Ramble Report May 9 2019

Today's Ramble was led by Linda Chafin.

Here's the link to Don's Facebook album for today's Ramble. (All the photos in this post are compliments of Don, unless otherwise credited.)

Today's post was written by Linda Chafin.

29 Ramblers today. We were happy to have Sandra Hoffberg, a former Nature Rambler who left us for a post-doc at Columbia University, back with us today. She brought a long a friend named Todd, who is studying salamanders at UGA – read further about his salamander finds today.

Show and Tell:

Catawba Rhododendron
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Linda brought two flower clusters of Catawba Rhododendron,

pointing out the yellow pattern of nectar guides inside each flower that direct the pollinator to the nectaries deep inside the flower. The style is sharply curved at the tip, bringing the stigma into position so that it makes contact with the pollen-coated belly of the bee.

Today's reading: Terry read a poem, Tree Frogs, from Swift: New and Selected Poems by David Baker (W. W. Norton, 2019).

Today's route: Through the Conservatory, out the back door and down the Wood Walk to the Orange Trail Spur, then then Orange Trail Spur to the bridge and then up the Orange Trail to the parking lot.

Visitor Center Plaza Fountain:

Azalea Sphinx Moth
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Under the blue canopy remaining from the Gala Ball activities we saw a large Azalea Sphinx Moth. It had been there since Wednesday afternoon and was still there as we all headed home about noon, and was still there about 6:00 pm. It was gone on Friday morning.

Cope's Gray Treefrog(click on photo to enlarge)

We also enjoyed a Cope's Gray Treefrog, seen basking on top of one of the informational signs at the fountain.This species will begin breeding soon. The male advertisement call sounds like a husky "Greeek", repeated until an interested female is attracted.

International Garden:

Fringed Bluestar
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Hubricht's Bluestar
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The Bluestars are in flower now, including the native Fringed Bluestar in the International Garden and Hubricht’s Bluestar in the meditation area by the Flower Garden.

Sweet Bay Magnolia
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Sweet Bay Magnolia is past flowering, so we “stopped to smell the leaves” instead. They are aromatic and sometimes used in cooking though they are not as strongly fragrant as the leaves of Red Bay, a species in the same family as the European Bay Laurel whose leaves are widely sold for cooking. Sweet Bay and Red Bay are native to wetlands in the Georgia Coastal Plain, where there is a third “bay” tree – Loblolly Bay. All three of the bays have leathery evergreen leaves with an elongated, elliptic shape. Loblolly Bay lacks the compounds that give the leaves of the other two species their spicy fragrance. Interestingly, none of the three are in the same plant family and their flower differences show it:  Sweet Bay is in the Magnolia family (with fairly large, showy flowers), Red Bay is in the Laurel family (with small yellowish flowers), and Loblolly Bay is in the Tea family (with large, Camellia-like flowers).

White-flowered Foxglove; the brown spots are the nectar guides.
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We saw many large and showy Purple Foxgloves, some plants with bright pinkish-purple flowers and a few with white. As with the Catawba Rhododendron, Foxglove flowers have conspicuous nectar guides to show the pollinators the way in. Just looking at the flower and the arrangement of the style and stamens inside the flower, it’s easy to deduce that fat, hairy bumblebees pollinate these flowers. The stamens and style are pressed against the upper surface inside the flower where they can easily pick up and deposit pollen from the hairy backs of the visiting bees. Purple Foxglove is a great choice for the Botanical Garden because all parts of the plants are loaded with very toxic compounds – digoxin, a cardiac glycoside – that deter browsing by deer. In the past, these compounds were used medicinally to treat heart problems, but dosing can be tricky and often resulted in fatalities (modern medicine has rendered their use obsolete). Purple Foxglove is native to Europe; there are no members of the genus Digitalis native to North America.

Rose Vervain
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Rose Vervain, a native verbena, is planted in several of the beds that we passed on our way across the Garden. It’s a close relative to the non-native Moss Vervain that is flowering along roadsides now, especially in south Georgia. The non-native species has narrow, deeply divided leaves.

Breadseed Poppy; note the black nectar guides.
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Poppy seed capsule cut open to show the numerous seeds.
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Beautiful, red-flowered poppies are flowering and developing fruits now. These plants belong to the same species as the Opium Poppy, the plant whose fruits yield opium and whose seeds flavor our bagels and cakes. Ornamental and culinary varieties are specially bred to eliminate the milky latex that carries the opium compounds. We sliced through a poppy fruit to see the abundant seeds, but no latex oozed out at all. The flowers have quite conspicuous nectar guides, pulling in the bees that love the abundant nectar and pollen on offer. Ramblers have discussed before that bee eyes aren’t sensitive to the color red, but are highly sensitive to other colors toward the blue and ultraviolet end of the spectrum. In the case of the poppy flowers–bright red with black markings to human eyes–the bees are reacting to ultraviolet colors that are invisible to humans.

