This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a sweet treat from the fall forest, American Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana).
American Persimmon is found throughout the southeastern United States. It’s usually a small to medium-sized tree which grows on a wide array of soil types. On Edisto Island, it’s commonly found on field rows, road sides, ditch edges, and coming up in fallow fields. In drier habitats and those with poor soils, it typically grows into a short and sometimes shrubby tree. On fertile soils with ample water, it can grow into a large canopy tree. American Persimmon is a tree that’s easy to identify. Its fairly large, simple, alternate, oval-shaped leaves resemble few other species here in the coastal plain. Persimmons also commonly get a leaf-spot disease here on the coast, which manifests as small black dots all over the tree’s leaves, and this symptom is so ubiquitous that it makes American Persimmon very easy to pick out at a glance. On a quick aside, Persimmon is also one of the host plants for the Luna Moth, whose caterpillar feeds on its leaves. In the winter Persimmon is still an easy one to pick out as it has unique bark, which is dark, almost black, gray-brown and deeply furrowed with a blocky appearance, and distinctive twigs, which are a warm brown, punctuated with little corky bumps, and bear small, black buds.
However, American Persimmon is easiest to identify in fall by its fruits. The fruit of our native Persimmon is a large berry, at about an inch across, and colored a rich blend of soft orange and red, darkening and reddening as it ripens, with a velvety sheen of silver on the skin. Inside this fruit are a handful of persimmon seeds, which are large, flat, and orange-brown in color. American Persimmons are incredibly productive fruit trees. In good years, a small wild Persimmon can be so laden with fruit as to break branches. Persimmon fruits are adored by an almost endless list of wildlife, including deer, foxes, mockingbirds, raccoons, box turtles, orioles, squirrels, cedar waxwings, coyotes, opossums, turkey, black bears, and the list goes on. American Persimmon is also very edible for people! When fully ripe, the fruit has a heavy honey-sweet flavor enrichened with a complex medley of intermingled fruity notes. A ripe persimmon is a uniform rose-red in color and mushy to the touch. However, when NOT fully ripe, the fruit is unbearably astringent due to its high tannin content, like red wine cranked up to eleven, which leaves your mouth feeling like it’s full of sawdust. That extreme astringency is harmless but practically intolerable. Finding a perfectly ripe Persimmon in the wild can be a challenge, given every critter in the woods is looking for one too. To get around this competition with wildlife, one can harvest not-quite-ripe persimmons and ripen them through a process called bletting. This was historically done by exposing the fruits to light frost for a few days. Nowadays and down here where we can’t rely on frost, this is most easily accomplished by placing the persimmons in a paper bag with a banana for a few days until they begin ripening and then, once close to ripe, storing them in the fridge (sans banana) for a week or so to blet them. One additional fact is that American Persimmon is a dioecious plant, meaning that there are both male and female trees. Male trees will never produce fruit and you can’t tell which kind of tree you have until they mature and flower. Female trees won’t produce fruit either unless there are male trees nearby to pollinate them. So if you’re interested in growing your own American Persimmon trees, you’ll need to plant a handful!
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday is a ruddy reptile with a terrible reputation, the Copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix).
The Copperhead is our most common Viper on the Island and on the smaller end, averaging two feet in length. Their scales are a tan or copper-orange with dark “X”s down their back. They live in forests where they blend into the leaf litter or nestle under logs to ambush rodents, toads, and insects. Vipers are interesting for reptiles in that they give live birth. Rather than laying eggs, the eggs incubate inside their mother and she gives birth to wide-eyed and scaly-tailed baby snakes.
Copperheads are known for getting into trouble with us humans. Their favorite hidey-holes are underneath something next to a structure and we like to leave somethings lying all around our structures. This is compounded by an instinctual danger reflex unique to Copperheads. When surprised they freeze and let their camouflage hide them, remaining motionless until touched. When touched they assume their cover is blown and go straight to fangs. This preference for getting into our stuff and not letting us know they’re there is the reason why Copperheads account for the vast majority of venomous snake bites in South Carolina. Luckily, Copperheads often dry-bite, injecting no venom, and their venom is the weakest of our Vipers. Healthy adult humans can typically survive their bite without antivenin. However, I wouldn’t roll that dice. One should always seek immediate medical attention if bitten by a venomous snake.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s an aureate autumn field flower, Tall Goldenrod (Solidago altissima).
