Who Pollinates the Poisonous Plant?
Biodiversity as a balm
On a tilted terrace that gained elevation as it angled into the subalpine valley, we crossed a creek of snowmelt running over a bed of cracked slate. The water was gentle under our boots, but a few dozen feet to our left it vaulted over the side of the terrace and into the ravine. Past the mosses that lined the creek’s sides, a marshy micro-ecosystem grew. Down-turned cups of pink flowers rose on upright stems, and the white blossoms of wild strawberries showed their faces amid dense leaves.
Just beyond these, I stooped to marvel at a column of pale yellow flowers that I recognized as a bog orchid. Inconspicuous and strange, like many tiny mouths.
And past these, where the micro-marsh again gave way to drier ground, a few stalks of star-shaped whitish-yellow flowers grew in tall, loose clusters. Mountain death camas, a plant whose wicked name signals its danger: all parts of this plant from the bulb to the seeds are poisonous. I pointed out the plant to my mom, who hiked beside me, and she wondered if the nectar would be poisonous to bees. Later that night, after we had traversed the mountainside and passed many more plants too numerous to identify on the trail, I did some researching.
In fact, the death camas plant is poisonous to all but one type of bee (that we know of): Andrena astragali. Like most of North America’s native bees, the death camas miner bee is solitary and ground-nesting, meaning that the females lay their eggs in holes in the ground and work alone to gather pollen to feed their broods. And apparently it’s a bit of a mystery how the larvae, which hatch and eat the pollen left for them in their holes, withstand the poison. Maybe they can tolerate it, or maybe the pollen loses its toxicity over time, before the larvae hatch to eat it.
It felt like gleaning secret information to read this. How strange! And how interesting. To happen upon a poisonous plant and learn that its fate is bound to the fate of one singular and chimerical creature.
I’m writing this inside, in the city, and the zinnias next to my desk are wilting. I’m writing this to save myself from my own malaise, which from week to week threatens to flatten my curiosity and imaginative energy. Biodiversity is a center of mass that keeps pulling me towards its specificity and its strangeness. Whenever I feel my eyes glazing, it’s time to go back outside.
Listening To
Thinking About
This wildly accurate video from Elyse Myers
Reading
“Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal [for creative work] might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease.”