There are a number of reasons for writing this post that covers a range of plant-based items. One, it’s a nice change from the in-depth book reviews that have been the blog’s main outputs over the past couple of months. Two, I’m intrigued to see how the AI assistant – that I use to help draft the summaries eMailed to subscribers whenever a post is published – copes with such a wide range of topics in a single post – and what it has to ‘say’ about ‘improving the title for SEO’. [Ed. – AI made a brave attempt at a featured image, and the eMailed text ‘isn’t too bad’, but doesn’t mention all of the topics covered. AI proposed three alternative titles: Exploring 2024’s New Plant and Fungal Species; Ancient Egypt’s Psychotropic Mug: A Botanical Insight; and The Future of Electronics: Leaves as Circuit Boards. None of which are better than the one I chose to begin with. It had a a lot to say about content structure, but they’re only suggestions…]
Old year, new species
This image – of Phellodon sinclairii is a ‘toothy fungus’ of the same genus as those newly-described in the UK in 2024 – is by Bernard Spragg. NZ and has been made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Even though I’ve already ‘looked back’ in the immediately preceding post, I’m not averse to doing so again in this ‘postette’ [a postette is one of several separately-titled written pieces within an overall single post, such as this post with the over-arching title “Botanical potpourri No. 1”]. Celebrating the diversity of the plant (and fungal) world, two workers at RBG Kew write about their 10 favourites from the newly-named plants and fungi for 2024 here*.
Amongst the ‘newbies’ on Sebastian Kettley & Martin Cheek’s list is the “Ghost palm of Borneo published after 90 years – Plectocomiopsis hantu” (Benedikt Georg Kuhnhäuser et al., 2024) [which plant had been collected and stored away in a herbarium for almost 100 years before it was officially described and named and therefore ‘discovered’ (i.e. discovered in the ‘scientific’ sense by those who have to abide by the rules of naming species, not discovered in any meaningful sense of the word as in known to the local communities of Borneo (Malaysia and Indonesia) in the area where the plant lived – because that doesn’t really count…)]. Demonstrating that you don’t necessarily have to go to the tropics to find new species, the Kew list also includes “Three new species of toothy toadstools from the UK”. And, underlining yet again the fragility of nature and the dangers imposed upon it by human activities, we have a “Critically Endangered by cement manufacture in Vietnam: new genus and species Chlorohiptage” (Truang Van Do et al., 2024).
For more on this story, see here, here, Simon Rushton, Damian Carrington, and Gary Parkinson. For some sort of organismal balance, Liz Kimbrough writes about – and has photographs of – “Top new species from 2024” [Ed. – yes, which does include some plants and fungi amongst the animals…].
Forensic botany I: Foretelling the past
This image, of the storefront of a psychic fortuneteller, by Boston, is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
It is well-known that – supposedly – one can tell a person’s future by reading the tea leaves left in their cup after drinking the plant-based brew in the practice of tasseography (or tasseomancy, tassology, or tasseology (Aliza Kelly). Well, that may be so. But, what is much more definite is that examining what remains in the cups of ancient people can give insights into humanity’s past. And that’s the story highlighted by Julia Binswanger writing in the Smithsonian Magazine, a great source of plant-relevant stories.
Her article concerns the work of Davide Tanasi et al. (2024) and their analysis of the contents of a 2,000-year old mug from the 2nd century BCE. Using “cutting-edge proteomics, metabolomics, genetics techniques, and synchrotron radiation-based Fourier Transformed Infrared microSpectroscopy (SR µ-FTIR)”, Davide et al. (2024) characterised organic residues that remained in the vessel, identified as an “Egyptian ritual Bes-vase”. Analysis of the contents revealed “traces of Peganum harmala (Aslihan Yuruktumen et al., 2008), Nimphaea [sic.] nouchali var. caerulea [this plant’s genus name is shown correctly as Nymphaea in the body of the paper], and a plant of the Cleome [sic., generic names should be italicised] genus, all of which are traditionally proven to have psychotropic (Malini Ghoshal) and medicinal properties” (Davide et al., 2024) – quoted from the paper’s summary).
Although in the 21st century we can’t be sure what the mug and its contents were used for [we possess neither a time machine to go back and check, nor sufficiently reliable hindsight], Davide et al. (2024) speculate that the mug and its brew were used for “ritual practices in Ptolemaic Egypt (Sally-Ann Ashton, Arienne King)”. The nature of any such practices is largely unknown, but “may have been used for “incubation rituals,” in which people would sleep in a sacred area and hope to receive guidance from a deity in their dreams” [as suggested by Davide Tanasi to Julia Biswanger].
