Inside the Minds of Plants
Last June when Koko the gorilla was found dead in her sleep at the age of 46, the Gorilla Foundation in California, where she lived, released a statement saying that the western lowland gorilla would be “deeply missed.” For those who didn’t know who she was, they explained: “Koko touched the lives of millions as an ambassador for all gorillas and an icon for interspecies communication and empathy.”
Koko and her kitten. Credit: Creative Commons
It was a loving tribute, but it no doubt upset those who have long been troubled by the humanizing of Koko. Born on the fourth of July in 1971 at the San Francisco Zoo, the infant gorilla soon became the subject of a controversial language research project being conducted by psychologist Francine “Penny” Patterson. Over the years, Patterson taught Koko to use over 1,000 words of modified American Sign Language and the gorilla became famous for, among other things, her emotional expressiveness, love of cats and ability to enchant just about everyone, including celebrities like Robin Williams and Mr. Rogers.
But was Koko really capable of communicating in the way Patterson and others claimed she was? Some skeptical scientists have long said no, arguing that apes simply don’t possess the emotional and mental capacity to communicate on such a complex level. To them, Koko’s perceived abilities were nothing more than a textbook case of anthropomorphism. And if there is one thing scientists of that sort disdain, it is people going about attributing human traits to non-human lifeforms.
Holed up in places that clearly must not allow any pets for them to observe and interact with, these scientists are undaunted in their quests to prove human superiority despite decades of research demonstrating the intelligence and emotions of many living creatures—octopuses, chimps, dolphins, elephants and crows to name a few.
Fortunately, there are also scientists out there who get that humans are great and all, but other living things, including plants, can also do amazing things. Monica Gagliano is one of those scientists. An evolutionary ecologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she studies plants as few other do by exploring questions about their behavior, learning and memory. I heard about Gagliano’s work while listening to an episode of Radiolab’s podcast called Smarty Plants.
Sensitive plants close their leaves, like butterflies fold their wings together, when touched. Credit: iStock
Co-hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad were jostling with the question: Do you really need a brain to sense the world around you? To remember? Or even learn? Krulwich thought not, but Abumrad disagreed and the episode unpacked the idea, primarily zeroing in on Gagliano’s work with sensitive plants, Mimosa pudica, which she chose because they can be counted on to respond to stimuli by dramatically closing up their leaves.
Run out and buy Monica Gagliano’s book Thus Spoke the Plant.
For her first tests, examining plants’ ability to learn, Gagliano constructed what amounted to a tiny carnival ride that hoisted the sensitive plants up a short ways before dropping them onto a soft, cushy surface. Over and over, dozens and dozens of times, the plants were dropped and each time they closed their leaves until finally, they stopped. Because “the plants realized that was not necessary,” she says, explaining that the plants had learned something.(Watch her interview with TheScientist here.)
Krulwich was amazed, but Abumrad wondered aloud whether the plants had simply run out of energy to close up. Gagliano had thought of that too, and she’d tested the theory by shaking the plants that were no longer closing up their leaves from side to side rather than dropping them. The plants responded by quickly closing up, so it was not exhaustion they were exhibiting.
Three days later Gagliano returned to the lab and started dropping the plants again. This time, they stopped closing their leaves almost immediately, indicating that they hadn’t just learned something, they had also remembered it. Gagliano waited a few more days, and the plants still remembered. A few more days: same thing. At last, she waited 28 days before dropping them again. The result? Galiano believes those mimosa plants somehow remembered what had happened and did not close up on the way down.
At the very least, her research makes clear that plants, like animals, are capable of much more than we give them credit for. It makes you think, right? What do plants feel or sense or know when our shovels bite into the soil around them? I shudder to think about what might be going on with them when they somehow sense that pruners, or worse—an electric trimmer is nearby. Gagliano may not yet understand how plants are learning and remembering, but she is showing the world that they are doing those things. It’s thrilling to imagine what else may be discovered.
A version of this essay appeared in a 2018 issue of Northern Gardener.
How Critters Survive Minnesota Winters
I knew it had been a while since my last blog post. But I was surprised to see that it has been more than two months. I imagine that’s at least partly due to my aversion to spending any more time than necessary at my computer where I might be tempted to check the headlines—AGAIN and AGAIN, as if somehow some good news will suddenly appear. We will make it through these incomprehensibly stupid and dark times but, for now, it’s better for me to do stuff that’s totally unrelated to current events.
One thing I have been up to lately is marveling at how critters somehow manage to stay alive in our cruel climate. After doing a bit of research, I still don’t really get how, in the absence of witchcraft or magic, the majority of living creatures out there don’t just DIE during our long, inhospitable winters. But they usually don’t, and here’s how.