Tall Goldenrod is a large, late blooming wildflower found throughout the eastern United States. It’s commonly found here in the Lowcountry in fallow fields, pasture edges, clear cuts, and other sunny open areas. Tall goldenrod grows four to five feet in height. It has straight, stiff stems which are generally a muted-burgundy in color and covered in a fine peach-fuzz. Leaves spiral up the entire length of the stem and are alternately arranged, simple, lance-shaped, and possess a lightly toothed margin and debossed veins. Tall Goldenrod is a colony forming plant and spreads aggressively underground through rhizomes. Under the right conditions, it can fill up an entire field. Tall Goldenrod blooms in fall, usually peaking the first few weeks of October. Their radiant golden-yellow flowers emerge in a pointed panicle at the top of the stem. Each flower is itself a compound flower composed of many smaller flowers. The flowers of Tall Goldenrod are frequented by bees, wasps, flies, and other pollinators.
Tall Goldenrod gets a bad rap for causing fall allergies but this is actually a case of misattribution, as Goldenrod pollen is not wind dispersed. What actually causes fall allergies are species like Common Ragweed and various warm-season grasses, which have wind dispersed pollen but no obvious flowers. Goldenrods have bright showy flowers that attract pollinating insects, and also catch our attention. The point of these showy flowers is to get insects to pick up the heavy, sticky pollen produced by Goldenrod and carry it to other Goldenrod flowers. If Goldenrod released its pollen into the air, it would have no need for these highly visible, nectar producing flowers. Goldenrod blooms at the same time as these other innocuously flowering plants and grows in the same habitats. So when we start sneezing, we notice the Goldenrod covering the landscape and lay the blame at its feet, not noticing the Bluestem and Ragweed mixed in with it.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a boisterous and brilliantly blue bird, the Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata).
The Blue Jay is found year-round across the eastern and central United States. They’re a member of the corvids, the same family as crows. They share many of the characteristic with other corvids, including a heavy pointed bill, large body size, high intelligence, a wide range of vocalizations, and a social nature. Blue Jays are one of our most easily recognized birds. Their underside is plated in ice-whites and steel-gray. Their head pointed with a triangular crest. Their face encircled and divided by a bridle of black. Their nape is awash with a stormy-sky-blue leading down to a tail and wings of brilliant blue, divided by black bands and accented with white, like a stained glass panel. Blue Jays are also easily recognized by their calls, which are as loud as they are varied. The most common is a sharp dry cry but they also rattle, cackle, shriek, yip like a small dog, and click their bills. Often these are all issued in a slurry by several birds all at once. They will even mimic the calls of large birds of prey. Of our local raptors, they’re especially fond of, and pretty good at, mimicking the call of the Red-shouldered Hawk but will also attempt to copy the Bald Eagle and Red-tailed Hawk on occasion.
Blue Jays are social birds and live in tight-knit family groups. They typically inhabit oak forests but also take well to suburbia. They’re arboreal and spend most of their time in the trees but regularly drop to the ground to forage. The Blue Jay’s diet is predominantly acorns, nuts, fruits, seeds, and grains but also includes a fair bit of invertebrates and the occasional small vertebrate, such as a frog or lizard. They will visit feeders but generally need to be bribed with large nuts, dried fruits, and suet to get them to show with consistency.
