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Cottage Life

Can you spot it? New Pokemon-inspired guide helps people explore nature

Photo by mvc_stock/Shutterstock

As a kid, Natalie Rudkins and her family would pack up the car and drive two hours from her home in Barrie to visit a relative outside Bancroft, Ont. On her relative’s property was a pond where Rudkins spent her time squishing through the mud in search of leopard frogs, garter snakes, and crayfish. At night, she watched the curved wings of bats crest the dark sky. And sometimes, from a distance, she might spot a black bear stumbling through the nearby trees.

These moments sparked Rudkins’ interest in the natural world. During her environmental science degree at the University of Waterloo, Rudkins got into birding and botanizing; downloading apps to help her identify species. One of these apps was called Seek. The app challenged users to photograph different species to unlock achievements.

“It’s really gamified, and it’s a great way for people to find things,” Rudkins says.

This idea of gamifying wildlife spotting motivated Rudkins to create the Naturedex. Inspired by the Pokemon franchise, Rudkins, who now works for the Credit Valley Conservation Authority in Mississauga, created a nature guide that featured 151 different species from the Toronto area (the same number of species in the original Pokemon series).

“For this, I used species you could spot within 30 kilometres of Toronto’s city hall, which ends up being Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, and Vaughan,” she says.

On the Naturedex is a picture of each species with several stats, including whether they’re endangered, how difficult it is to spot the species, and which season you’re most likely to see them.

Each species’ endangered status is based on published lists from the Toronto and Credit Valley Conservation Authorities. To communicate the status, Rudkins used emojis. “I thought that was a really easy way to get the message across,” she says.

If the species has a smiley face, it means they’re thriving in the Toronto area and aren’t a conservation concern. A frowning face means the species is at risk in urban areas. A sad face means the species is trending towards endangered. An angry face means the species is non-native to the area. And a neutral face means the conservation authorities have yet to rank the species’ endangered status.

When giving each species a difficulty ranking for observation, Rudkins used a star system, with one star being the least difficult to find and three stars being the most. She based the ranking on the citizen science platform iNaturalist, where users post photos of wildlife they’ve seen. A species with fewer photos meant a higher difficulty ranking.

“It ranged from like 5,000 to 6,000 observations for something like a monarch or a pigeon, all the way down to less than 50 for things like loons,” she says.

To use the Naturedex, Rudkins recommends printing the guide out and hanging it on a wall or fridge. You can then check off each species you see on the guide. Some of the more difficult species to spot include the bald eagle, common loon, and gray tree frog. Others, such as the trillium, can be difficult depending on the season. And the fish are tricky unless you spend a lot of time fishing.

Rudkins estimates that she saw about 120 of the species on the list last year. One of her favourites is the Virginia ctenucha moth. “I put it on the list in an attempt to demonstrate to people that not all moths are these little brown, uninteresting things. Months can actually be kind of cool looking,” she says. “It has these dark black wings and its shoulders are a vibrant, shiny blue, and its face is completely furry orange.”

If you decide to take the Naturedex challenge, Rudkins suggests using the app Seek to confirm your sightings. She also recommends the app Merlin, which can record and identify bird calls. “It’s a lot easier to see birds if you know what they are,” she says.

According to Rudkins, the two main rules of the Naturedex are to respect wildlife by not disturbing them and to have fun.

“My main intention was to use it as a way to lure people into an activity that I find interesting and valuable,” she says. “I want it to be a resource for people to start recognizing the things that are around them.”

Pokemon-inspired Game
Photo Courtesy of Natalie Rudkins

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Cottage Life

Nature Scrapbook: Cardinal flower

By David Byron Keener/Shutterstock

The show-stopping cardinal flower counts on a cottage-country bird for pollination after summer sets in. From late July to mid-September, cardinal flowers stand out in deep crimson along the soggy banks of lakes and slow-moving rivers from New Brunswick to Ontario.

For anywhere from two to five weeks, up to several dozen individual hermaphroditic flowers bloom, a few at a time, along a single, unbranched, knee-high spire, starting from the bottom. Bearing first male, then female parts, each flower makes use of strategic timing to successfully reproduce. 

A newly open flower produces yellow pollen for three to 10 days in a slender, male, brushy-tipped tube projecting from it. Afterwards, a thin, female style emerges from the centre of the tube to receive pollen from other flowers for another two to four days.

In Canada, only ruby-throated hummingbirds pollinate cardinal flowers. Their long, needly beaks reach the rich pools of nectar at the bottoms of the deep tubular beauties. They usually imbibe first at the middle of the floral spire where some female parts are showing and then hover upwards towards the male flowers, which hold the most nectar, at the top. 

