Scientists seek unusual plant specimens from Otter Slough

The bald cypress, Taxodium districhum and the water tupelo, nyssa aquaticaone, below, are two plants from which a four-member team from the Chicago Botanical Garden came to Otter Slough to get seeds. [Click to enlarge]

One would not ordinarily think of Stoddard County as significant from the standpoint of unusual plants.

But a team of botanists from the Chicago Botanical Gardens thought the place unusual enough to come down and collect seeds from two plants the week of Oct. 25. "We were part of a group called the Midwest Plains Collecting Collaborative," said Boyce Tankersley, manager of Living Plant Documentation at the Chicago Botanical Gardens on Monday.

Tankersley said the four-person team came to the southern Missouri-northern Arkansas area in quest of plants not only for his organization, but also for the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Minnesota Arboretum and several other botanical facilities and agencies including the US Department of Agriculture.

But what plants and why here? "We came to the Otter Slough area looking for plants that were pushed southward during the last major glaciation [ice age] that have never managed to migrate back north," Tankersley said.

He added the reason for interest in such plants was that the plants that had survived the last ice age would have developed genes to permit them to survive "really harsh winters."

"We collected some very nice fruits from Nyssa aquatica and the bald cypress, taxodium distichum," he said.

N. aquatica is also called the water tupelo, a type of tree. Of the two, Tankersley said, the groups for which his team was collecting had no N. aquatica at all in their collections. "So this is very, very exciting for us," he said.

Tankersley added the bald cypress specimens in the collections to which the team hoped to add seeds were all from nurseries. "So we don't know which wild populations their genes represent," he said.

"So we are looking for plants of known wild origin, and they become a valuable part of our living museum collection."

Happily, the populations of both water tupelo and bald cypress in Otter Slough were quite large, Tankersley said. So the team's self-imposed restriction from taking more than 10 percent of the seed specimens still left much room to get very many seeds.

Tankersley acknowledged the collection of these particular seeds from the wild represented the start of a multiyear project for each of the institutions for which the team had collected them. "For the woody plants like the Nyssa and the Taxodium," he said, "it will take a minimum of seven years before they go out into our arboretum and our botanical garden.

"So this is very much a long-term process."

Moreso than meets the eye, according to Tankersley. "We spent three years planning this trip," he said

The process was also, Tankersley hastened to add, a painstaking scientific process, done with very careful scientific evaluation of the plants in Otter Slough and how the team thought the plants would do in the facilities in which they had been planted.

But what made anyone think these plants might be found here? "There is a USDA database online that helps us plot where these populations might be located," he said.

And in the data were indications that plants found in the north Arkansas-south Missouri area all the way east to the Georgia-South Carolina state line were also found as far north as Minnesota, surviving the harsh continental winters without any problem at all.

"So that's really encouraged us to take another look at these plants and see if we can add them to our collections up here," Tankersley said. Such collections, he said, would include not only those of environmentalists and museum curators but also plant breeders seeking traits that would enhance harsh climate survivability.

"It's part and parcel of what we do," he said, "but it's also very rare.

"We usually go out on a collecting trip about once every two years -- and it's been four years since the last one."

But it's worth the wait, relatively speaking. "Especially with the woody plants," Tankersley said, "in the wild under good conditions, some of these specimens can live up to 300 years.

"So what we're doing is building museum collections for our grandkids."

Tankersley concluded by saying every plant collected was by permit from the land owners. He said the particular parcel of land at Otter Slough was owned by the Missouri Department of Conservation