One of the most interesting facts about Blue Jays are that they’re a critical species in forest ecology. Much like squirrels, Blue Jays cache away acorns and nuts for later use, generally wedging them in crevices or jamming them directly into the soil. Also like squirrels, they sometimes forget where they left those nuts. Those forgotten seeds then get a head start on germination. However, unlike squirrels, Blue Jays can fly. Thus they can effortlessly move acorns great distances uphill, over rivers, or across open fields. There is also evidence that Blue Jays will deliberately cache seeds in un-forested areas and forest clearings. This provides an invaluable ecosystem service in the form of reforestation, allowing slow growing trees with heavy seeds the opportunity to reclaim land. This skill of Blue Jays and other Jay species is being put to good use by ecologists to help reforest certain damaged ecosystems. By providing the Jays with a buffet of acorns from selected species, ecologists can efficiently seed and reforest large areas of land, with no disturbance to the area and minimal costs for labor.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have a twiney vine found in fallow fields and brushy thickets, Hairy Clustervine (Jacquemontia tamnifolia).
Hairy Clustervine is found throughout the coastal plain of the Southeastern United States. It’s a low growing, herbaceous, and annual species from the Morning-Glory family, Convolvulaceae. It has heart shaped-leaves and almost the entire plant is covered in a coat of fine hair. The most notable feature of Hairy Clustervine is a namesake hairy cluster it produces composed of the flower buds and seed pods. This cluster is about an inch to inch-and-a-half wide and it’s bursting with thin, twisted bracts and downy hairs. From the cluster’s margins spring forth pastel-indigo flowers, each less than a half-inch across, and usually two or three at a time. As the seasons wear on, the flowers stop but these clusters brown and remain over winter as a reminder of the plant’s presence. Hairy Clustervine is most easily spotted growing in fallow fields over the top of grass and forbs but it is also a common site in roadsides, ditch edges, and sunny wood-lines.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’ve dredged up a peculiar fish from our estuarine waterways, the Oyster Toadfish (Opsanus tau).
The Oyster Toadfish is found throughout the saline coastal of coastal South Carolina. It’s most commonly seen in and around oyster reefs where it nestles between the oysters and the pluff mud, lying in ambush. They’re omnivorous but mainly eat crustaceans, mollusks, and small fish. The Oyster Toadfish is a strange and unique looking fish. It reaches about a foot in length and its relatively flat body is covered in a mottled pattern of browns and pale-yellow. Their pectoral fins are heavy and muscular and their dorsal fin extends all the way down towards the end of their tail, perfect for crawling around the mud and low-speed swimming. They have a broad, flat head covered in fleshy barbels and a wide mouth full of small dome-shaped teeth. When pulled out of the water, Oyster Toadfish can be a handful. These fish grunt, bite, and wield a mildly venomous dorsal spine. Their sting is painful like a wasp but otherwise harmless. The Oyster Toadfish is one of the many species who depend on the critical inshore reef habitat created by the Eastern Oyster and a key part of keeping those habitats healthy.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we have yet another noticeable wetland wildflower, Obedient Plant (Physostegia virginiana).
Obedient Plant is found sporadically within the South Carolina Lowcountry. It’s not a particularly common native wildflower here but it is a widespread staple of home gardens and easy to source at native plant nurseries. It prefers wet meadows, freshwater marsh margins, and sunny floodplains, all not too common habitats here in South Carolina. Obedient Plant grows two to three feet in height. It spreads laterally beneath the ground and forms loose clumping colonies. It has an upright posture with stems growing straight up, branches held aloft, and leaves held straight out. The leaves are oppositely arranged and easily identified by their simple, elliptical shape and saw-toothed margins. Obedient Plant is in the mint family, Lamiaceae, and proudly demonstrates its family’s trademark square stems. Yet its flowers are still the trademark identifier. Flowers bloom at the uppermost tips of the stems and branches. Individual flowers are arranged together into a spike, with each flower emerging directly from the stem, and together the flower buds form a tall and tight-knit spire above the main plant. Individual flowers bloom from the base of the spike upward. There are often a dozen or more open at once, all packed closely together. Each flower is a blend of magenta and white, giving the flower a pale pink color from a distance. The petals of each flower are fused together into a bilaterally symmetrical corolla, shaped a bit like a pitcher. The peak bloom time of Obedient Plant is mid-September and it is a wonderful nectar plant for pollinators, particularly our native bees. It’s also a good addition to any backyard garden and grows well in garden beds with rich, moist soils.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday we’re scoping out the Tricolored Heron (Egretta tricolor).
