Fossils at Mine Kill State Park.

Tuesday I decided to take a trip down to Gilboa, NY with an old friend. Driving up the Schoharie Creek is very pretty. The valley becomes more dramatic as you head south and towards the Catskills. Shale cliffs emerge on the mountainsides and thoughts of fossils strike your imagination. The drive also exhibits debris from high waters and destruction from tropical storm Irene.

We eventually stopped at Mine Kill State Park to explore. The park itself is not that interesting and sits across the river from the hydroelectric plant and HUGE electrical wires. Not picturesque. Although, there were some huge tulip trees and the biggest shag-bark hickory I've ever seen. After making our way down towards the river, we started our search. Nothing in the river bed, but the cliffs made for some interesting finds.

Who invited tomatoes to the salad party?

I’m a little embarrassed to be working at a local restaurant, but human life is unfortunately motivated and lubricated with money. Regrettably, I am no exception to the laws of economics and need some capital for advancement of my botanical pursuits. Although restaurants may not be the most interesting place for the aspiring naturalist, they can inspire some questions.

Before I go further, let me define my use of the word “vegetable.” In horticulture a vegetable is typically a plant that is used in salads or snacks and a fruit is a plant that is consumed for a snack or desert (and is typically considered sweet, sugary). You may be interested to know that Congress passed a law calling tomatoes a vegetable so a tax can be applied to them, but that’s a different topic. Opposed to horticultural terms, a fruit in botanical terms is more or less the structure resulting from sexual reproduction. In my experience with botany, the term vegetable doesn’t really exist; rather vegetative refers to somatic cells and organs not pertaining to reproduction. The definitions are pretty close, but I just wanted to distinguish them. I’ll be referring to vegetables in the horticultural sense and despite tomatoes’ vegetable status, deep down refuse to think they are anything but fruits.

My restaurant duties include making salads. 80% of the salads I make require romaine lettuce and 90% require tomato. Tomatoes are New World (aka the Americas) plants that have somehow insinuated their way into traditional Italian cuisine. I’ve always been amazed with that. Someplace I remember reading that the first colonists refused to eat tomatoes because they were red and thought they were poisonous; a prejudice that still exists in somefolks. Red fruits and vegetables…a whole other can of worms I may open at a later date.

As I am ruminating the adoption of tomatoes by Italian culture and slicing tomatoes for salads in the restaurant, it hits me: How did tomatoes get into salads? Is romaine lettuce a New World plant? What about other common salad characters like radishes, arugula, cucumber, onion, carrots?

It’s not hard to understand why salads exist. Humans are omnivores, we eat an array of vegetables matter, some have more or different nutrients than others, eating these different types separately is kind of silly, so throw them together in the right proportions to get the right amount of nutrients in one location, and badda-bing-badda-boom. Salad.

Humans have always been keen on travelling and in so doing have allowed the introduction and exchange of lots of cultivated vegetables. It is not hard to fathom that cucumbers originating in India, radishes from Eastern Europe, arugula from southwest Asia, carrots- Europe/Asia, romaine lettuce from the Mediterranean, all made in into the same bowl. Onions, interestingly enough, have wild species native to New and Old Worlds, so it is no wonder they are one of the usual salad-suspects. Who invited the tomato?!Was it placed in salad before it was thrown into the pot for sauce? Or did someone want their vitamin C without going through the trouble of cooking vegetable and simply added it "raw" to their leafy greens? It is likely globalization has simply expanded the variety of vegetables we can put in our salads.

What we need to be concerned with is the actual nutrition of these salads. Salads probably resulted because they provided a balanced nutrients and diet. With the addition and subtraction of certain vegies, we should make sure these exchanges maintain nutritional content. A salad should not be considered healthy only because it is vegetables. Without proper components a salad may have the nutritional equivalent to rice cakes; it may be tasty, but lacking in other key dietetic elements. I'm not really sure this is a problem. This paragraph is mostly me thinking out loud. I’m not a nutritionist, but it seems like a valid concern, and easily remedied problem (if it even is a problem).

What is a problem is the amount of food wasted by restaurants. What I would consider fit for consumption, for example the proximal ends of romaine lettuce, is thrown out at the restaurant I work at. This is just one example, but if you were to sort the garbage at any given restaurant, you'd notice what I'm talking about. I will stop here before it this paragraph turns into a ramble.

This website was cited on some of the Wikipedia articles I read. I’ve used it before for some research projects. You can compare countries’ agricultural products by downloading spreadsheets and graphs among other things. You’re smart, you’ll figure it out. http://faostat.fao.org/site/567/default.aspx#ancor

This is a strange website I stumbled upon. I don’t like they way these folks are looking at me: http://www.dole.com/#/superkids/

Wikipedia provided me with a lot of the information on the origins of the vegies mentioned above FYI.

Plants, Rock.

Oh boy, I’ve been slacking off a lot lately. To compensate for my inactivity on this blog I’m going to try and post a lot over this next week.

A couple years ago I was at my parent’s house for a couple days during the summer. In their kitchen sat a light colored rock. After closer inspection, I determined it was obviously a fossil. It looked like a ridged cylindrical limestone. Remembering back to my morphology and evolution of vascular plants class, I thought this fossil closely resembled an extinct genus Calamites, essentially a giant horsetail. The end of the fossil was broken and showed what looked like a cross-section of radial vascular tissue. A couple months later I took the fossil, which turned out to be my cousin’s, to college to confirm or deny my suspicion. I was so excited about the potential of this rock being Calamites because it was found near my cousin’s house on the Helderberg Plateau of NY, whose rock dates back to before the known fossil record for Calamites.

Despite a botany professor agreeing with my identification, a geology professor promptly dismissed the fossil as the fairly common rugose coral…not even a plant. Oh well, no reevaluation of plant evolutionary time-scale for me. I knew the Helderberg Plateau was a sea floor at one time, but was hoping it was also adjacent to a terrestrial environment, which would increase the probability of Calamites fossilization.

Since then my interest in fossils has remained peripheral, probably because of their scarcity. Luckily, there is a fossil forest south of the Helderbergs. In fact, it was featured in a recent article of Nature. Gilboa, NY is home to a quarry where loads of plant fossils have been found. In the study, Stein et al (2012) identified three types of arborescent trees within their 1,200m2 study site. The pseudosporochnalean genus Eospermatopteris is the predominate fossil of the study site and is characterized by a bulbous root mounds short-lived leaves. The aneurophytalean Tetraxylopteris was identified through analysis of vascular tissue and “orthostichous knobs.” Additional aneurophytalean rhizomes where found terminating at the base of Eospermatopteris possibly indicating using a climbing habit. The third tree-like plant that was found at the site was identified as an ancient club moss, which extended the known range of these plants.

Archaeopteridalean plants found close by, but not in the research plot, indicate a fourth type of ancient tree. These plants are the first to show bifacial cambium growth and were thought to have marked a new type of forest distinct from Eospermatopteris. However, this study refutes that notion because of the proximity and lithologies of both types of fossils. These ancient forests also have implications for understanding ancient atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide levels and temperatures.

I think I may try to find of these fossils. Don’t worry, I’m leaving my dynamite and rock hammers at home...

…I don’t actually have dynamite…yet.

Stein, W.E., Berry, C.M., Hernick, L.V., and Mannolini, F. 2012. Surprisingly complex community discovered in the mid-Devonian fossil forest at Gilboa. Nature, 7387: 78-81.