I came from Steamboat Springs, CO to Klamath Falls, OR to work with the USFWS and started in mid April. I came about 3 weeks later than the other two CLM interns I am working with, so when I got here things were in full swing and I did my best to understand everything that was going on. We are working with the Endangered Species crew and have been very involved in trying to capture the endangered Short-nose Sucker and Lost River Sucker adults in order to collect their eggs and sperm in order to spawn them. This has all been a very different and exiting experience for me being that I have done hardly any fisheries work, and I am gaining so much new knowledge in so many different ways.

My first week we worked the BOR in Lake Ewauna here in town.  We were using trammel nets to catch fish, and collected about 6 suckers, but were not able to make any of them become “ripe” using an experimental human growth hormone. This was exiting because it was my first experience on a boat here and I have only been on a boat about twice in my life! Later in the week I also got to experience using a dry suit and snorkeling in the river with my boss in order to see if we could see any suckers and catch them, however the turbidity levels of the water made seeing very difficult and we couldn’t get or see any fish.

Me and my boss following snorkeling

Another interesting experience the first week was meeting up with some fisheries biologists from the USGS who had collected Lost River suckers and were pit-tagging them. We were able to use 2 of their fish to collect eggs and sperm from to send down to a laboratory in Roswell, NM. It is very weird collecting these things from the fish, they are very big and you have to make sure you hold them tight, then you point their tail end downwards and squeeze their lower belly and everything just pours out! We sent them out that day and heard back the next week that 90% of the eggs we got had been fertilized, which is really good.

Lost River Sucker

My second week was interesting because we were focusing mainly on a project to get suckers out of a pond in the Lower Klamath Refuge where they had been raising them. This involved draining the pond and using Seine Nets to get all of the fish out of the major canal and outlying areas. This turned into a bit of a scramble because when the canal was getting low many fish began surfacing for air because the dissolved oxygen levels had become so low. We raced in the canal and used little nets to capture suckers as they were surfacing. The hardest thing about all of this was managing to walk in the mud where the pond had been. In some areas it was almost 3 feet deep and I got stuck at one point because the mud was acting like quicksand and the more I tried to get out the deeper I kept going, luckily we had a large crew with us and one of our guys helped me out- whew! It was a bit scary. In the end we got over 65 suckers out and they have a different home now.

SO MUCH MUD!

Yesterday we went to Redding, CA to pick up some baby suckers from a hatchery, they are going to be raised in a smaller pond which is next to the one we drained. I had never seen baby fish before and wow are they small!

Tiny baby suckers at the hatchery

This last week has mostly been focused on putting together net pens where we will be raising other larvae. This has been good, hard work.  The net pens are made out of these buoyant blocks you can make boat docks from, they just take a bit of effort to actually assemble.  But we finished and now just need to get it taken out to where it will be all summer.

That’s all I have for now, it has been good getting into everything these last few weeks and I am pretty exited for what will come next!

Klamath Falls Field Office- USFWS, Klamath Falls, OR.

Once upon a Central Oregon time,
In a district whose name starts with a Prine.
Two little botanists went out in the field,
Eager to see what the day might yet yield.

They came to a hill so steep and so high,
The top of it almost seemed to touch sky.
But they hoped there was something growing up there,
So they shouldered their gear with nary a care.

The climb it was hot, rocky and steep,
At times it seemed that the outlook was bleak.
But as they came over the line of the ridge,
The sight that they saw caused their jaws to unhinge.

Lupin!

Lupin!

Lupin for days,
Lupin fading into the spring haze.

Lupin and paintbrush,

Lupin and phlox,

Growing above all these honkin big rocks.

They collected their vouchers then headed down,
Lighthearted and gleeful they drove back to town.

Hello World,

Back in 1995, the Las Cruces District Office botanist, Laird McIntosh, was out botanizing on the east side of the Organ Mountains, in Rock Springs Canyon. He collected a few plants, one of which was an inconspicuous little member of the carrot family (Apiaceae) that he identified as Spermolepis echinata. At that time, Spermolepis echinata was the only Spermolepis known to occur in New Mexico. Here’s his specimen:

That specimen sat in the New Mexico State University Herbarium (NMC) for 15 years or so. Then Guy Nesom, of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, decided to study Spermolepis. He got specimens on loan from most of the major herbaria in the southwestern U.S., including NMC. He published the results of his research in 2012, and you can read it here. Nesom made a few changes in the taxonomy of Spermolepis, two of which are relevant here. First, he concluded that Laird McIntosh’s specimen was a new species, which he named Spermolepis organensis. That lone plant on the sheet was the only known individual of this species when Nesom published his work. Second, he separated Spermolepis echinata into two species: Spermolepis echinata and Spermolepis lateriflora. All the New Mexico specimens–except Laird’s from Rock Springs Canyon, of course–were assigned to Spermolepis lateriflora. Spermolepis echinata, which we had thought to be the only Spermolepis in New Mexico, was now not known to occur in the state at all.