Brushed with a strip of pollen onto their foreheads, they then cross-pollinate female-stage blossoms in the middle of the next stem they visit. 

Plants that are pollinated may produce up to 30 dry capsules, which split open in autumn to release thousands of dust-like seeds to the wind. However with most hummingbirds cruising south in late summer, many cardinal flowers never get fertilized. 

Around mid-August, the plants also begin sprouting a ground-hugging cluster of leaves from their shallow roots.  If the plant survives through the winter, it sends up a new flowering stem late the following spring.

After germinating from seed, a cardinal flower usually doesn’t raise a flowering stem until its second spring. The plant seldom lives more than a few years.

This article was originally published in the August 2022 issue of Cottage Life.

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Cottage Life

Cottage Q&A: What to plant for a bee-friendly garden

By Julianne Caust/Shutterstock

We want to plant a bee-friendly garden at the cottage. What should we plant? Also, my daughters are both concerned that attracting bees will mean they’re going to get stung. Is that a realistic concern?—Jasmine Avanti, Georgian Bay, Ont.

“It’s understandable that a person would have that concern,” says Lorraine Johnson, the co-author of A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee: Creating Habitat for Native Pollinators. Bees sting. More bees flying around, seeking out flowers, more potential bee stings, right? Except bee behaviour doesn’t support that reasoning. Foraging bees are attending to Very Important Bee Business. “They’re not the least bit interested in stinging you,” says Johnson. “Watch. Enjoy. Observe without fear.”

As for what to plant, the possibilities are—well, maybe not endless, but very vast. “You can create a pollinator garden in almost any conditions,” says Johnson. “The trick is to match the plants to the conditions that you have.” 

Just keep those plants native. For sunny areas of the property, try black-eyed Susan, pearly everlasting, pussytoes, and native wild strawberry. For shady areas, go for zigzag goldenrod. “It does not cause hay fever,” says Johnson. “That’s ragweed.” (You’re vindicated, goldenrod!) Woodland strawberry is another great option for shade. Bonus: “It produces delicious berries.”

Avoid the non-native, invasive groundcovers “commonly available at regular nurseries,” says Johnson: periwinkle, pachysandra, or bugleweed. Even if a plant isn’t invasive, if it’s not native, it’s not as useful for pollinators. (Native plants and native species evolved to have a mutually beneficial relationship.)

Hit up a local native plant nursery with your site-specific questions. “They are amazing resources,” says Johnson. “Their mission is to share info.” Hey, that’s our mission too!

Got a question for Cottage Q&A? Send it to answers@cottagelife.com.

This article was originally published in the August 2022 issue of Cottage Life.

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Cottage Life

Cottage Q&A: Giraffe legs in the water?

Photo by Yevhen 11/Shutterstock

Several years ago, I was kayaking in a swampy bay in our lake. From a distance, I thought I saw the legs of a dead giraffe. How can that be, I wondered. But as I got closer, I could see that it was actually a large plant root of some sort. I took a photo; I was interested to know what it is.—Neil Poutanen, Lac Sinclair, Que.

We were interested too. Because we had absolutely no idea. (Well, we were 99 per cent certain that it wasn’t part of a dead giraffe.) Turns out, your second guess was correct. It’s a root system.

“Those are actually the roots of a water lily—you can see the leaves in the surrounding water,” says Sean Fox, the manager of horticulture and curator of the University of Guelph Arboretum in Guelph, Ont. “The roots would typically be buried in the mud at the bottom of the lake, but if dislodged, they can float to the surface.”

Neat-o! But why are the roots so huge? “Water lilies can form large colonies, where many hundreds of leaves are attached to the same root network,” says Fox. “So, while the individual leaves might look small compared to the roots, those large rhizomes are actually part of a broader network that stores food over the winter and supplies many leaves, which can cover a very large area of the surface water.”

It doesn’t take much to dislodge even a big honkin’ root network. It could have been knocked loose by turtles or fish moving around in the substrate, turbulent water during a storm, or “a well-meaning paddler sticking their paddle too deep into shallow water, hitting the mud, and pulling some roots up,” says Fox. (He’s not throwing shade. He means a different paddler. Not you.)

The roots are strange-looking, sure, “but beautiful in their own way,” says Fox. Just like a giraffe.

Got a question for Cottage Q&A? Send it to answers@cottagelife.com.

This article was originally published in the May 2022 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

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Cottage Life

Bees’ eye view: what sunflowers really look like (to pollinators)

Photo by Mykhailo Baidala / Shutterstock

Flowers are one of the most striking examples of diversity in nature, displaying myriad combinations of colours, patterns, shapes and scents. They range from colourful tulips and daisies, to fragrant frangipani and giant, putrid-smelling corpse flowers. The variety and diversity is astounding—consider the duck-shaped orchid.

