I’m guessing since this internship is through the Chicago Botanical Gardens not many of you are avid OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting, Oregon’s NPR station) listeners. If I’m correct this is very unfortunate for you 1. because OPB is great and 2. because you missed the recent segment on planting wocus – a segment that not only included bright orange sunglasses but also the carefully prepared and executed wocus dance.

The wocus, otherwise known as the Rocky Mountain Pond Lily, is a water plant that was once extremely prevalent in the Klamath Basin but is now much less common. ‘Wocus’ as the Native Americans called the plant has been used by the tribes in the area for many generations. A group of employees from US Fish and Wildlife, The Nature Conservancy, and the Klamath Tribes have been working to re-introduce wocus to a property owned by the Nature Conservancy that has recently been returned to its historical state as a marsh (another cool story that involves lots of explosives).

I have to admit that I was not part of this re-introduction effort nor was able to wear orange sunglasses or do the wocus dance, so you may wonder why I just told you all of this. After the wocus re-introduction project was complete there were still 9 plants remaining, so the other intern in the office and I took the opportunity to commandeer the seedlings and use them in one of our fish rearing projects. We are raising suckers in two ponds that are essentially like giant bath tubs – relatively shallow and extremely exposed with no vegetation.

While we could have used the method of stapling the wocus to the bottom of the pond, we decided to instead experiment with growing wocus in water that is too deep to plant them. In order to provide cover for the juvenile fish to escape predation and also as an experiment in transplanting wocus, we designed a system to hang wocus from buoys anchored in the middle of the ponds. The idea of growing wocus in coconut fiber baskets came from work on wocus by Dr. Jherime Kellermann, a professor at Oregon Institute of Technology.

We moved the wocus seedlings from their pots to 10 inch coconut fiber baskets and used hemp twine to tie the bundles like small packages. 

These wocus bundles were then suspended by hemp twine from the chain just below each buoy. Each plant hangs between 1 and 2 feet under water and there are three plants per buoy. Another intern in our office, Shilah, bravely donned a dry suit and entered the ponds teaming with algae and zoo plankton to place the anchored buoys and wocus.

In the coming weeks we hope to start seeing wocus leaves reaching the surface and growing larger.

A few side notes:

• If you’re disappointed about missing the OPB story on wocus (why wouldn’t you be?!), don’t fear! You can read about the wocus project and listen to the radio piece here: http://www.opb.org/news/article/bringing-back-klamath-wetlands-one-wocus-at-a-time/
• One day while on the way to the ponds on the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge we were lucky enough to see an adult and juvenile borrowing owl. The juvenile retreated into its hole, but the adult allowed us to drive within about 10 feet of it and get some very close pictures.
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