Here’s what Spermolepis lateriflora looks like:

There are a couple of clear differences between Spermolepis lateriflora and Spermolepis organensis. The fruits of Spermolepis lateriflora have hooked hairs, while those of Spermolepis organensis are glabrous. Spermolepis lateriflora has sessile umbels, while Spermolepis organensis has pedunculate umbels. So, morphologically it’s clear enough. However, naming a new species based on a single specimen is a bit risky. Maybe this was just one odd individual rather than a species.

Following the publication of Nesom’s paper, a few New Mexico botanists went out to look for Spermolepis organensis at Rock Springs Canyon where Laird McIntosh collected it. Ken Heil and Dave Anderson went out there in 2013. I joined them for another search in 2014. Jeanne Tenorio and I looked for it again in 2015. None of us found it. We found a few Spermolepis, but nothing with the glabrous fruits of Spermolepis organensis. Repeating the search was on my to-do list this year, but I was beginning to suspect Laird’s plant was just a one-off with anomalous morphology.

Before I got the chance to go out and look for Spermolepis organensis, I was out on the northeast side of the Organ Mountains, a couple of miles north of Rock Springs Canyon, to collect seeds. A friend of mine, Gregory Penn, joined me. We made a Seeds of Success collection of Phacelia coerulea. I’m allergic to this species, and it causes rashes very much like poison ivy. Most people have no reaction to Phacelia coerulea and other members of the genus, but a lucky few of us do. In hindsight, doing a seed collection of it was a bad idea. Of course, it’s not just hindsight. I knew it was a bad idea at the time and did it regardless. In any case, before we started collecting seeds, only a few steps out of the truck I noticed that Spermolepis was abundant. Some of it was Spermolepis lateriflora, but I knew immediately that some of it was not. There were many plants that had no hooked hairs on their fruits. I wasn’t sure these were Spermolepis organensis, though. Perhaps I was mistaking another genus for Spermolepis. For instance, perhaps they were Cyclospermum leptophyllum, another inconspicuous little carrot. So I took some photographs and collected some specimens. Both Spermolepis lateriflora and this other little carrot were abundant throughout the area where we collected Phacelia coerulea.

After reviewing Nesom’s work and looking at my specimens under a dissecting microscope, I became certain the plants without hooked hairs on their fruits were indeed Spermolepis organensis. So, Laird’s plant was not an oddball. Spermolepis organensis is out there, easily identifiable from morphology, and locally abundant. Our earlier fruitless searches, I guess, resulted from looking for them when moisture conditions weren’t quite right. Or perhaps it only occurs sporadically at Rock Springs Canyon, and is more reliably found a bit to the north. In any case, here’s what it looks like:

Once I knew we had found Spermolepis organensis, I decided I needed to go back out there, look at more of them, collect a few more specimens so I could send duplicates to various regional herbaria, and visit a few more sites to get a better idea of its distribution in the area. I was also hoping to get some more pictures, of both Spermolepis organensis and Spermolepis lateriflora, but it was very windy. I went back another week later for pictures and it was, again, very windy. Oh well. I eventually got some decent pictures in spite the wind. During these revisits of the area, I noticed that there seem to be three Spermolepis species out there. One, with sessile umbels and hooked hairs on the fruits, is Spermolepis lateriflora. One, with pedunculate umbels and glabrous fruits, is Spermolepis organensis. The third has pedunculate umbels and hooked hairs on the fruits. I collected specimens of all three and, again, I needed to review Nesom’s work and look at my specimens under a dissecting microscope. It turns out that the third Spermolepis is Spermolepis echinata. Here’s what it looks like:

I guess this is the story of how a plant that was identified as Spermolepis echinata, but wasn’t, led in a roundabout way to the discovery of Spermolepis echinata in New Mexico. Our knowledge moves forward, more or less, but takes a few odd turns and relies on some happy accidents along the way.

So. It has been a really long time since I have given an update. Sorry about that. I promise I’ll do better from now on. To try and make it up to you, I’ll share lots of cool pictures from all the places my internship has taken me over the last couple months. March and April presented the Carson City CLM interns with a lot of opportunities for traveling. Lately it seems like I’ve spent more time on the road than at home – fine by me! The workshops and conferences we got to attend were supremely informative, and I got to scratch a couple more states off my bucket list. But, I’m just about spent by this point, and I’m practically falling asleep as I write this, so it’s probably a really good thing that I don’t have to go anywhere else for a while.