But as much as we can appreciate the beauty and diversity of flowers, it is quite literally not meant for our eyes.

The purpose of flowers is to attract pollinators, and it is to their senses that flowers cater. A clear example of this are ultraviolet (UV) patterns. Many flowers accumulate UV pigments in their petals, forming patterns that are invisible to us, but that most pollinators can see.

What happens to honeybees over the winter

The disconnect between what we see and what pollinators see is particularly striking in sunflowers. Despite their iconic status in popular culture (as testified by the arguably dubious honour of being one of the only five flower species with a dedicated emoji), they hardly seem the best example of flower diversity.

How do insects see the world?

Different light

What we commonly consider a single sunflower is actually a cluster of flowers, referred to as an inflorescence. All wild sunflowers, of which there are about 50 species in North America, have very similar inflorescences. To our eyes, their ligules (the enlarged, fused petals of the outermost whorl of florets in the sunflower inflorescence) are the same uniform, familiar bright yellow.

However, when looked at in the UV spectrum (that is, beyond the type of light that our eyes can see), things are quite different. Sunflowers accumulate UV-absorbing pigments at the base of the ligules. Across the whole inflorescence, this results in a UV bullseye pattern.

In a recent study, we compared almost 2,000 wild sunflowers. We found that the size of these UV bullseyes varies extensively, both between and within species.

The sunflower species with the most extreme diversity in the size of UV bullseyes is Helianthus annuus, the common sunflower. H. annuus is the closest wild relative to cultivated sunflower, and is the most broadly distributed of wild sunflowers, growing almost everywhere between southern Canada and northern Mexico. While some populations of H. annuus have very small UV bullseyes, in others, the ultraviolet-absorbing region covers the whole inflorescence.

Attracting pollinators

Why is there so much variation? Scientists have been aware of floral UV patterns for a long time. Some of the numerous approaches that have been used to study the role of these patterns in attracting pollinators have been quite inventive, including cutting and pasting petals or coating them with sunscreen.

When we compared sunflowers with different UV bullseyes, we found that pollinators were able to discriminate between them and preferred plants with intermediate-sized UV bullseyes.

Sunflowers with different UV bullseye patterns as we see them (top) and as a bee might see them (bottom). (Marco Todesco), Author provided

Still, this doesn’t explain all the diversity in UV patterns that we observed in different populations of wild sunflowers: if intermediate UV bullseyes attract more pollinators (which is clearly an advantage), why do plants with small or large UV bullseyes exist?

Other factors

While pollinator attraction is clearly the main function of floral traits, there is increasing evidence that non-pollinator factors like temperature or herbivores can affect the evolution of characteristics like flower colour and shape.

We found a first clue that this could also be the case for UV patterns in sunflowers when we looked at how their variation is regulated at the genetic level. A single gene, HaMYB111, is responsible for most of the diversity in UV patterns that we see in H. annuus. This gene controls the production of a family of chemicals called flavonol glycosides, which we found in high concentrations in the UV-absorbing part of ligules. Flavonol glycosides are not only UV-absorbing pigments, but play also an important role in helping plants cope with different environmental stresses.

A second clue came from the discovery that the same gene is responsible for UV pigmentation in the petals of the thale cress, Arabidopsis thaliana. Thale cress is the most commonly used model system in plant genetics and molecular biology. These plants are able to pollinate themselves, and therefore generally do without pollinators.

a small white flower in a meadow
Thale cress can pollinate itself without the help of pollinators.
(Shutterstock)

Since they don’t need to attract pollinators, they have small, unassuming white flowers. Still, their petals are full of UV-absorbing flavonols. This suggests that there are reasons not related to pollination for these pigments to be present in the flowers of the thale cress.

Finally, we noticed that sunflower populations from drier climates had consistently larger UV bullseyes. One of the known functions of flavonol glycosides is to regulate transpiration. Indeed, we found that ligules with large UV patterns (which contain large amounts of flavonol glycosides) lost water at a much slower rate than ligules with small UV patterns.

This suggests that, at least in sunflowers, patterns of floral UV pigmentation have two functions: improving the attractiveness of flowers to pollinators, and helping sunflowers survive in drier environments by preserving water.

Thrifty evolution

So what does this teach us? For one, that evolution is thrifty, and if possible will use the same trait to achieve more than one adaptive goal. It also offers a potential approach for improving cultivated sunflower, by simultaneously boosting pollination rates and making plants more resilient to drought.

Finally, our work, and other studies looking at plant diversity, can help in predicting how and to which extent plants will be able to cope with climate change, which is already altering the environments they are adapted to.The Conversation

Marco Todesco, Research associate, Biodiversity, University of British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

26 native plants that will attract pollinators to your garden