In your webpage you mention using fractal analysis in your research. How does this apply to botany? The only connection I can recall hearing of is an essay of rickyjames’ called Fern – Fractal Fusion Frustration … but his point was that, compelling as it looks, fractals couldn’t apply in this case!

I’m afraid I’m not at all familiar with plant biology, but I’ve just been reading Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”, and he makes quite a big deal about the variety of ways in which domestication of plants by humans has resulted in many different kinds of obvious and not-so-obvious changes in their biology. Selection for larger sizes, seedlessness, or larger seeds when the seed is what we’re after; self-pollination, quick germination, etc. etc. Can you comment on reproductive differences between wild and domesticated species you’ve looked at, or any general comments on that subject?

I would be MOST interested in your comments on my fern / fractal confusion…

Do you students have difficulty studying with someone so beautiful?

Bob C.

In early December I drove up from Seattle and spent the day in Vancouver with janra, my first real trip to Canada.  We went for a short hike in the forest and I was VERY impressed with just how beautiful it was.  I hadn’t realized the forest in that part of the Northwest was actually considered a “rain forest”.  Anyway, you’ve got a wonderful corner of the world in which to study botany.

One of the most curious things we saw (to me, anyway) were a half-dozen or so burned trees.  These were BIG charred hollow trunks going up to 10 or 15 meters above the ground with no “insides”  and no real damage to speak of on any of the nearby trees or ground.  There weren’t, from what I could see, any limbs from the trees on the ground, either.  I’ve spent a LOT of time in hardwood forests in the South, and I’ve NEVER seen anything like that a single time before, much less a half dozen times in walking distance.  They strongly reminded me of so called lava trees I saw in Hawaii many years ago, but of course that’s not what formed them.  Janra said lightning caused them, but I still find that a little hard to believe.  In the South I’ve seen lots of lightning strikes on trees, and while they do cause fires and generally tear up the side of the tree, down here they never just burn out the core of the tree.  Have you ever seen charred trees in B. C.?  Your comments?

Hi Cindy, I wish you could tell us about how you go about getting the samples of dwarf mistletoe. Do you climb trees yourself? It sounds like you have to keep going back throughout the germination period (a year and a half!). Do you need to get specimens from throughout the tree, or it it OK to just take the low-hanging fruit (as it were)? The “pest” link above splits the three in thirds from the top down to rate the infestation — does the placement on the tree have any significance (top vs. middle vs. bottom), or is it just a way to roughly quantify the total amount of mistletoe?

In the press release, in discussing the way the dwarf mistletoe ejects its seeds, you say “This extreme buildup of water pressure as a seed dispersal system is rare in the plant world.” What other plants besides dwarf mistletoe use this method? I’d never heard of it before!

The cool thing about mistletoe is its ability to be green all year without being a conifer.  From an evolutionary standpoint, why haven’t all green leafy plants adopted the mistletoe route and stay green year-round?  It seems to me that dropping leaves is much more common.  Which came first – falling leaves or mistletoe?

Cindy, until you came along to take her place, my female botanist heroine over the years has been  Mary Eubanks ever since I read an article about her years ago in Discover magazine, and I’m wondering if you are familiar with her work on corn.  Who were the role models that got you interested in a career in botany?

Is mistletoe really your favorite, or something else?  Somehow I just can’t imagine that a self-professed plant gynecologist wouldn’t be interested in orchids, that ultimate plant most associated with sex on so many levels and scandal to boot.  Are you?  

I said I guessed that it was lightning. I don’t know for certain.

Just for a bit more detail, the burned-out stumps were much bigger in girth than anything around them. That park was logged about 100 years ago, so I’d imagine they are remnants from before the logging. (Which would explain the lack of branches…)

If iterated function systems (IFS) were the only way to generate fractals then we’d be in trouble. However, Jackson Pollock made fractals with a brush, and a smoothly connected line of paint is a far cry from a free-floating pixel. Really the “fractalness” of an object is simply a description of how the apparent size of an object increases as the size of the ruler used to measure it decreases. If I used a square 10 microns per side to measure the surface area of a fern, I’d end up having to include the surface area of the air passages inside the leaves (if the little pores known as stomata are open at the time), which would make the apparent area much larger than if I’d used a postage stamp to estimate the surface area. Ferns are fractal, even if we don’t know how they got that way.

I was going to ask a similar one, except that I was going to mention my favorite parasitic plant genus, the paintbrushes. These grow in B.C. and are sexual tricksters, considering that the colorful part most of us would call a flower isn’t a flower. What is it about dwarf mistletoe that makes it so fascinating to study?

Unless anyone objects, I am going to treat barakn’s comment (#15) as a separate question, for the sake of collecting the rated questions at the end of January 11. (So rate it, people!) I think the reference to parasitic plants in particular makes it different from the parent comment. Besides, as barakn points out, not all pretty things are flowers.

On the other hand, I’m going to append janra’s comment (#13) and rickyjames’ comment (#4) to their parent comments, because they add to their parent.

Hi Cindy, your web page says you are director of the Friends of Wells Gray Park. I take it provincial parks are run by the province, so do you have to deal with provincial officials? Or more with the membership of the Friends? How long have you been doing it, and what does it entail?

Cindy, were you the hand behind the press release “Dwarf mistletoe reveals its sexual secrets”? I can imagine a publicist writing it to spice up the subject, but on the other hand you seem to have a pretty good sense of humor. It’s terrific!

gosh – thanks. But of course I posted – like – the BEST picture I have of myself on the web. The real me may not be exactly as shown… The Wells Gray Park pix are a little more me.

Thanks! Actually, Jake B. of Quantum Writing really picked up on the more “interesting” aspects of dwarf mistletoe reproduction from an interview he did with me. We had a lot of fun! But he indeed wrote the article.