Month: July 2011

July 8, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Big Island group trying to grow one of world’s rarest plants

KAILUA-KONA >> A Big Island coalition is trying to propagate one of the world’s rarest plants that had been deemed extinct until it was discovered last summer.

The Kohala Watershed Partnership received a $7,550 grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Recovery Branch to protect and restore the endangered plant species Clermontia peleana singuliflora, more commonly known as oha wai, West Hawaii Today reported Friday.

The last species were collected in 1909 and the Fish and Wildlife Service had presumed it was extinct in 1994. But last summer during a survey of rare tree snail population, a Big Island representative for The Nature Conservancy rediscovered the plant in a North Kohala upland forest.

Thomas Lammers, a Clermontia expert at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, identified the plant as oha wai through photographs sent to him.

The watershed partnership, a voluntary coalition of private landowners and state land managers, aims to propagate and plant at least 200 seedlings in a 10-acre fenced, secret location, said Melora Purell, Kohala Watershed Partnership coordinator.

“This plant had not been seen for a century and to be rediscovered is amazing,” she said. “Its survival shows the power of endangered plants, which are often though as weaker.

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July 4, 2011 Aquaculture, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Monster blue catfish finding mixed reception

MECKLENBURG COUNTY, Va. — Talk to fishermen here, and you will hear the legend of Buggs Island Lake: A Navy diver sent to recover the wreckage of a small plane encounters a fish the size of a man on the lake’s bottom. He bolts to the surface and refuses to dip a toe in the waters again.

The yarn seemed as dubious as any other fish tale — until two weeks ago. An angler hooked a 143-pound blue catfish in this reservoir along the Virginia-North Carolina border; it smashed the state record by more than 30 pounds and could be a world record.

It is likely not the only one lurking out there. A monster fish that can easily top 100 pounds and stretch nearly five feet has come of age in the region’s waterways.

It has a distended beer gut of a belly, a chin studded with whiskers tipped with taste-bud-like sensors and a grunt like a pig’s. Like a creature from a Hollywood B-movie, it has grown fat from conditions created by pollution.

Blue catfish have exploded in numbers and size in many local river systems, biologists say, spawning the type of giant fish more commonly found in the species’ native Mississippi River — or in the pages of Mark Twain. And no one is sure how big they’ll get here.

The rise of “blue cats” has spurred a response as strange as any fish story. Nearly everyone agrees it is a monster of sorts, but whether that is necessarily a bad thing depends on whom you talk to.

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July 3, 2011 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Horse chestnut collections rewrite leaf miner spread

Horse chestnut leaf miners were living on natural stands of trees in Greece a century before they were first described by science, a study shows.

The discovery was made by researchers who examined many of Europe’s historic herbarium collections.

They say it offers an insight to the history and origins of the tiny moths, which are blighting many of the continent’s horse chestnuts.

The findings will appear in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment journal.

“It is a moth that has been the target of a lot of research recently because it has been expanding [its range] so fast – much faster than other kinds of leaf-mining moths,” explained co-author David Lees from the French Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA).

The larval form of the Cameraria ohridella moth feed inside the leaves of the white flowering horse chestnut tree (Aesculus hippocastanum), producing characteristic “mines” between the leaves’ veins.

The creatures do not kill the tree but infested trees may produce smaller conkers.

Dr Lees said C. ohridella was spreading its range by about 60km (40 miles) across Europe each year.

The small but highly invasive moth was first discovered in 1984, and first described by scientists as a genus new to Europe in just 1986. Since then, it has expanded its range across almost all of Europe.

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July 3, 2011 Aquaculture, Gardening, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Waterlilies, hardy or tropical, can lend a touch of magic to ponds

If I bought a house that happened to have a swimming pool — not my favorite landscape element — I would hope that the feature would be geometric, at least. If it instead were kidney-shaped, I would fill it in with loads of sand and peat moss and turn it into a garden of the prettiest swamp flora, full of pitcher plants and Japanese and Louisiana irises.

If the pool were a much preferred circle, square or rectangle, I would make it uniformly 22 inches deep, grow lots of aquatic plants in containers, throw in a few small koi and spend the years watching them grow.

I have no intention of doing this, by the way, because I already have a pond. My garden would seem lifeless without it, however, I would offer this general advice about decorative ponds, besides the shape. Make them bigger than you think you need. Small ponds are harder to keep clean and algae-free, and the water temperature fluctuates too much for the good of flora, fauna and owner. Another hard-earned lesson: Set it up so that the pump and the filtration box sit out of the water. This will reduce maintenance further and keep you out of the pond.

No ornamental pond is complete without waterliles. Part of the magic of a waterlily is that its flower inhabits two realms. It is born in the submerged crown and journeys upward to the dry world, where it opens to the delight of the aerial circus of pollinators and to the thrill of the gardener looking for beauty in the heat of summer.

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