Birds—Sure, a lot of birds head south for the winter. But here in Minnesota, many birds stay put, including house sparrow, woodpeckers, blue jays, American goldfinches, Northern cardinals and black-capped chickadees, to name a few. How do they survive? Well, not all of them do. When we go through long periods of terribly harsh cold, only the strongest birds make it. And they do it, by doing some of the same things we might, like shiver, especially through the night when it’s really cold so they can maintain their body heat. Some birds also squat down to cover their legs and feet as best they can. (Oh, those tiny little bare legs.)
Black-Capped Chickadee—iStock
Because all that shivering burns off fat, birds are really hungry in the morning. So if you’d like to help out with a meal, fill a tray or platform feeder with a nice mix of black oiler sunflower seed, peanut pieces, safflower seeds and cracked corn. To offer a little something for everyone, consider having a tube-style feeder with a similar mixture in it for birds who prefer to eat that way. While you’re at it, maybe throw in a suet feeder or two and a finch feeder packed with tiny bits of thistle and sunflower pieces (they love sunflower pieces). Want to provide some water too? Plug in a heated dog dish or birdbath. Birds bathe all year long to keep their feathers clean, which helps them hold in warmth.
Ground Squirrels and Chipmunks—While chipmunks hibernate in the winter, sleeping in their burrows where they wake up every now and then to have a snack and poop and pee, Eastern Gray squirrels must survive the cold on food they’ve either hoarded or can forage somehow. They often stay in their nests for several days when it’s bitterly cold, but otherwise they’re out and about hunting for all of those nuts they carefully buried. How successful are they at finding all of those? According to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, “a gray squirrel can hide 25 nuts in a half an hour and can later find roughly 80 percent of the those it buried.” I’m impressed.
Squirrels believe all feeders are for them. End. Of. Story.
Frogs—Hibernation means different things for different creatures. In the case of frogs, many aquatic frogs hibernate in the water. But rather than burrowing deep into the mud like turtles, they hang around near the bottom of a pond or stream where they breathe oxygen from the water through their skin. (Fun fact: extremely cold water holds more oxygen than warm water.) Other frogs, like tree frogs and wood frogs, endure a more sci-fi experience in that they pretty much freeze solid for the winter months. Hibernating under logs or in leaf litter, they wait out the winter as little frog popsicles that reanimate once the weather warms up.
Wild Turkeys—It’s hard to take a nature walk in the city these days without running into at least a few wild turkeys. Huge and strangely prehistoric looking, those turkeys are as tough as they look and can usually survive our brutally cold weather as long as they can find food, particularly fruit-bearing shrubs and trees as well as grasses and seeds. The biggest hardship they face is deep powdery snow that can make it too difficult for them to forage. If those conditions persist for more than a couple of weeks, many turkeys can starve to death, which totally makes me want to set up a Little Free Wild Turkey Emergency Feeding Station in my front yard. I know. You’re super glad you’re not my neighbor.
Cicada or Locust?
If you’re like me, and probably a zillion other people, what you think you know about cicadas and locusts is all mixed up. So how about we spend a few minutes sorting this mess out.
I grew up in Phoenix where there are a lot more cicadas than we have here in Minnesota. Their buzzing, which I love, was pretty much the soundtrack to my entire childhood. But what I enjoyed even more was playing with the alien-like exoskeletons that cicadas shed and leave stuck to just about every surface in sight. Pinching those delicate shells between our fingers, my friends and I would march them around, like we did our Barbies, acting out whatever we were playing that day.
Cicadas are related to crickets. (Yeah, I can’t really see it either.)
I haven’t been able to find a source to prove it, but by the sound of it, I think we had more cicadas this year than usual. (Listen to some of the sounds different cicada species make here.) Others who have thought the same, have emailed to ask if I think this is one of those 17-year cycles where a huge swarm of them comes out of the ground to mate and wreak havoc on crops, or whatever it is they do when there’s a whole bunch of them. Now, I’ve of course heard of the 17-year cycle of locusts, which I thought were the same thing as cicadas. But lacking any kind of useful answer for folks, I looked stuff up. And boy did I learn a lot.
First off—cicadas and locusts are completely different insects. What! I know, but it’s true, and the reason we get all confused about this is probably because both insects do behave in similar ways. Locusts, however, are a type of grasshopper while cicadas are related to crickets—the latter connection is far less obvious when you look at photos. Locusts are the critters that swarm, sometimes to the point of causing actual natural disasters and earning them a bad rap in the Bible, books and a fair number of sci-fi films and TV shows. Watch them swarm and devour everything in sight in this BBC Earth clip.)