The first of our road trips was to Las Vegas. We attended the Nevada Rare Plant Workshop, which I imagine is probably just about the most fun a person could possibly have while visiting Vegas. Our drive there was scenic – we had decided to take a detour through Death Valley, so that we could enjoy the rare super-bloom. As advertised, it was pretty super. The typically barren plains were shrouded with desert gold, and for about half an hour I basically became Mary Poppins. It’s worth making the trek out there if you get chance. (Is the super-bloom even still happening? You probably ought to check before you go. I’d feel really bad if you went all the way out there on my recommendation and were disappointed by the lack of super-bloom. Although Death Valley is still pretty neat even without flowers. I digress.)

Anyways, after this highly worthwhile side trip, we arrived in Las Vegas for the workshop. Several botanists from around the state and beyond shared their work with us, and it was enlightening to gain a better understanding of the work they do. What’s more, the workshop included a field trip to Valley of Fire State Park. I don’t think there’s two words in the English language that I like hearing more than “field trip,” with the possible exception of “grilled cheese.” This field trip involved beautiful scenery and searching for a rare species of Astragalus, which we found. After being introduced to (and subsequently forgetting) a couple dozen plants endemic to the Mojave desert, we made our way back north to Carson City.

The second trip our crew took was to Boise, the site of our Integrated Pest Management and Pesticide Applicator Certification course. This training taught us everything we ever could want to know about managing unwanted populations of bothersome plants and animals. Also, I am now licensed to use restricted pesticides. Look out, weeds, here I come. The only downside to this course was that it took place entirely within the confines of a hotel basement, which was decidedly less beautiful than the scenery that surrounded me during my trip to Las Vegas. I didn’t bother to take pictures.

Although the first two outings were both fun and profitable, the third was definitely my favorite. Alec, Margaret, and I flew to Tucson to spend a week learning about measuring and monitoring plant populations. If you’re anything like me, then you would agree that measuring and monitoring plant populations is pretty much the best thing ever. It offers all the fun and excitement of a field trip, plus people actually pay you to do it. It’s a perfect situation. Previously, I only had experienced the field work aspect of plant monitoring. This workshop gave me a better understanding of what goes into designing a monitoring program, and also how to analyze the data I collect. I anticipate this course being a tremendous boon to my future endeavors as a botanist, and I am thankful that the CLM program provided me with this opportunity.

I also am grateful that I had the chance to briefly visit and explore the Sonoran desert. On our day off, we took a trip to Saguaro National Park, where we got to see some of the American southwest’s most iconic plant species in the flesh (both figuratively and literally – I made the mistake of touching a beavertail cactus and I think some of the small prickly hairs are still stuck in my hand.) As an east coast native, I’d always imagined deserts as wastelands that couldn’t measure up to the lushness and liveliness of the green forests where I’d grown up. The cacti blooms I saw in Arizona dispelled those notions. We even saw a rattlesnake! And lived to tell the tale.

Anyways, that’s just a brief overview of the experiences that my internship has granted me in these past couple months. I’ll report back soon with more updates. Thanks for reading!

-SS

Reno Earth Day, which happened last Sunday, was a grand success. The annual 3,000 person event takes place in Idlewild Park along the Truckee River. Hundreds of canopies arranged by environmental groups, artists, public agencies, and food vendors line the green space and baseball fields. It is a lively and cooperative community event that I was glad to take part in.

We had been generating outreach material for months leading up to the event, and were able to hand out a wide range of activities, from invasive species word searches to Seymour the Antelope coloring pages. In addition we had informational brochures on local plant diversity, EDDMapS web-based invasive species mapping system, local trail maps, horse and burro management, and more.

However our number one initiative at the event was educating and involving fourth graders in Every Kid in a Park (EKIP): a nationwide program that provides free access to national parks and other public lands to kids ages 9-11! We had a separate table at our Earth Day booth devoted to EKIP, where fourth graders worked through an activity that involved assigning either Hooker’s balsamroot or Lupine to its appropriate family. Although a bit advanced (we have since revised the activity for future events), with provided references on inflorescence, leaf and root structure, as well as our guidance, students were able to complete the activity, after which we were able to give them their park pass! It was delightful to see students, their families and friends excited about the possibilities for outdoor exploration.

Reno Earth Day was a valuable experience to interact with the public, and share information about how they can engage with and promote the health of their public lands.

Margaret Lindman, Carson City BLM