Weeds: The Superhero Gang of the Plant World

The lawn in our outdoor classroom is lush, thick and inviting.  It looks like a perfect sea of even, green grass.  Just look at it!  If you stop and really look, though, you'll start to see weeds.  They are stealthy and hidden, but they are everywhere!

A clover plant thriving in a nutrient-depleted patch.

Weeds, by definition, are plants that humans consider to be growing in the wrong place.  They annoy us in our lawns, we spend time removing them from our gardens, and when they grow amongst our crop plants, they reduce the amount of food that is produced, so they cost us food, time and money.

Still, I rather admire weeds.  If you look at them from the plants' perspective, weeds are the ones that manage to survive even after people have done everything they can to get rid of them.  To make our outdoor classroom, humans removed all the vegetation and reseeded with very thick grass to completely out-compete the weeds for sunlight and nutrients, but the weeds found a way.

Spring cress, false-strawberry and a dandelion battling their way into our lawn.

Weeds usually have some unique 'special power' (well, growing ability) that lets them grow in hostile habitats.  Some weeds, like the spring cress in the picture above, can grow when it's too cold for other plants, so they take off while the grass pauses for winter (plus they have exploding seed pods!).  Clover's super power is to produce a nutrient called nitrogen that other plants can't make, so it can grow in nutrient-depleted habitats.  Dandelions, are shape-shifters: generalists that can adapt to just about any condition (plus their seeds fly on the wind).   The spurge's power (seen below) is speed: the ability to grow and make seeds so fast they can live their lives before people notice them and kill them.

A spurge weed with milky sap - tear the stems and notice it oozes a white liquid.

Some conditions are too harsh even for weeds.  Notice the worn pathways in the grass where students walk.  There don't seem to be any grass plants or weed plants there.  Now we just need to find a weed whose special powers are to grow despite dozens of people walking on them every day!

Another reason I admire weeds is that they provide variety to the types of habitats available for other organisms.  The more types of plants that grow in an area, then the more types of insects and birds and mammals and other species you can have.  Variety of types of living organisms is called biodiversity.  A pure, uniform lawn is like a desert in terms of biodiversity, because it only has one type of organism.  Weeds increase the biodiversity of our outdoor classroom.

Do you think weeds are more likely to be found in the middle of the lawn or at the edges of it?  You can experiment to find the answer.  Use a small hula hoop as your measuring device.  Throw the hula hoop randomly onto the grass in the center of the lawn and count how many weeds are present in the circle.  Then randomly toss the hoop on the grass at the edge and count weeds again.  Do this a couple more times, and you should have your answer.  Now you just have to figure out an explanation for why you think weeds prefer one habitat over the other.

Busy Fall Ants

Edward O. Wilson is one of my scientist heroes, and he has studied ants for most of the 83 years of his life.  As a child, he loved to go outside and observe ants for hours because they exhibit such a variety of behaviors.  E. O. Wilson eventually became the world's leading myrmecologist (ant expert), as well as an expert on ecology, animal behavior and conservation biology.  Thanks to him, I know some really amazing things about ant behavior, and I always think of him when I observe ants.

A foraging ant.

The ants at our outdoor classroom are busy, busy, busy this time of year.  Frost is coming soon, and the ants are foraging for their last bits of food to help get them through the cold weather coming our way.  If you stop and observe the rocks around the pond, you will start to see some patterns in the ants' behaviors as the ants bustle around in a mad rush to get ready for winter.  Below are some patterns in ant behavior that I observed.

An ant and her shadow.

The ant above was exploring to find food, also known as foraging.  Any ant exploring on its own in a zig-zag or random fashion is most likely foraging for food.  When the ant finds food, it will pick up the food and bring its food back to the ant's nest to share with the other ants in its colony.  If there is more food than it can carry, the ant will do something incredible.  It will leave a scent trail on its return to the nest to signal to its nest mates to go and get the rest of the food!  How amazing that these tiny creatures can communicate such complex information to each other.

Ants following a scent trail.

Ants are social insects that live in colonies.  The ants in a row in the picture above are interacting as a social group by following a common scent trail.  Either they are all going to get food or they are moving their colony.  Ants usually maintain a nest in a space in or near the ground.  The nest stores their food and eggs.  The ants in the picture above are all sisters!  I know this because all worker ants are female and are sisters.  The sisters work together to keep the colony alive and take care of their mom, the queen.  The queen stays in the ants nest and lays eggs.  If you look closely at a line of ants, you might be able to see if they are carrying bits of food or eggs.  If they are carrying ant eggs, they are moving the colony.  There is a colony of ants outside my back door that moves its nest every time it rains: from under the flower pot in dry weather to under a loose brick when it's rainy.  They never seem to get tired of carrying eggs around.

