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On 8/29/2010 8:27 PM, David & Alison Webster wrote:
> Hi Fred & All, Aug 29, 2010
* I'll reply to more of this later, but I'll just relay some preliminary
results now. We've been catapulted by other obligations to Prospect,
west of Halifax, where John & Karen Gilhen have taken us under their
wings. What I have to report are a few stands along Hwy 101 (3
collections at stands we'd previously waypointed, which made it possible
to slow down and sample them, and three other stands documented as
drive-by waypoints), a sample from the big stand in Annapolis Royal, and
a very strange stand down here along Hwy 333.
> I have long admired the stand at Annapolis (on the left as one goes west
> out of Annapolis) which, so far as I am aware, is no larger or smaller
> than it was when I first saw it about 1946. Some assume this stand to be
> Acadian in origin, based on location I suspect. I have a clone of this
> stand in the yard (planted 1991) and the base of the culm (with dead
> sheaths removed) is green but smooth.
>
> So based on culm base color and surface texture the answer to the
> question "is this stand European in origin ?" is yes and no.
* this is also my assessment of the stem of this stand that Adam
Zieleman collected, before our flight SE from Round Hill. The colour of
the lower stem was mingled red and green, and the texture of the
internodes were what I call "micro-rough" - intermediate between the
smooth condition of the natives, and the rough yellow or green stems of
the pure European stands.
Two of the stands sampled along Hwy 101 west of Windsor were also
intermediate-like and the other was native-like. As Ontarians we were
astonished to see no Phragmites along Hwy 101 between Windsor and
Halifax. Along Hwy 333, last evening, we saw an amazingly low
grey-headed stand SE of the road. Today we collected a sample of this,
and found it to be two uniform stands extended for about 100m along the
road. These are short stems (though the initial impression that they
were only a foot high was due to their growing along a raised road) The
stems are nonetheless short, and narrow but microrough and green. The
heads were big and open, with big parts. The specimens emitted lots of
little Aphids.
This is also a mosaic of native/European features, rather than a
clear-cut identification, so our plan is to collect samples for
botanists to examine.
While no hybrids have been *documented,* Paul Catling and I both have a
few Ontario stand which we suspect to be hybrids, but neither of us have
time or funds to properly work on their status. Part of the problem is
that the DNA work was done on chloroplast DNA, which is maternally
inherited, so the DNA can't directly assess interbreeding. We also don't
know for certain that the native kinds are all one uniform taxon across
the different lineages.
>> We'd be very glad to hear of the location of suspected native or
>> invasive stands, and as soon as we have better internet connections
>> we're going to put up a page for reporting the location of Phragmites
>> stands, which we'll communicate to Paul Catling's national registry of
>> such stands.
fred schueler
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Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
now in the field on the Thirty Years Later Expedition -
http://fragileinheritance.org/projects/thirty/thirtyintro.htm
Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
(613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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