Locusts are a type of grasshopper.
There are two types of cicadas, annual and periodical. True to their name, annual cicadas show up every year, though their life cycle is usually several years longer. They just spend the rest of that time underground, so we don’t see them. Periodical cicadas, though, have a 13- to 17-year life cycle. And that’s where we get our misguided ideas about the 17-year locust plague. Like annual cicadas, periodical species also spend a good deal of their lives underground. They just emerge far less often, and when they do, their numbers can be quite large, causing people to think they are a swarm or, yes, a plague of locusts. This BBC Earth segment on 17-year periodical cicadas is an amazing, yet kind of horrifying, MUST SEE.
Minnesota doesn’t even have periodical cicadas. So, even if we are hearing more of them this year, it’s not like we’re being overtaken by the critters or anything. Unlike locusts, cicadas don’t destroy crops. But they do feed on and lay their eggs on trees, though the damage isn’t usually a big issue. Generally present from early July to sometime in September, cicadas are harmless, so even though they look scary, don’t squish the poor things if you see them.
Once the nymphs finally come up out of the ground and leave their skins behind to become adults, they only get a few brief weeks to hum and buzz to attract mates and have a bit of fun before they die. So, the next time you hear that strange noise they make with their abdomens, know that what you’re hearing is really the sound of love.
A Happy Ending for Baby Snapping Turtles
Nature is wondrous, but it can also be very cruel. Spend 10 minutes watching a David Attenborough show and some poor, hapless creature is bound to become engaged in a life-or-death struggle and end up maimed or eaten. My husband, Mike, has stopped watching nature shows because his tender heart can’t take it. I agree, with the exception of programs by Attenborough. That charming British naturalist may be 92, but his curious, inquisitive, downright gleeful approach to nature never fails to enchant me. (Here he is narrating the intro to “the lesser-spotted” Adele’s Hello as only he can.)
Snapping turtle laying eggs on Lake Harriet’s North Beach.
Knowing that backstory, you’ll understand how the first words out of Mike’s mouth were, “Oh no. Don’t look,” when we ran into a large crowd staring out at the water on the north end of Lake Harriet the other day. I looked. And there on the sandy beach were three medium-sized brown snapping turtles, side by side in a line. Necks arched upward, feet splayed out, the turtles were nearly motionless, each in a shallow hole not much bigger than they were. “They’re laying eggs,” a woman next to us whispered. Everyone was whispering, like people used to do in libraries and museums.
I know most turtles in Minnesota lay their eggs in June, but I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing them actually doing it. How amazing nature is, all those mama turtles coming up on the beach to lay their precious eggs. Out in the lake, the heads of more egg-heavy turtles were visible as they bobbed up and down in the water, probably thinking, “Well, what the hell. Those rude humans haven’t the sense to avert their eyes during this intimate moment in our lives, but this is as good a place as any to have these babies, so let’s get to it.”
A cute baby snapping turtle.
But they were wrong. As heartwarming as that whole live nature show was, anyone there could see that burying eggs in the sand in the middle of a busy swimming beach was not a good plan. I watched for several minutes before realizing Mike was off talking with the lifeguards, who were taking the whole scene in from their nearby perch. My kindhearted husband wanted to know what happens next, and this is where our nature program took a grim turn. Snapping turtles lay eggs on this beach every year, a young lifeguard explained. And every year, once those mama turtles slide back into the water, the eggs they so carefully laid are quickly gobbled up by dogs, raccoons, foxes and other critters. Those that somehow manage to go uneaten are often crushed or otherwise destroyed by people who have no idea that baby turtle eggs are just beneath the sand.
They don’t always pick the best spot to lay eggs. —iStock
Surely something can be done to keep this horrible situation from happening every summer? Mike pressed. The lifeguard shrugged his thin shoulders: Calls had been made in the past, he said, but with few exceptions, it seemed like nothing was being done to relocate or otherwise protect the eggs from harm. We walked home wondering how this could be so. It seems like efforts are made to protect all sorts of things all the time. Where are the experts? Where are the naturalists? Snapping turtles are not an endangered species. Is that enough to make rescue efforts a no-go? One thing is for certain; those mama turtles will not be helping out. Reading up on Minnesota turtles, I learned that female turtles are done with the whole mom thing once they lay their eggs. They never come back and check on them. They don’t reunite with their offspring out in the lake one day. They lay their eggs and they are Out. Of. There.
