. This was important to Jane...get kids out in nature, and appreciate it for what it is not what we choose to make it. Since Jane's death in July last year I've been doing a lot of outreach activities through the Arboretum/Herbarium, and now through this partnership with the TTLT. If I get to do this for the rest of my life, I will be one happy camper. I can see why Jane loved this so much. Every time I do a botany-themed outreach activity I tell myself at the beginning that if I would have made Jane proud, I've done my job. She was quite the lady.

I would LOVE to post pictures of the kids and how excited they were to plant the meadow seedlings and some "action shots" but...that's actually against the law. So instead, here's a photo-tour of the site and a tiny piece of the surrounding area with some cool stuff I saw while I was at Meadowlily. My supervisor and I have been to the area before looking for mushrooms, but we had never ventured this direction into the actual meadow. It was really neat to go there, and I'm definitely going back sometime to explore some more! And to check up on "our" plants :) So without further delay...pictures! There are a lot of them (sorry to those of you with slow internet connections!) :)

Meadowlily meadow, looking East-ish. Don and Drew planning the hole placement for our meadow plant planting.

The Meadowlily meadow looking West-ish (you can see a passing transport truck on Highbury Ave; from where we were you'd have no idea this was right beside a road with a speed limit of 100 km/hr. Amazing what kind of sound buffer nature can be!)

One of our meadow species we were planting: wild bergamot. It's a really beautiful plant with purple flowers that is great for attracting butterfly and bee species. A great garden plant for full-sun locations!

Sandra preparing the milkweed seedlings for the kids to plant (getting them out of those styrofoam trays was much more difficult than it seems. I swear you need an engineering degree to figure it all out. I ended up just digging my fingers in and pulling them out. I got muddy!). This species of milkweed is sometimes called the "monarch flower" (or another name along those lines) since it is the only food source of the monarch butterfly. It was recently taken off the noxious weed list in Ontario, so if you can find some in nurseries, plant some in your garden! And don't kill the caterpillars eating the plants...they'll grow up to be monarchs one day.

Another meadow species, but this one isn't native (native to Europe; naturalized, not invasive, in Canada). A close relative of the dandelion, this is called the common goat's-beard (Tragopogon dubius).

Two TTLT summer interns, Drew and Jamie, digging some of the grass out of the way to make space for wildflower planting! They were a great help during the day.

A view looking towards the river showing the kind of diversity present at the site. 1) an American basswood tree, 2) Virginia creeper, 3) wild grape, and 4) Dame's Rocket in full bloom. VERY unusual for mid-June; usually those are done flowering here by the end of May. We've had some wacky weather!

The three colours of flower you can find in a population of Dame's Rocket: purple, white, and slightly-more-purple-than-white. A great little plant to do some outdoor genetics experiments on. Illustrating genetic principles using real-world examples. Awesome!

One of the branches of the Thames river running through Meadowlily. The water was remarkably high, and moving quickly. No boaters today, but I'm sure if the weather was nicer (overcast, threatening to rain all day without ever having actually rained) there would have been lots!

A really nice, old Bur oak tree that I was admiring for a while and then thought...wait a minute. Are those BUCKETS up in the tree?! That's nearly three stories off the ground. How the heck did they get up there?!

Canada anemone, one of our showiest native forest wildflowers. This species flowers in the spring, unlike the fall-flowering Chinese or Japanese anemone that most people plant in their garden as an ornamental species.

A great example of why planting invasive species in your garden when you live near a natural area is a really, really bad idea: yellow flag iris starting to take over the wetland area at the edge of the forest where it meets the river. Eventually it will out-compete all of the native wetland species around it and it will be a solid stand of yellow flag iris. Might look pretty, but it's not nearly as important to the ecosystem as the native species!

The smallest vascular plant in the world, duckweed, floating on the surface of a tiny stream feeding into the river. I was trying out my new rubber boots here by wading down the stream. They work! Feet dry.

Another unfortunate invasive species taking over. This is forget-me-not. If you live near a natural area, don't plant this species, either!

