> Hey isn't this that plant that Bob is trying to move to Texas???
> Debbie in Williamsburg, VA
Yeah...in a way. Lygodium microphyllum is the main thug, along with its close
relatives. A weed is a plant in the wrong place. And Florida is the wrong place
for those Climbing ferns.
http://www.cassiakeyensis.com/sofl_plants/fern_lygodium_microphyllum.html
Lygodium japonicum is Bob's plant...one of the three close relatives. Dryland
Texas, or North Carolina where they are rare but his plant has been established
and in place for a long time, might not be the wrong place for them.
Barb in Southern Indiana Zone 5/6 dorsett@blueriver.net
A root is a flower that disdains fame.
Hey isn't this that plant that Bob is trying to move to Texas???
Debbie in Williamsburg, VA
Nature's Hostile Takeover?
By Joel Achenbach Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday , July 30, 2000 ;
A01
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. ** Cruising westward at 300 feet, the helicopter is
heading straight for the end of civilization. You can see it just ahead.
It's a line across the surface of the Earth--a levee, built years ago to
hold back the swamp. Now it works in reverse, restraining the developers.
Beyond the levee there are no shopping malls, no houses, no roads, just a
wet prairie full of alligators, lily pads and saw grass.
And there's something new, something growing, spreading--a pale-green
substance that seems to be crawling all over the tree islands that speckle
this portion of the Everglades. The pilot takes the chopper down for a
closer look. You can see it, sure enough: lygodium. Old World climbing
fern.
It has gone berserk. It's like the Blob. The islands are caving in at the
center, crushed by the dense, matted blanket of vegetation. The willows,
the hollies, the cabbage palms--they're being buried alive.
"You wouldn't see any of this three years ago," testifies the chopper
pilot, Jim Dunn.
David Viker, deputy manager of the federally managed swamp, says, "It
looks like a green bomb went off."
What exactly is this virulent organism? It's a houseplant. In the right
context, it's a lovely little fern.
Lygodium is the classic invasive species: an organism that's been
transported by human beings to habitats where it has no natural enemies.
The counterattack against this intruder is just one isolated battle in
what is becoming a major war from the Everglades to Rock Creek Park, from
Hawaii to your own back yard. The scale of the conflict is planetary.
[much deleted about other species]
Lygodium, originally sold in nurseries, may turn out to be more diabolical
than melaleuca. Its tiny spores can fly for miles in a windstorm. The
oldest patches are in southern Martin County, where it pillars up from the
forest floor, riding cypress trees to the sky. Dead, whitened tree trunks
poke through the flourishing lygodium like skeletal fingers. The weed
gradually drifted west and hopped the levee into the Loxahatchee National
Wildlife Refuge, where it has proliferated only in the last decade. Aerial
surveys revealed 39,000 acres in South Florida infested with lygodium in
1997. By 1999, the figure had risen to 100,000 acres.
The antidote may be yet another exotic species, an Australian moth that
feeds on the fern. Biologists are still studying the moth to make sure it
won't go berserk itself.
In the meantime, refuge managers attack lygodium with herbicide and
machetes. At one point the refuge officials hired some college students to
hack away at the fern, but their thrill at having an outdoorsy summer job
vanished quickly in the steam of the swamp.
"They lasted about a week," said Mark Museus, the refuge manager. "They
didn't want to work in 90-degree weather up to their chests in water with
snakes and alligators all around."
(c) 2000 The Washington Post Company
