Day 243: You see before you the portrait and moment of scientific discovery. Yesterday was an historic day. Team Biota isolated a heretofore unrecorded host Carex (sedge) for our rare friend, Myriosclerotinia caricis-ampullaceae.
So momentous was this discovery that we made a trip out to a point where we could contact Plant Ecologist Arnie Peterson by phone. When he answered, I announced without preamble, "We've got the sedge!" He immediately dropped what he was doing and drove an hour to meet us at the site. Ankle-deep in snowmelt water and under a penetrating rain, Arnie and I obtained three juvenile specimens from the 42 inventoried on this trip, a painful but necessary sacrifice in the name of science. One was preserved with the Carex still attached, and the fungus' tell-tale knobby and diagnostic sclerotium visible.
Arnie was unable to identify the specific Carex in the field, but of the known hosts for Myrio, only one occurs in the Park. That host does not grow at this site. In and of itself, Myrio was a signal discovery; documenting it on a new host is emphatically more significant.
I am enormously grateful to my companions in Team Biota Joe and Sharon Dreimiller for their field-work in inventorying Myrio despite the unfavourable weather, and for providing this photo of a couple of soggy but very happy scientists.
Congratulations!!
ReplyDeleteThank you! I know it's hard for people "on the outside" to appreciate what something like this means. It is certainly the high point of my career and perhaps of my whole life. Arnie and I spent three hours at the microscope today, dissecting and analyzing, and raising more questions than we managed to answer. That said, we learned a couple of interesting things about Our Mutual Friend, and I will be monitoring them as they develop to see if we can solve any other mysteries.
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