A very cool insect-insect-plant mutualism we saw during the lunch break. These VICIOUS red ants (we taunted them with a stick to see what they would do, and attack they did!) were defending their little aphid colonies that were feeding on cottonwood trees. The aphids suck out the sap in the main vein of the leaf, and any extra they can't consume pools on the leaf surface as a "honeydew". The ants consume the honeydew for nutrients. I'm sure they would also consume the aphids, if they ever stopped doing their jobs!

It wouldn't have been a day in the great outdoors if I didn't at least make an effort to look for mushrooms. And let me tell you...the crop this year in this area is abysmal. We didn't have enough rain in the early spring, and then had too much rain later in the spring, and so now everyone's confused at what season it is and what they're supposed to be doing. This was only one of two trees that had mushrooms on them. That's it! One single species of mushroom on two trees all day! I felt ripped off.

The same species of fungus (Dryad's saddle or Polyporus squamosus) growing on a very dead tree. Some of those mushrooms were 50 cm across!

I call this picture my "mushroom selfie". I think I'm going to start making this a thing...any mushroom worth photographing gets made into a selfie. You should all do it, too! I was using this particular mushroom to talk about the dangers of invasive species (snails eat the spore-bearing surface, or the location where mushrooms make their babies, of fungi and are likely a huge factor contributing to the steady decline of fungal species in North America. Invasive species are bad!!) either accidentally or purposely introduced to an area.

Hi Mr. Toad! Sorry for almost stepping on you...twice. Don't worry, he's fine. Or she...I don't know how to tell the difference between male and female toads. I always interpret frogs as females and toads as males until proven otherwise.

Hackberries can be nature's lightning rods

Species name: Celtis occidentalis

Common name: common hackberry, northern hackberry

Location: Western University campus

To keep with our "super-massive-gigantosaur" trees on campus, I have a compilation of pictures of the two biggest hackberries. Actually, I might be wrong on that one. When I asked Jane back in June if these were the biggest hackberries, her response was "I think so." Because it wasn't an adamant "yes!," I can't be positive; I'll have to keep track of all of the really big hackberries on my wanderings around campus from now on to see if I can find a bigger one than this one.

Hackberries are trees that are native to the Carolinian forest, with their native range extending from Ontario and Quebec in Canada south to Tennessee in the United States. It still exists in moderate numbers, but has a low tolerance to disturbance so is often one of the first species lost from a forest after a clearcut (even though there are seeds that are still in the seed bank). That being said, they are very good urban trees, and can withstand quite a bit of air pollution with no ill effects. The berries on the tree, which you can see in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth images above, are a great food source for native bird species preparing to migrate south in the fall, as they are some of the most nutritious berries available. They start off green on the tree then mature to a reddish-orange. At this point they can be picked by humans for consumption but be warned: "tart" is an understatement. I tried a bright red berry and thought my mouth was about to turn inside out from the sourness of the fruit! The way that hackberries are traditionally consumed by humans is as a jam or preserve-like substance: the berries are cooked in a simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water) until they are mushy. They can then be used exactly like cranberry sauce on meat! After turning red/orange on the tree they start to turn a dark purple-black, and this is what birds consume. This concentrates many of the sugars in the fruit to make it more energizing, but also concentrates other compounds that react not very nicely with the human digestive system. If eaten raw they can cause severe stomach upset (but nothing that would require a hospital visit unless a whole bucket were to be consumed!). Once they're black and wrinkly like the bottom picture they can be used in wines and beers as a fermentation product. They give the beverage a really fruity undertone that, from what I understand, is unusual and pleasant all at the same time. The good thing about hackberry trees is that the fruit that falls from the tree doesn't start to smell after sitting on your lawn after a while (the same cannot be said for apples, crabapples, cherries, Cornelian cherries, or plums!), and the spent fruit do not attract bees or wasps in large abundance. These trees do grow relatively quickly, so are a great possibility for a boulevard tree. The bark is also spectacular, and one of the characteristics of hackberries that can be used for proper identification even in the dead of winter. In very mature specimens where the bark is starting to peel off, you can soak the bark in water to plump it back up and carve cork-like plugs out of it to use as stoppers. A multi-function tree!