That means, if this nature program is going to have a happier ending next year, it is up to us humans to make that happen. But what do we do? So far, I’ve learned that snapping turtles usually lay 25 to 80 eggs at one time and, depending on the weather, it can take two to three months, or even longer, for some eggs to hatch. I have no idea how many turtles laid their eggs on that beach, but you’ve got to figure that hundreds were buried there. Could they be moved to a safer spot? Would it be better to have a bunch of folks take some eggs home and put them in a homemade incubator or something? Is it crazy to think that next summer, when those mama turtles come out of the lake to lay their eggs, some of us could be there, ready to help keep their babies safe? That’s the kind of nature program I’d like to see.
How Raccoons Turned Our Gardens Into a Toilet
Here’s a fact you might not know, and probably, actually, don’t want to know: raccoons like to defecate communally. Yep, that’s right, they like to poop as a group, which is fine, I suppose, until the place they decide to call their toilet is already your front yard. Gross? Totally. But that is what happened at our house this summer, and I want to tell you the story, partly because it’s disgusting and bizarre, but also because maybe you’re like me and you think it’s fun to learn interesting stuff about other living creatures. If so, stay tuned. If not, now is your chance to RUN AWAY.
Hey you guys, I found a toilet in the bushes!
Here is the thing: I love wildlife to the point where I know I drive some people mad when I’m all, “Oh, calm down. It’s just a few gopher holes and, no, I won’t tell you how to kill them.” Or, “Yes, squirrels and chipmunks do damage some plants and take bites out of tomatoes. But they’re cute and the outdoors belongs to them as much or more than it does to us. So, no, I won’t tell you how to kill them.”
This live-and-let-live mindset is plain old good karma to my husband, Mike, and me. So when a family of raccoons started visiting our yard most nights this summer, we watched in wonder as they emerged from the sewer (Linden Hills’ sewers seem to be filled with raccoons) and trundled in a line down the path to the huge oak tree near our front door. Up the tree they would go, and then they’d stare silently down at us for a while before getting bored—or maybe comfortable—with our wine drinking and card playing or whatever. Pretty soon a couple of them would scooch over to the bird feeders and start shoveling food into their mouths with both paws. We noticed right away that, unlike squirrels, who behave like maniacs when they have to share food, the raccoons were very polite to each other, even going so far as to move out of the way so that somebody else could get closer to the good stuff.
We’ll probably die of cuteness overload before we die of rabies. Photo Credit: iStock
All of that snacking must have left the coons feeling parched because every morning, one of the two water bowls we leave out for thirsty critters was always empty. The other, smaller bowl was mostly empty too. But that bowl was always filled with mud, sticks and a bit of bird food or berries. Curious, I looked it up and learned that raccoons often dunk their food in water before they eat it. Scientists used to think that’s because they were washing their food, but further study revealed that raccoons dunk things in water to make their paws more sensitive to touch. Why? I’m so glad you asked. You see, raccoons don’t have the best vision, which is partly why you often see them tapping their paws on the ground rather than just looking right at stuff. Anyway, what raccoons do have is the same nerve groupings in their forepaws as primates, including humans. Getting their hands wet, scientists have found, increases nerve responsiveness, amping up their sense of touch so they can better understand important stuff about whatever they are about to stick into their mouths.
Freak out and scream, “RABIES!” if you want. But the truth is, and you can look this up, most raccoons do not have rabies and even if they do, transmission to people is extremely rare. Our raccoon family showed no signs of aggression, and Mike and I really enjoyed having them in our lives. The one worry for us was our dog, Lily, who thinks all creatures want to play with her. So we were careful not to let her our after dark. If she just had to go, we went with her, and everything was fine.
Well, everything was fine until the pooping started. I was filling the water dishes one day when I noticed a neat pile of really dark little turds. At first I thought they might be from a cat because half the neighborhood lets their cats live outside (do not get me started on that topic). But this poo was black, like charcoal, and oddly tube-shaped. I took a picture, which I chose not to share with you so; you’re welcome. I looked it up and sure enough—raccoon poo. We weren’t thrilled but figured, hey, everybody has to go sometime, and threw it away. (Yes we know raccoons can be infected with round worms. We wore gloves.)
How could anyone as cute as me poop so grossly in your yard? Photo Credit: iStock
A couple of weeks passed and there was more poo, only this time there were three piles instead of one. Adding to the grossness was a huge mound of barfed-up berries, which seemed to have come back up whole, so I guess they didn’t agree with somebody’s tummy. After that, things got worse fast and we were waking up to five, six, even seven piles of poo (some from coons who clearly needed to see a gastroenterologist), as well as an increasing amount of barf. So now our yard was not only a toilet, it was also a vomitorium. AWESOME.