The Tricolored Heron is a large bird and a medium-large Heron. It’s found year-round throughout the South Carolina Lowcountry as well as the coastal plain of the Eastern United States, from Massachusetts down into Mexico, and beyond. The Tricolored Heron is one of our more colorful herons and is plumed with white across the belly and underwings, a pewter-blue across the back, wings, and neck, and a frayed string of chestnut-brown between their throat and their breastbone. That chestnut returns again, blended into the pewter of the mantle and mane, which are adorned with longer plume-like feathers on adult birds. Juveniles lack these plumes in exchange for heavy chestnut accents along their flanks and all the way up their neck. In the off-season, adults have chartreuse-yellow legs and a dark crimson-red eye behind a patch of golden-yellow skin. In breeding plumage, adults gain white plumes from the back of their head, rosy legs, an intense scarlet eye, and a brilliant sky-blue beak. Like all our Egrets and Herons, Tricolored Herons hunt fish using their long necks, pointed bills, and high-speed pinpoint precision. Tricolored Herons are more active than some of our waders and can often be seen walking slowly through shallow water or sometimes running and chasing fish in very shallow pools. Again like other waders, they are colony nesters and make use of tall-shrubs and low-hanging branches in open swamps over alligator-filled waters, usually alongside several other species of wading birds.
Here’s a quick fun fact. The terms Egret and Heron don’t truly have a deeper scientific meaning. Even though we have a standardized set of common names for bird species, their use is arbitrary and inconsistent. One could argue that members of the genus Ardea are the true Herons and members of Egretta the true Egrets but it is all semantics. Members of one are called the other and we have several other genera that are labelled as one or the other. For example, the Great Blue Heron and Great Egret are both in genus Ardea and at the same time the Snowy Egret is in genus Egretta but so is the Tricolored Heron. We also have the Green Heron, which is a separate genus, and the Cattle Egret, yet another genus. What it all boils down to is that Egrets are pure white in color and Herons are not. Except for the ones that aren’t, like the Little Blue Heron that is snow-white as a juvenile but ocean-blue and faded maroon as an adult. Makes sense given the adult isn’t white. However, the Reddish Egret is also snow-white as a juvenile but becomes faded clay-red and storm-gray as an adult. I guess the most we can say with certainty is all Egrets are all white in at least one stage of their life. (The most used term in applied biology is “it depends” and, as I like to say, “biology is the study of exceptions.”)
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday, we have a common denizen of ditches and pond edges, the Primrose-Willows of genus Ludwigia.
Primrose-Willows, AKA Water-Primroses, are a group of predominantly small wetland shrubs which are widespread throughout the Eastern United States. In South Carolina we have roughly sixteen abundant species. I’m going to focus on the three I think you’ll be most likely to see: Seedbox (L. alternifolia), Wingleaf Primrose-Willow (L. decurrens), and Water-Purslane (L. palustris).
Seedbox is often found in sunny ditches, pond edges, and freshwater marshes. It grows about three feet in height and forms small, airy bushes. It has a narrow, smooth stem that is often reddish in color. Its leaves are alternate and simple, pointed, and elongate with a pale vein down the center. The flower is four-petalled and lemon-yellow with nearly heart-shaped petals. The calyx of leaves beneath the petals is practically square on its perimeter, with its points situated between the petals. The most distinctive feature of Seedbox, and where it gets that common name, is its dry capsule fruit. This capsule takes on an almost cubic shape, with a square top and seams between its gently bowing sides.
Wingleaf Primrose-Willow is superficially similar to Seedbox in size and shape and is found in much the same habitats. However, Wingleaf Primrose-Willow prefers wetter feet and can grow in more saturated soils. It also grows straighter and less like a bush, its leaves have a corrugated character, and its stems are thicker, green, and often have wings running down from each leaf. The fruit of Wingleaf Primrose-Willow is very different in appearance from Seedbox, having an elongated rectangular shape and prominent ridges at each corner.