So how big is this tree? Well, it's pretty big. Not as large as the Burr oak from my last blog (which you can read HERE), but still pretty darn large. Here's the herbarium tag for reference:

If we use our same method of size estimation as last time, that tag is approximately 6 x 14 cm (or 2.5 x 5.5 inches). Using my "tag estimation method" (there are about 12 tags that could fit across the tree, so the diameter would be approximately 66 inches or 167.5 cm), the circumference of that tree is 207 inches (5.26 meters)! That's one big tree. But wait...didn't I say it wasn't as large as the Burr oak? Circumference-wise, it's definitely larger at the largest point. But what you'll see if you look closely at the shape of the tree, versus the shape of the big Burr oak, this tree tapers starting nearly at the bottom of the tree. The Burr oak is like a barrel, and only starts to narrow very near the top of the canopy. If you compare weight or total volume of the trunk of the tree, the Burr oak is much, MUCH larger. That being said, this hackberry still has quite a few years left to live (this one is probably "only" about 200 years old) so I'll have to come back to visit this tree every decade or so to see how long it lives and how much bigger it gets!

So what's so special about hackberries? Their berries aren't overly tasty (for humans at least), their wood is of terrible quality (as far as furniture-building goes; it's very brittle and has uneven grain so is only used in cheap fencing and cheap furniture) and isn't very decay-resistant, and they can get old. So far, not very exciting-sounding. Well let me tell you...hackberries can withstand a huge level of "unanticipated stress" and make it out unscathed. Most trees, especially established trees, could never tolerate being split in half and heal up just fine. Hackberries regularly do this. Here's an example:

That tree might not look like much (for size perspective, it's only about half the size of the tree pictured above), but it's a survivor of a really unusual phenomenon, and one that trees rarely recover from like it never happened: lightning strikes. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you'll see a big ridge running from a large wound about 5-10 feet off the ground that extends all the way up to the end of one of the tallest branches. The lightning likely struck the branch, and the electrical charge traveled down the tree until it found a way out; that might have been where a branch once was, or perhaps it was even just a crack in the bark from a burrowing beetle or woodpecker. The ridge, while nearly impossible to tell from the angle of the picture, extends all the way to the ground on the other side of this big hole in the tree. The fact that this tree was nearly split in half by a lightning strike and has since recovered like nothing ever happened is pretty telling to how resilient this species actually is. An absolutely remarkable feat. Makes me want a hackberry just to have it get struck by lightning. What a great story to be able to tell your grandkids, or even great-grandkids!

One of the last big burly oaks on campus

Species name: Quercus macrocarpa

Common name: bur oak (sometimes burr oak or even burl oak), mossycup oak

Location: Western University campus

Burr oak trees (that's how I spell it since that's how I was taught to spell it, but Bur oak is just as common a spelling) are native to the Carolinian forest of eastern North America, and are still present throughout much of their native range. Unlike most oak species, the burr oak does best in open areas like savannahs (depending on the area, they can sometimes be the only oak species in a traditional Oak Savannah habitat) and actually does rather poorly in forested areas. It is very shade-intolerant but grows very quickly, and these two characteristics have made it one of the most popular boulevard trees (or landscaping tree). The burr oak is also incredibly long-lived, with some individuals reaching ages of 350 years or more! That's one old tree!

Like most oak species, the burr oak is known for its masting. Masting is when a tree over-produces fruit in an attempt to overwhelm seed predators so that some of their offspring (fruits are the structures produced by plants to carry and protect their seeds, which are their babies) make it to the next generation. Burr oak seeds are some of the most prized nuts in the eyes of wildlife (like squirrels, deer, and in some places even bears), and they will selectively eat burr oak acorns over any other type of acorn. There are a few reasons why this occurs: first, the acorns are the largest of any oak species ("macrocarpa" means "big fruit"). Second, the acorn wall, or that tough shell you have to crack through to get to the yummy meat of the nut, is quite thin compared to other oak species so it's much easier to eat. Third, there are fewer tannis in the acorns of the burr oak, which make it much more palatable than other oak species. They are rumoured to even be choice edibles to humans, although I've never tried one. As long as you roast it a bit I could see them being at the very least edible, but tasty? I don't know if I'd go that far. I would make a terrible forager! When tree seeds are the most eaten food item of an animal species that has co-evolved with the tree, they tend to use really odd yearly cycles to over-produce fruits. These masting years, depending on the species, are every 7, 9, or 11 years. Our red oak in the front yard had a masting year a couple years ago. It sounded like it was raining acorns every time the wind lightly blew through the tree! It was incredible. The squirrels didn't know what to do with themselves :) To put it into perspective just how many burr oak acorns are eaten by wildlife, there are reports of certain trees in Tennessee and Kentucky in "bear country" near the Great Smokey Mountains having a 0% reproductive rate in some years (non-masting years, that is). When you set up video cameras to check out what's going on with these trees reproducing less than their neighbours, you catch bears climbing the trees and eating every single acorn they encounter. They'll even rip off branches or shake the trunk of the tree to get the ones higher than they can climb (bears are heavy, you know!), and then scramble down the tree to eat what dropped. Something tells me you don't want to come between a burr oak and a bear...