Acorn Bridge:

Typical bean family flower structures.

On the Acorn Bridge we stopped to check out the American Wisteria. Only a few flowers were hanging on, but it was still possible to see the characteristic flower shape of most bean family flowers: a large, usually erect banner petal, two spreading wing petals, and two lower petals fused together into a canoe-shaped petal called a keel.

American Wisteria flowers
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American Wisteria is pretty but it is easily outclassed in the looks and smell department by the large, heavily fragrant flowers of the Chinese Wisteria. But the latter is one of the worst invasives in the southeast and planting it and maintaining it in gardens is never justifiable.

Green and Gold
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Green-and-Gold is still in flower at the end of the Woodland Walk but will soon be done flowering as the canopy closes in.

Orange Trail:

Crane Fly
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Tom found a large Crane Fly not long after we crossed the bridge onto the Orange Trail. Like all true flies in the Order Diptera, the Crane Fly has just one pair of wings. The second pair of wings is reduced to a structure called a haltere. It is an important sensory structure that enables flies to perform aerial maneuvers by sensing their movement in all three dimensions.

Wild Geraniums have gone to fruit and some of their fruits have dispersed their seeds. Our native geraniums have a fascinating means of spreading their seeds–ballistic dispersal–explained in the slide below. We tried to coax some of the fruits into exploding with gentle taps but they weren’t dry enough to pop. (Note: our native geraniums are not closely related to the cultivated “geraniums” grown in window boxes and gardens; these are actually Pelargoniums, native to the Old World.)

Geranium seed dispersal mechanism

Summer Bluets were seen at several locations along the Orange Trail.(click on photo to enlarge)

Tulip Tree flowers are scattered along the Garden’s trails now, usually dropped by a squirrel that has bitten through the twig.

Tulip Tree flower showing the orange nectar-secreting patch.(click on photo to enlarge).

The flowers are beautifully colored, with a bright orange patch that exudes nectar, luring in pollinators high in the tops of the trees. You can lick the nectar patch and taste the sweetness, sometimes more pronounced than others. If  you can’t taste it, it may be that ants, which we nearly always see inside the flowers, have harvested the nectar or it has been washed off by rains.

Two-lined Salamander
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Sandra Hoffberg’s friend, Todd, found both the larval and adult forms of Two-Lined Salamanders in the stream. The larval form had feather-like gills on the side of its head, used for respiration while in its aquatic form. Between now and later in the summer, it will metamorphose into the adult form by absorbing the gills and restructuring its jaws for feeding on land, As a larva it is a suction feeder, but the adult captures prey with a ballistic tongue, much like a chameleon.

Rattlesnake Fern
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Rattlesnake Ferns are common along the upland portions of the Orange Trail. It appeared that all had released their spores, leaving only the shell of the sporangia behind.

Broad Beech Fern fronds with theri "Fox Head" shape.
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Wild Onions
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Wild Onions, bearing both flowers and bulblets, were seen on the lip of the bank above the Orange Trail stream.

Mayberry (or Elliott's Blueberry) fruits
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A large patch of Deadman’s Fingers fungus was seen growing among the roots at the base of an oak tree, probably indicating that the tree is injured or dying.(click on photo to enlarge)

Lurid Sedge
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Flowering Witch Grass near the Orange Trail stream.
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Green Frog
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A Green Frog was seen along the water’s edge below one of the bridges along the Orange Trail.  In spite of its common name, most of the Green Frogs in our area are brown in color. The color of this species varies geographically, green in the north, gradually changing to brown as you move southward. Opinions vary as to whether this variation should be given sub-specific status, but, regardless, they are all Green Frogs, Rana clamitans.

SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES:

Azalea Sphinx Moth	Darapsa choerilus
Cope’s Gray Tree Frog	Hyla chrysoscelis
Fringed Bluestar	Amsonia ciliata
Sweetbay Magnolia	Magnolia virginiana
Foxglove	Digitalis sp.
Verbena	Verbena sp.
Breadseed Poppy	Papaver somniferum
American Wisteria	Wisteria frutescens
Showy Evening Primrose	Oenothera speciosa
Hubricht’s Bluestar	Amsonia hubrichtii
Green-and-Gold	Chrysogonum virginianum
Mayberry/Juneberry	Vaccinium elliottii
Mayapple	Podophyllum peltatum
Crane Fly	Family Tipulidae
Wild (Spotted) Geranium	Geranium maculatum
Summer Bluets	Houstonia purpurea
Tulip Tree	Liriodendron tulipifera
Southern Two-lined Salamander	Eurycea cirrigera
Rattlesnake Fern	Botrychium virginianum
Broad Beech Fern	Phegopteris hexagonoptera
Wild Onion	Allium mobilense
Deadman’s Fingers	Xylaria polymorpha
Lurid Sedge	Carex lurida
Witch Grass	Panicum capillare
Green Frog	Rana clamitans