Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Flower Power | Wish Upon a Shooting Star

A unique kind of primrose has helped biologists anticipate how plants might adapt to climate change

[Editor's note: Last month was not easy at 13.7 Billion Years. Dealing with the issue of animal cruelty is a heartbreaking, angering affair. While 13.7 will continue to keep you up-to-date on animal welfare issues via Twitter and important action alerts within each daily post, for the month of May, the focus shifts to a subject not nearly as gut-wrenching, but still crucial: flowers. Indeed, all higher life forms -- including humans -- could not exist without them.]

In North America and part of southeastern Siberia, there is a genus of herbaceous, bee-pollinated flowering plants in the Primrose family called Dodecatheon. Because of their flower shape, they are commonly known as Shooting Stars.

And these unique flowering plants have been the subject of a study by Brad Oberle and Barbara A. Schaal, biologists at Washington University in St. Louis who have attempted to predict what might happen to them and other plant species that face extinction due to anthropogenic climate change, according to ScienceDaily.

Instead of looking into the possible future for answers, the researchers looked into the past, investigating the ancient history of three Shooting Star species to see how they survived global warming at the end of the Pleistocene, the geologic epoch from 2,588,000 to 12,000 years BP (Before Present) that spans the Earth's recent glacial period.

Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, "Responses to historical climate change identify contemporary threats to diversity in Dodecatheon" found a mixed result studying two of the species, which are rare and grow only in cliff habitats.

One species is probably a relict species, adapted to the Pleistocene's cool and wet conditions that gradually retreated to shrinking refuges as the climate heated up. The other species is probably an ecotype, a local variant of a widespread species that had adapted in place to the "microclimates" of their cliff dwellings.

The researchers concluded that "the complex response of Dodecatheon to historical climate change suggests that contemporary conservation efforts should accommodate evolutionary processes, in some cases by restoring genetic connectivity between ecologically differentiated populations."

"The results suggest that the two rare 'species' of shootingstar in the eastern United States should be managed quite differently," according to ScienceDaily. "Because the jeweled shootingstar is a relict, it's probably hanging on by a thread. If climate continues to warm, it is likely to go extinct."

"Because we know this species is genetically distinctive, the jeweled shootingstar should be a priority for conservation as climate continues to warm," Oberle says.

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Also on 13.7 Billion Years: "Reports from 2050," a series of imagined reports from the year 2050, supported by current news, recent discoveries and scientific predictions.

image: Shootingstars in Grand Teton (Wikimedia Commons)
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