BBBBB EEEEEE NN N ISSN 1188-603X BB B EE NNN N BBBBB EEEEE NN N N BOTANICAL BB B EE NN NN ELECTRONIC BBBBB EEEEEE NN N NEWS No. 47 December 20, 1992 Address: aceska@cue.bc.ca Victoria, B.C. ---------------------------------------------------- EDITORIAL From: Adolf Ceska 1. Have a nice holiday season and happy new year 1993 ! 2. I apologize for a long gap in BEN. I was in Costa Rica and lost touch with reality. Can you imagine a country that would preserve over 25 per cent of the land in national parks or biological reserves? 3. I heard from several subscribers that they did not get BEN nos. 43 and 44. I don't know, how selective this blackout was, but if you did not get these issues and would like to have them, drop me a note. 4. I would like to thank all of you who sent me contributions for 1992 BEN. Many thanks. If you have any news, notes, messages or ideas to share with other BEN addicts, BEN will be pleased to hear from you. SPIKED SPUDS KEEP BEETLES AT BAY From: New Scientist (22 Aug 1992) Jeffrey Wyman and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison implanted a gene that produces a toxin lethal to the Colorado Beetle into potato. The toxin that kills Colorado beetles comes from Bacillus thuringiensis tenebronis. The gene was implanted in a number of varieties of potato. [I hope the Yukon Gold is among them. - AC] DATURA PREPARATIONS BANNED IN FRANCE From: New Scientist (22 August 1992) Herbal medicines made from Datura were banned from sale in France last week after three teenagers died from overdose of atropine. Datura stramonium has been the base of anti-asthma cigarettes, first approved for sale by prescription in the 1920s. Smoking a cigarette made from about 1 gram of crushed datura relaxes bronchial muscles, calming the symptoms of asthma. This treatment is still preferred by many elderly French asthmatics. WHEATGRASS, GRAMA-GRASS, AND THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN BARRIER [BEN #36] From: R.T. Ogilvie, Royal BC Museum, Victoria, B.C. Canada Don Gayton raised some questions in BEN No. 36 about the Rocky Mountain boundary between bluebunch wheatgrass and blue-grama grass. Here are some answers and some more questions. I enjoyed talking to him at the Botany B.C. meetings at Lac le Jeune, and also reading his book The Wheatgrass Mechanism. The Rocky Mountain massif is a major physiographic barrier separating the central plains and the western cordilleran areas. This geographic barrier results in a major climatic demarcation between the more maritime climate to the west and the strongly continental climate to the east. Although the Rockies are an obvious floristic boundary between the arid prairie flora and the moist cordilleran forests, the mountains are by no means a complete barrier for all plant species. For example, Douglas fir, Rocky Mountain juniper, western red cedar, western larch, and western yew all extend on to the east side of the Rockies, mostly as rare scattered individuals but some of these species form dominant communities. Likewise, many of the eastern prairie species extend across into eastern B.C., for example: the orange lily - Lilium philadelphicum, wild bergamot - Monarda fistulosa, prairie cactus - Opuntia polyacantha, scarlet globe-mallow - Sphaeralcea coccinea, low larkspur - Delphinium bicolor, ground-plum - Astragalus crassicarpus. What about the grasses crossing the Rockies? Both bluebunch wheatgrass - Agropyron spicatum [=Pseudoroegneria spicata] and Idaho fescue - Festuca idahoensis occur extensively along the east slope of the Rocky Mountains and Foothills from the Bow River southward. In this area these two species of the Bunchgrass Prairie overlap with blue grama-grass - Bouteloua gracilis of the Mixedgrass Prairie. Bouteloua gracilis is known in B.C. only from a few isolated populations in the southern Rocky Mountain Trench and a disjunct occurrence along the Fraser Valley in the southern Cariboo. The Rough Fescue Grassland occurs on both sides of the Rockies dominated by Festuca campestris, while a closely related taxon, Festuca hallii, is the dominant rough fescue of eastern Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Finally, little bluestem - Schizachyrium scoparium [=Andropogon scoparius] one of the dominants of the eastern Tallgrass Prairie extends westward into the foothills west of