What is more certain is that the present-day ability to analyse and identify organic substances in such ancient artefacts provides an extra route to elucidating the rich diversity of plants and their products used by people in the past, which work continues to underline the importance of plants to people. Importantly, being able to analyse the contents of vessels provides strong evidence for their chemical nature rather than relying on second-guessing what they might have contained, and therefore been used for.
Not wishing to ‘cast any nasturtiums’, but I wonder how old the mug’s contents – with their “psychotropic and medicinal properties” – might actually be. After all, Julia Binswanger tells us that the “intricately crafted mug depicting an ancient Egyptian deity was donated to the Tampa Museum of Art’s collections in 1984”. Is there any possibility that the residue in the mug might have been ‘contaminated’ by modern-day people using the mug for their own purposes in the period between 1984 and 2024? Is the entirety of the vessel’s residues from the Ptolemaic period? Could it have been … tam pa’d with? Just asking…
For more on this work, see here, here, here, Dario Radley, and Sejal Sharma.
[Ed. – I’d love to have been able to tell you that the inspiration for this postette came from our guest correspondent, Claire Voyant, who’s quite partial to a nice cup of Rosie Lee (Sarah Angela Almaden). But it wasn’t. And, I suspect, some of you may have predicted that I was going to say that…]
Circuitous reference to an old wood post
This stunning image of a flower of Magnolia sieboldii, by William (Ned) Friedman, is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Whilst I like to try and make each post – or postette – on this site as complete as I can, quite often items appear shortly after one’s been published that I would have liked to have included in the post(ette) – to make it even more complete. Take, for instance, Christie Wilcox’s item with the headline “Producing circuit boards from leaves would prevent millions of tons of e-waste”. In a previous post – about present-day uses of wood, I mentioned the use of wood – and cellulose fibres extracted from wood – as an alternative material for the circuit boards used in electronic applications. Whilst that item was fine as far as it went [Ed. – but which, again with hindsight, would have been better to have entitled that postette as “a chip off the old block”…], imagine how much further it could have gone – and more satisfyingly so – if it had included the work of Rakesh Nair et al. (2024) which “opens a vista of possibilities for biodegradable polymers heretofore considered unsuitable for making temperature-stable substrates for state-of-the-art electronics applications”. Oh well, at least the ‘leaftronics’ story has now had an honourable mention here (even if the work described is rather vague as to which magnolia species was used as the source of the leaves for the material…).
For more [Ed. – and, let’s be honest, Mr P Cuttings has given you very little to go on here(!)] on this story, see here, here, here, and Rose Ganshert.
PS (Karen Hertzberg, as annoying as it was not to have mentioned a relevant news item that wasn’t available when I wrote the original postette, it was embarrassing to have omitted an item that was available long before my piece was written. That was the work of Van Chinh Tran et al. (2023) who describe the creation of a functioning transistor (Artem Oppermann) in which all three terminals were made of ‘conductive wood’ constructed from balsa (Ochroma pyramidale). For more on that rather technical story, see Jeremy Hsu’s piece in New Scientist. Which revelation must mean I have at least one New Year’s resolution (Jessica Glenza) to make: Research blog posts more thoroughly. [Ed. – Let’s see how long that lasts…]
Forensic botany II: Fungal spores flutter by……
This image of a painted lady butterfly on a coneflower, by Jean-Pol Grandmont, is used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
I enjoy researching the items that get bundled together as the posts on this blog. Particularly when I think a story is going in one direction and then takes off on a completely different trajectory because of some of the articles or whatever that I’ve read whilst researching it, or even thanks to a chance remark uncovered in the article of the main story. Take this postette for example. Initially I was intrigued by Saugat Bolakhe’s story entitled “The secrets of butterfly migration, written in pollen”. That article described the work of Tomasz Suchan et al. (2024) that documents an epic 4200-km trans-Atlantic migration by painted lady butterflies. Analysis of the insect’s pollen loads indicated the departure site for their trans-ocean journey, and involved records collected as part of a citizen science project (Christina Riska Simmons).
Although I’m still interested in Suchan et al’s work, the aspect that caught my eye – and intrigued me more – was what wasn’t in the scientific paper, but which only appears to be mentioned in Saugat Bolakhe’s article. And that is the announcement that “Tracking migration routes of insects could be of growing importance in the face of changing climate, because such insects can carry fungal diseases in addition to pollen”. Apparently, “Suchan – first named author on the scientific paper by Suchan et al. (2024) – detected many species of fungi in some butterflies. … Thus, migrating insects could potentially spread these fungal diseases across continents, posing risks to ecosystems and economies” (Saugat Bolakhe).
