An Historic Day

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.

Carex Under Scrutiny

Day 2: When a rarity is discovered, it is not enough to simply document it and move on. One must seize the opportunity for further investigation in the hopes of bringing something previously unknown or unnoticed to light. In the case of a botanical find, this often involves repeated trips to the site, pulling in various outside experts, analyzing anything and everything which might be a contributing factor in the species' preference for a specific location or ecology.

Since I was clearly out of my depth when it came to sedge identification, our Park plant ecologist took it upon himself to "bone up" on the subject and go into the field with technical manuals in hand. Once he had obtained a specimen of a likely host for the rare fungus we discovered earlier in the year, he sent his findings along to me to see if the same questions were raised in my mind. Indeed they were! He brought me a sample of the sedge so that I could take photos of it through the microscope to validate his ID. A lot of "ifs" followed in our ensuing emails and personal conversations, largely based around the evidence that this is the only sedge at one of the fungus sites. IF we can demonstrate that it hosts the fungus, it will be the first record of Myrio parasitizing this species of Carex. Unfortunately, my minute dissection of all parts of the specimen failed to yield up the slightest trace of the fungus on this individual plant.