Water-Purslane is very different than the other two. It commonly grows as a creeping groundcover on pond and freshwater marsh edges but also as an emergent wetland plant in shallow water. It has somewhat spoon-shaped, alternate leaves often with a prominent pinkish-red vein and fleshy, burgundy stems. Its flowers are tiny and butter-yellow with petals shaped similarly to its leaves.
This week for Flora and Fauna Friday it’s the most feared arthropod in all the south, the Southern Black Widow (Latrodectus mactans).
The Southern Black Widow is a member of the Cobweb Spiders, family Theridiidae, and the Widow Spiders are the largest members of this family. They are found throughout the Lowcountry. An adult female Black Widow is usually about an inch-and-a-half in spread with a body about a half-inch long. The female Black Widow has a spherical abdomen, round cephalothorax (head plus thorax), and slim, almost hairless legs. They are usually a glossy ink-black across their entire body with a distinctive scarlet hourglass on the bottom of the abdomen and a scarlet-red spot just above their spinneret. Males are roughly half the size of the female with a wrinkly egg-shaped abdomen not much bigger than their cephalothorax. Males are also more colorful with tan and black banded legs and ivory and orange markings across the back, while still retaining the hourglass below. Immature females resemble the colorations of an adult male but with feminine proportions. Black Widows are found in open wooded areas and prefer to make their webs in drier locations and hidden from view. In the wild they make webs in bushes, thickets, brush piles, crevices, burrows, and hollow stumps. However, they have an affinity for web building in and under human structures, such as sheds, wood stacks, piles of rubble or masonry blocks, and crawl spaces. Their webs are thin, three-dimensional, and disorganized. The egg-sac of the South Black Widow is a roughly half-inch diameter sphere of tan, tightly wound silk.
Black Widows are well known, apart from their hourglass mark, for two things: their mating habits and their venom. Female Black Widows are reported to be voracious hunters of their own suitors, which earned them the Widow common name. Although it is true that they will not shy away from dining on their dates, more recent studies indicate that impromptu dinner dates are more a function of how well fed she is and how long the male sticks around than any habitual or instinctive preference of female Widows, with most males escaping unharmed. Moving to their other trademark, the venom of the Southern Black Widow is neurotoxic and causes incredibly painful, involuntary muscle spasms that spread from the site of the bite. These spasms can prevent breathing and cause death by suffocation. However, the dangers of a Black Widow bite have also been exaggerated. Although Black Widow venom is irrefutably capable of killing an adult human at the right dosage, it is difficult for the spider to inject that much venom to the right area of the body in a single bite. Unless the victim has underlying pre-existing conditions, the quantity of venom injected by a bite is very rarely enough to be fatal and symptoms take hours to manifest. However, that does not mean a Black Widow bite is not excruciatingly painful nor medically serious. Anyone bitten by a Black Widow should still seek immediate medical attention, just know it’s by no means a guaranteed sentence.
As a bonus, we also have another common species of Widow, the Brown Widow (L. geometricus). The Brown Widow is much the same size and shape with similar habits to the Southern Black Widow but, it is brown. It’s also covered in fuzz and can have a pale marbling pattern across the abdomen. Another notable difference between the two is the egg-sac. The Brown Widow’s egg-sac is spiked, giving it a somewhat woolen appearance and making it very easy to identify. The Brown Widow is not native to the Southeastern United States. It was introduced to Florida and spread north over time. It is now found throughout the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina. Brown Widows are found in the tropics worldwide and need hot, humid climates. They have a marked preference for human structures but, thankfully, their bite is far less potent than our native species, but still quite painful. The Northern Black Widow (L. variolus) is a third Widow species that can be found in South Carolina and it is very similar in appearance to the Southern. However, it is not nearly as common as the other two species down here on the coast.
