Brickellia

Transcription

[BANJO MUSIC] Tom Wendt Have you ever wondered what's in the famous Texas tower? Down here in the lower parts, we have what's called the Plant Resources Center. This is the Plant Resources Center, or the Herbarium, as we call it. So let's go on back in here. We get phone calls from people wanting to come and visit the Herbarium... because it sounds like the kind of place that's going to be full of beautiful living plants. Well, it's not. It's this industrial look, lots of cabinets. Basically, this is like a library of plant specimens. Where we are right here is the work room where all the mounting, and shipping in and out of specimens goes on. Rebecca Haning I'm Rebecca Haning, I'm gluing plants to paper right now. Kateri Allen My name is Kateri Allen, I glue and sew plants to paper. I can glue about 10 an hour. Rebecca Haning I can do 11...and a half. [laughs] Tom Wendt Here we have an herbarium specimen, basically a dead flat plant. But for us as scientists this has a lot of very useful information on it. The critical thing in studying plant classification is trying to figure out patterns of variation. You want to know geographically where it came from, what month of the year, perhaps, it was collected in.... so you know what part of its flowering cycle it was in. If it's a specimen without that data, we just know, well, it's a bluebonnet from somewhere at some time. And that's nice, but it's not useful for analyzing the data. Botanist When I look in the collection, the rest of them are mature, and this one... Tom Wendt Yeah, it's immature. There have been botanists working here for well over a hundred years. Interestingly, the first really active botanist here who started forming the herbarium, was a woman, Mary S. Young, who was a professor here in the teens of the 20th century. When she wasn't teaching, she'd take off into all different parts of Texas... by burro, by train, whatever was necessary to get into the remote corners of the state in those days. Another really important person was Billie Turner who took over as director in the 1950's. And over the next 40 years he turned this place from a regional herbarium... into an internationally renowned herbarium with over a million specimens. Part of this involved getting the donation of a major herbarium, the Lundell Herbarium, over 400,000 specimens that had been amassed by Cyrus Lundell, a well-known botanist who worked a lot in Central America and Texas. Billie Turner retired as director just a few years ago, but botanists are botanists until the day they die, and so he still comes in every day and works actively in the herbarium. Billie Turner Get a good picture now, I want to advertise myself. Anne Van Nest Once the plants have been mounted, and the Texas and Mexican plants databased, they have to go somewhere... in one of the hundreds and hundreds of cabinets, in one of the six floors in this building. Tom Wendt The Plant Resources Center is the largest herbarium in Texas. It's the 11th largest herbarium anywhere in the United States. It's among the top 100 largest herbaria in the whole world, and there are thousands of herbaria. There are over a million specimens here of what we call vascular plants. What that means are ferns, pines, oak trees, cacti, and then all the flowering plants which can be anything from a grass, all the way up to the things you think of as wildflowers, such as a bluebonnet or a sunflower. But, do we have a lot of very, very rare plants represented here? You bet. This is a collection from Captain Cook's first voyage around the world. It was collected in 1768. And you can see, it still looks like an herbarium specimen just like the others. It's exciting when we look back at how it was collected. Somebody may have had to climb a tree, they may have had to canoe a river. Or they may have just had to drive 10 miles outside of Austin to get it, but there's a whole history of going to collect that specimen. I personally have spent a lot of time collecting in rain forests in Mexico. [BANJO MUSIC] Now when we go out and collect these plants, we might collect five or 10, assuming that it's not a rare and endangered plant. One of those specimens will end up here. But the other five or 10 we'll send off to other institutions, and they'll send us some of theirs. Thus, we've been able to build up a large collection, for instance, of Amazonian plants, although almost no one from here has spent much time in the Amazon. So, how do we make these specimens? Well, it's pretty much like when people put a flower into a book, shut it, and come back a while later, you have a nice, flat, dry flower. Except we kind of do it on an industrial level. We have these things called plant presses, and the specimen, whatever you're going to collect, goes into some newspaper. You put it in there, you put it in the press, put a whole bunch of them together and you put them in a drying oven. But the real excitement from these specimens comes from how they're going to be used. Like right here in this one, we're looking at a genus called Brickellia. Brickellias are sunflower relatives that grow all over Mexico and Texas, and we want to understand how many species there are, how do you identify them, how are they related to each other, how did they evolve, and what kind of variation do we have within that genus? Now, in the old days, the old days meaning 50 years ago, we would just take these specimens, we would look at them really carefully with microscopes, with whatever tools we have, and try to understand the variation in them. However, these days we're applying molecular techniques, such as DNA sequencing or DNA bar-coding. Why not just go out and look at the living plants out there? They have so much more information than these dead, flat ones. That's absolutely true, but the great advantage here... is that you can look at specimens that have been collected over a hundred or more years, in good years, in bad years, from all over the range of a species. You've got them all in one place at one time. The herbarium itself is a gold mine of data for anybody working in plant conservation, and those people are in here working in the collection all the time. You can't really conserve something unless you know what it is, and there are hundreds of thousands of plant species out there. Figuring out what they are and where they grow is a major part of what we do, and so we provide that information to a lot of different people. It's not that there's been a plan to make this herbarium, but rather, there have been a large number of people who just love botany, love plants, love to go out and collect, and they go out and collect the specimens, and they come in. [BANJO MUSIC]