Why this wasn’t mentioned in Suchan et al. (2024)’s paper is a mystery to me. It seems to be as big a story as the marathon migration of the butterfly, and reasonable speculation is usually encouraged in discussing the relevance of a study’s results**. But, perhaps one shouldn’t be too surprised at this ‘omission’; mention of any fungal spore load doesn’t appear to have been one of the study’s stated results. Maybe this information is being kept for another publication..?
As so many examples in nature show, there is often a double-edged sword at play when animals and non-animals interact. In this case, the plants provide the butterflies with an energy source – nectar and pollen – but opportunistic fungi may also use the insect as a vector to spread disease between plants that may be separated by thousands of miles. Whether one should admire the fungi for having discovered this transport route or not is a moot point. Nature is, well, nature and therefore natural. And natural can be neither wrong nor right. It just is. Discuss…
For more on this story, and in addition to the admirably in-depth news story by Saugat Bolakhe, see here, here, here, here, Guillermo Carvajal, and Monique Brouillette.
* Not on that Kew list, but surely a candidate, is what’s been described as the “Hairy ‘orangutan pitcher plant’” by James Woodford. That nickname (Daniel Costa) was applied to Nepenthes pongoides (Nepenthaceae), a micro-endemic (Mike Passal) tropical pitcher plant from northern Borneo described and named new to science by Alviana Damit et al. (2024).
The reason for the hairy orangutan name is revealed in the namers’ etymology section of their paper [frequently one of the most interesting parts of a publication describing a new species]: “The specific epithet pongoides is derived from the primate genus name Pongo (the orangutans) and the Greek suffix –oides (resembling). This name was chosen in light of the highly developed, persistent reddish indumentum covering the stems, phyllodes, tendrils and pitchers; the long, dark, rufous hairs of living plants are similar in colour to those of this critically endangered great ape, a population of which persists within the area of the Ulu Tungud Forest Reserve, as evidenced by a fleeting encounter with a single individual during the expedition” (Damit et al., 2024).
Although newly-named, only 39 mature individuals – spread over two subpopulations – were observed in the wild, which has resulted in the species being categorised as ‘CR’ (Critically Endangered) under the IUCN Red List criteria. Apart from its extremely small population size, and the highly restricted geographical area in which it occurs, the “very high threat of unsustainable poaching for the horticultural trade” is also recognised as contributing to its CR status. Another characteristic the plant shares with its animal namesake is the fact that the orangutan is also assessed as CR in the wild.
** I don’t know how relevant this may be, but what this information made me think of was the Chaos Theory (Clay Halton) notion of the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Argentina leading to a tornado in Texas, the so-called butterfly effect (Paul Halpern). Could the flapping of the painted lady’s wings in Africa cause fungal epidemics world-wide..?
REFERENCES
Alviana Damit A et al. (2024) Sabah’s hidden giant: Nepenthes pongoides (Nepenthaceae), a micro-endemic tropical pitcher plant from northern Borneo. Australian Journal of Botany 72: BT24050; doi:10.1071/BT24050
Benedikt Georg Kuhnhäuser et al., 2024. Plectocomiopsis hantu, a distinctive but elusive rattan from Borneo. Palms 68 (1): 5-10.
Rakesh E Nair et al., 2024. Leaftronics: Natural lignocellulose scaffolds for sustainable electronics. Science Advances 10(45): eadq3276; doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adq3276
Tomasz Suchan et al., 2024. A trans-oceanic flight of over 4,200 km by painted lady butterflies. Nat Commun 15: 5205; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49079-2
Davide Tanasi et al., 2024. Multianalytical investigation reveals psychotropic substances in a ptolemaic Egyptian vase. Sci Rep 14: 27891; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-78721-8
Van Chinh Tran et al., 2023. Electrical current modulation in wood electrochemical transistor. PNAS 120(18): e2218380120; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218380120
Truang Van Do et al., 2024. Chlorohiptage (Tetrapteroids, Malpighiaceae), a distinct new genus endemic to Vietnam based on morphological and molecular data. Plant Ecology and Evolution 157(2): 125-136; https://doi.org/10.5091/plecevo.115623
Aslihan Yuruktumen et al., 2008. Syrian rue tea: a recipe for disaster. Clin Toxicol (Phila) 46(8): 749-752; doi: 10.1080/15563650701323205
Plant Cuttings 
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