Ants deciding if they are friends or enemies.

If you observe a line of ants, you will probably notice ants are going in both directions, like in the picture above.  That means the ants run into each other.  Every time an ant runs into another ant, it needs to determine if the other ant is a friend or an enemy.  Enemy ants must be run off the territory or killed and eaten, and friendly ants must be allowed to pass.  Ants don't recognize each others' faces; rather, they smell each other with their antennae.  It takes just a flash for the ants to touch antennae, recognize each other, then head on their way. 

Ants are extremely important creatures on Earth.  They live in the soil and on trees and other plants, and they help recycle nutrients in ecosystems.  Ants build soil, eat pest organisms, and provide food for other insects and for birds.  Some plants are pollinated by ants, and some seeds are dispersed by them too.  E. O. Wilson has estimated that ants account for about the same amount of mass on Earth as humans do! I wonder which has had a greater impact on our planet.  I know humans have built cities and houses and reshaped the ecosystems, but ants have built the soil that all other terrestrial ecosystems are built on.

How to Read Bark Scars in Sourwood Trees

Sourwood trees are among the first to turn colors in the Fall.

The sourwood trees in our outdoor classroom are the first to put on their fall colors for the season.  Sourwoods are wonderful, smallish trees with beautiful foliage and interesting bark.  They are named for the sour taste of their leaves, which you can experience if you touch a bit of torn leaf to your tongue.  The leaves contain oxalic acid, which tastes pleasantly sour (all acids taste sour).  Tasting the leaf is not harmful, but the leaves are not considered edible and shouldn't be eaten.

The small orange-leaved tree in the picture is one of our sourwoods.

We have two sourwood trees.  Above you can see the location of one sourwood - it's the orange-leaved small tree in the center of the picture.  See if you can find the second sourwood tree when you visit the classroom.

Lenticels in young bark of the sourwood tree.

Sourwood bark is wonderful - it has so many visible features that give clues to what the tree is doing and what it has gone through during the tree's life.  A lot of people think tree bark is a dead part of the tree, but the opposite is true: tree bark is a living, important tree tissue that changes as trees grow.  Bark is mostly responsible for moving sugars (a tree's food, made from photosynthesis) between the leaves and roots.  Bark is filled with phloem tubes for transporting the sugar.  The above picture of a young twig contains tiny spots called lenticels.  Lenticels are tiny holes in the bark to allow air to get into and out of the inner tissues of the twig.  Compare the above twig to the one below.

Sourwood twig with cicada damage.

The twig in the picture above is about the same age as the one in the previous picture, but something looks wrong!  This giant gash in the bark is the healed wound cut into the bark by one of last year's cicadas.  Cicadas cut into young bark and lay their eggs in the gash where the developing offspring can feed on tree sap.  The living bark responds by slowly growing a scar to heal the wound and seal off the wood, which is what you see above.  

Older twig with young bark splitting as the twig grows larger.

Bark naturally stretches and tears and re-heals to allow tree twigs and trunks to increase in girth.  The twig above shows the first tears in young bark as the twig is getting thicker through the years.  The stretch marks get bigger as the tree gets bigger, and large branches and trunks might have deep furrows in the bark.

Scar from where a branch broke off the tree.

When branches fall off or are broken off, the bark around the broken area swells up and heals over the scar.  The scar above looks like a pretty big scar, so I suspect the branch that used to grow here was torn off unevenly.  Notice the larger tears in the normal bark above and below the branch scar.

Large gash in bark that is healing over - possibly damage from planting the tree.

Here is an even bigger scar from some major damage to the trunk.  Something cut into the bark of this tree.  Perhaps it was damaged as it was being transported or planted here.  Such an injury can weaken or kill a tree, because it can let diseases into the tree, just like a wound in our skin can become infected.  I wish more people realized this so they wouldn't carve their initials into trees' bark.  Nevertheless, this tree appears to be healing from its damage.  You can see exposed wood through the gash in this bark.  If the wound to this tree were to have cut through the bark all the way around the tree, the tree would have died, since the bark would be unable to move sugars up and down the tree.  Plant managers who need to kill trees use this technique - it's called girdling a tree.

Check out the bark on our sourwood trees and look for lenticels, branch scars, normal tears in the bark, and possible injuries to the bark.  Then take a look at other types of trees and see if you can read the scars in the bark.  Can you tell where branches used to be?  Can you see how the bark split at the tree got bigger?

Click to zoom in and see how the leaf veins connect.

When you check out the bark on our sourwoods, be sure to look at the leaves too.  Sourwood leaf veins are large, and it's easy to see the network of how the veins connect.  Also be sure to look for the remnants of flowers, now turning into fruits, at the ends of some of the branches.