Again, I turned to the Internet for answers, and that’s when I found out that once raccoons find a lovely place that feels safe and comfortable, they turn it into their own personal group toilet. I can sort of see that, I guess. But for a lot of reasons, Mike and I don’t want to muck out our little friends’ crapper and vomitorium every day. So, though we were sad to have to do it, we stopped filling the bird feeders, took away the water dishes and sprinkled fox urine granules all over the place, which is supposed to scare critters away. I can tell you this; the stench of fox urine has scared us away from our front porch. But we’re still dealing with some poop and barf, though less often. So, yeah, lesson learned. Now if we could just figure out a way to install an actual outdoor toilet that they could use.
Battling Japanese Beetles
- On August 11, 2017
- By Meleah
- In Bugs, Organic Gardening, Perennials, Soil, Uncategorized, What In Tarnation?
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In the last half an hour since I came in from the garden, at least two Japanese beetles have flown out of my hair, headed for who knows where in my house. But that was nothing compared to the one that just crawled boldly out of the waistband of my jeans. I squished it. Just one week ago I was breathing a sigh of relief that our Southwest Minneapolis neighborhood seemed, once again, to be mostly dodging the Japanese beetle plague after being hit really hard in 2011. And then I spotted them on my roses, and the Virginia creeper and the grape vines and the river birch trees. Soon they will move on to other plants they love, including my basil, and I will hate them for that, especially.
Japanese beetle orgy on my grapevines.
I have been battling Japanese beetles in earnest for five days now and, as you probably already know from having experienced them yourselves—I am losing. There are a lot of reasons for that; the biggest being that they are demons from hell and there is nothing mortals can do to stop them. But that aside, I also don’t like to use chemicals outside or inside, so my strategy for getting rid of them amounts to going around knocking them off of my plants and into a plastic bowl filled with soapy water. Yes, I do wear a glove on the beetle scooping hand. I have heard anecdotally that the beetles can bite, but that has never happened to me. I just prefer to keep them off my hand skin whenever possible.
Caught all of these Japanese beetles in my gardens in 30 minutes.
Before I say more about how to deal with these gross creatures, let me first explain a bit about Japanese beetles for those who have been living in a cave or condo for years, and/or are just new to the perils of gardening. About the size of a dime with futuristic-looking, gold and green bodies, Japanese beetles are actually kind of attractive if you’re into metallic bug robots. They were first spotted in Minnesota in 1968, but with the exception of a brief period in 2000 and 2001, they didn’t become much of a problem until about 2005.
Though the Japanese beetle life cycle is a short 60 days or so, they can do a lot of damage in that amount of time. Females lay eggs beneath turf grass in the summer, and around June or early July the following year their offspring emerge and fly off to their favorite plants (they are attracted to about 300 different plant species) where they mate in zombie-like orgiastic piles while skeletonizing leaves and pooping everywhere. Pheromones released by the beetles during this whole scene, which I swear I am not exaggerating, attract more and more beetles, and in a short time the areas where they gather are both denuded of foliage and reeking to high heaven, as my grandma used to say.
Anyway, let’s get back to how to get rid of them. Because the pheromones they release attract more beetles, it’s best to reduce their numbers if you can. So, as I said earlier, I go around murdering them every day with a glove on one hand and a bowl of soapy water in the other. I do this by slipping the bowl under a bunch of them, and then I gently brush the beetle piles into the water and move on to the next spot. Even when they are not enraptured by beetle sex, these are not fast-moving creatures—unless they start to fly—so it’s pretty easy to knock hundreds of them into a bowl of water in about 20 minutes.
Here’s a tip—don’t get super ambitious like I did today and try to brush a wide swath of them into the bowl at one time because loads of startled beetles will fly up and into your hair, your shirt pockets and your jeans—one even ricocheted off my lips. And here’s another tip—don’t hang up one of those Japanese beetle pheromone traps because they do work by attracting lots of beetles. The problem is they attract a whole lot more beetles to your yard than that trap will ever be able to deal with. Study after study has shown this and yet hardware stores keep selling out of these traps. Spread the word.
Don’t use JB traps unless you want to invite more beetles to your house.
If you don’t handpick Japanese beetles or use ill-advised traps, all of the other reasonable-sounding ways to control them involve insecticides, either synthetic or organic, and most, if not all of those are toxic to pollinators and other living things in one way or another. I love my gardens and it pains me to see them torn apart by ravenous, sex-crazed beetles. But, it doesn’t make sense to me to resort to chemicals that are known to be harmful, even when used according to their labels, which often advise spraying at night so the product will hopefully be dry by morning when bees start visiting plants. What? No. I can live with a few beetles in my hair.