Unfortunately, the burr oak that I took a picture of and its nearest equally old neighbour are on their way out as far as tree lifetimes go. The third picture above shows where a branch broke off many, many years ago and a massive hole has formed in its place. I have no idea if the hole is occupied, but it's large enough to be an ideal place for a Great Horned Owl to build a nest. And those birds are huge! It would also be a good nesting place for a raccoon family, or the equivalent of a Hollywood mansion for a family of squirrels. The fourth picture shows where on that same tree the bark is starting to come off the tree. Unlike in my previous blog post about the butternut (which you can read HERE), this is not a direct result of a fungal infection. There is now likely a fungus that has exploited the tree's old age and exposed wood, but that bark fell off because the tree is just getting old and nearing the end of its natural life. The last picture shows where more bark is coming off the tree near the base, and you can see that it, at one point, was heavily infested with insects. Again, that's likely not what caused the bark to come off in the first place, but once the old rotting wood was exposed the insects took advantage. The tree is also likely hollow, because the old inner wood of trees is often decayed by fungi before the tree is completely dead; this is called heart rot. This also doesn't directly kill the tree, but rather creates a standing hollow tube. Doesn't take much of a wind storm to knock the tree down once the structural integrity is compromised. I personally have no idea how old this tree is (I might be "old" according to my students, but I'm not THAT old!), but I'm guessing upwards of 250 years. It will be a shame to see this tree come down in a storm, and I'm sure it's not that many more years before it does.

Aside from being some of the oldest trees that can be found around southern Ontario and the eastern half of the United States, burr oaks can also be some of the largest. They grow to be very, very tall trees but also grow to an enormous girth. It's hard to tell from the above pictures, but the burr oak I was taking pictures of is one of the largest trees on campus. To put it into perspective, I took a picture of the width of the tree at "breast height" (about 4 feet off the ground; this is traditionally a way to determine if a tree is ready for logging) with the arboretum label for size:

Still doesn't really look like much, but that arboretum label measures 2.5 by 5 inches (or about 6 x 14 centimetres). So if you figure out what the diameter of the tree is (by my rough estimation, 63 inches or 160 centimetres), that's...enormous. That would make it about 196 inches in circumference (or almost 5 meters!). You would need three people joining hands to comfortably circle the tree. That's bigger than enormous! There are two trees of this size that are burr oaks, and a couple hackberries (look for this species to be covered in my next blog), all in the same general location. Standing here looking at the trees, I often wonder what these trees have "seen". They would have survived the entire outwards growth of the city I live in, and would have been here long before London, Ontario actually became a city. I wonder who planted them? Or was this an acorn that sprouted there? If it was, where was the tree it came from? It would be long gone by now. Did anyone care for this tree when it was a wee seedling? If so, who were they? What did they do? Did the Kingsmill family, the ones that owned the property that Western University is built on for many generations before Western purchased all of the land in 1919, ever use this tree for a rope swing? When there were bears living in southwestern Ontario, did bears used to climb this tree to get the acorns? So many questions and no one left to ask...

When I helped Jane Bowles with an arboretum tour back in June, she said that the four trees in this small patch of campus were "some of" the largest, oldest trees on campus. I never thought to ask her where the biggest or the oldest trees were. I guess I'll have to go exploring to find them myself now (and learn a bit about how to determine the age of a really big tree depending on the species). Until then, I'll just have to be content with the geezer trees I know :)