Calgary. It has been collected from two localities in the Rocky Mountain Trench of southeastern B.C.; both are considered by their collectors to have been introduced or planted there. Botanists have long attributed different paleobotanical origins and history to these different grasslands, and recent ecophysiological research has found fundamental differences in the photosynthetic pathways of some of the dominant grasses. The Bouteloua gracilis grassland originated in the arid southwestern U.S. and adjacent Mexico, and many of its species, including Bouteloua gracilis, are C4 species adapted to growth and photosynthesis at high temperatures. At the northern extent of this grassland in Canada there are approximately equal proportions of C4 and C3 species. The Agropyron spicatum grassland originated in the intermountain area in the rainshadow of the Coast-Cascade-Sierra Mountain axis; most of its species have boreal affinities and are C3. Also, the Rough Fescue grassland species have a northern origin and are mostly C3 species. Lastly, the Schizachyrium scoparium grassland had a southeastern origin and includes several C4 species including the little bluestem. The grasslands on the two sides of the mountains have ancient origins; the Agropyron spicatum grassland is about 3 million years old, and the Bouteloua gracilis grassland is about 13 millions years old. Since Late Miocene-Pliocene time there have been major climatic changes involving dry periods, wet periods, cold periods, warm periods, glacial and interglacial periods. In our area, at the northern extremity of these grasslands, this has meant numerous sequences of migrations and immigrations bringing the species in contact with species of different geographic regions, resulting in grasslands of phytogeographically diverse composition. Some of the earlier papers on these grasslands are by Daubenmire (1975:Journ. Biogeography 2:1-18; 1978:Plant Geography; 1982:MoF Grassland Symposium). There is an interesting paper by Leopold & Denton, 1987, Ann. Miss. Bot. Garden 74:841-867. Finally, Dale Guthrie, in his research on the Beringian "Mammoth Steppe" in Alaska (1990) has found compacted plant fragments of Agropyron, Danthonia, and Salix in the molars of a 36,000 year old ice-fossilized bison. His 1982 paper (in Paleoecology of Beringia, p. 323) mentions that he had the nest materials of Wisconsin-age fossil ground squirrels from Alaska, identified at the Colorado State University Laboratory, and the plant material included Bouteloua. As he says, this find is several thousand miles north of the presently known range of Bouteloua in south- central Alberta. Obviously, we need a lot more paleobotanical research and critical paleoecological interpretation of the fossil data, the modern floristic distributions, and species ecophysiology. NEW PUBLICATION - THE BOREAL FOREST CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS Twenty speakers, from across Canada, addressed tourism, native issues, forest fires, snow as habitat, peatlands, rivers, trees, government and industry positions, climate change, citizen advocacy, conservation strategies, and small scale timber operations. And, the audience of over 200 responded in question and answer sessions. The Proceedings, published with the help of Athabasca University, is now ready to mail out. To order a copy make your cheque for $14.00 ($10.00 plus $4.00 postage and handling) payable to (amounts in Can. $) Boreal Forest Committee, Box 1351, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada T0G 0B0 For further information contact: Louis Schmittroth, tel. 403-675-4408, email: louis@cs.athabascau.ca, or Joan Sherman, tel. 403-675-6340, email: joan@cs.athabascau.ca BOTANIST LOOKING FOR JOB If you know about any job for a botanist with 1) good knowledge of British Columbia vascular plants (especially pteridophytes, sedges, rushes, aquatics, and other critical groups); 2) wide collecting experience in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest (over 30,000 "numbers" since 1969); 3) good knowledge of ecology of British Columbia plants and plant communities; 4) expertise in development of vegetation classification techniques: please send a note to the editor of BEN. The botanist in question can take contract jobs or be seconded or transferred within the British Columbia government.