Daily Diversity! Week 7 and 8

Hi everyone! Sorry this is getting posted late, but here are the species from the past two weeks!

Foxglove beardtongue

Scientific name: Penstemon digitalis

Anishinabemowin name: unknown

The first plant this week is this wonderful little flower! Foxglove beardtongue has purple stems, dark green leaves, and can be found throughout eastern Canada and the eastern US!

Fun Fact: The name “beardtongue” comes from the fact that the flowers produce stamens that appear to have small tufts of hair!

For more information, check out this website!

Red Honeysuckle

Scientific name:  Lonicera dioica

Anishinabemowin name: ozaawaaskined

This climbing flower prefers to grow in edges, clearings, and banks of thick woods.

Fun fact: This native plant is quite ubiquitous: it’s found in almost every county in Michigan!

For more information, check out this website!

Bur Oak

Scientific name: Quercus macrocarpa

Anishinabemowin name: mitigomizh

This common ornamental tree is an important part of eastern prairies. It is fire-resistant, drought-resistant, and may live for up to 400 years!

Fun Fact: The name “macrocarpa” refers to the bur oak’s macro-sized acorns!

For more information, check out this website!

Green Heron

Scientific name: Butorides virescens

Anishinabemowin name: gichi-mooshka`osi

This small heron is quite the family-oriented bird! Both parents help with incubating the pale-green eggs and feeding their young.

Fun fact: As Wikipedia states, “Butorides is from Middle English butor ‘bittern’ and Ancient Greek -oides, ‘resembling’, and virescens is Latin for ‘greenish’”.

To hear the green heron’s call, click here!

To learn more, check out this website!

Barred Owl

Scientific name: Strix varia

Anishinabemowin name: gookooko'oo

Here to welcome you to July is the barred owl! This nocturnal bird eats small mammals and is known to have an interesting courtship dance. “Who cooks for you?” is the classic phrase to help remember the call of the barred owl!

Fun Fact: Although seen as symbols of wisdom in Western culture, the Anishinabe often see owls as signs of death.

To hear the barred owl, click here!

To learn more, check out this website!

Common Milkweed

Scientific name: Asclepias syriaca

Anishinabemowin name:  ininiwizh

Many species of insect feed on the fragrant, nectariferous flowers these plants produce. These are a popular plant in butterfly gardens, which have increased in number over the years as a way to combat declining monarch butterfly populations.

Fun fact: Milkweed oil from the seeds can be converted into cinnamic acid and function as a very potent sunscreen when used at a 1-5% concentration.

For more information, check out this website!

Indian Hemp

Scientific name: Apocynum cannabinum

Anishinabemowin name:  zesabiins

This perennial herbaceous plant is poisonous, as it can cause cardiac arrest if ingested. Stay away from this one, folks!

Fun fact: Although Indian Hemp can be toxic, tea from the roots has been used in some traditional medicine to treat several conditions, including headache, earache, nausea, insanity, edema, jaundice, anxiety, diarrhea, constipation, and urinary difficulties.

For more information, check out this website!

Japanese Knotweed

Scientific name: Fallopia japonica

Anishinabe name: unknown

This plant is invasive to several countries, and is actually listed by the World Conservation Union as one of the world’s worst invasive species!

Fun fact: Despite its invasive nature, Japanese Knotwood is valued by some beekepers as a significant source of nectar for honeybees when little else is flowering.

For more information, check out this website!

Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake

Scientific name: Sistrurus catenatus

Anishinabemowin name: zhiishiigwe

Hissssss! This little guy is rather shy and avoids humans whenever possible, but possesses a cytotoxic venom that destroys tissues ~ it’s not afraid to use it if it feels it is threatened!

Fun fact: The word “massasauga” comes from the Anishinabe language, and means “great river mouth.” This is because it tends to live in swamps, which are frequently located at the mouths of rivers.

To hear the Massasauga’s rattle, click here!

For more information, check out this website!

Northern Water Snake

Scientific name: Nerodia sipedon

Anishinabemowin name:  omazaandamoo

This large, nonvenomous snake hunts along the water’s edge for small fish, frogs, worms, leeches, crayfish, salamanders, small birds and mammals.

Fun fact: If one of these slippery fellows feels threatened, it usually swims to the bottom of the water and stays there until the predator gives up.

For more information, check out this website!

Virtual Tours Get Reality Test at Matthaei Botanical Gardens

By Sam Pilon

Field trips are most often a way to take learning out of the classroom and provide new spaces and experiences that students can’t easily have at school. And they can enhance what students are learning by connecting classroom studies with real-world examples. As the children’s education summer intern at Matthaei Botanical Gardens and Nichols Arboretum, I’ve had the privilege of leading many school group tours, camps, and scout programs. Teaching the students about the plants and systems in our conservatory, trails, and display gardens is a very rewarding experience. Nothing compares to seeing a child’s face light up with excitement when they discover a plant they are familiar with or when they make that connection between their school studies and a plant or animal they see at the gardens.

Here I am explaining the parts of the plant
to the students as one of our docents,
Dave Wooten, records with a tablet.

We’ve done many types of tours with different themes from bugs to plant parts, ecosystems to biomes, and others, but I was surprised to learn that we were trying an entirely new type of visit—a virtual tour. Of course that immediately brought some questions to mind. Can we give these kids an experience through a screen that’s similar to actually being here? Will they really learn anything? How is this different from just showing them a video? What are the benefits of this kind of tour?

I was anxious to see how it would work out, and more importantly how the students would react to the tour. It was definitely a team effort to make this successful. To set up, we had one or two tour guides stationed in each room of our conservatory to explain several plants and talk about the biome that the plants would be found in. We used a tablet as our camera, and our tour was streamed onto a projector in a school classroom. Our cameraman (shout out to volunteer Dave Wooten!) went around to each station as the tour continued, zooming in on details of the plants and showing the parts that were being talked about. The tour was a huge success and was an amazing experience to be part of. All of my initial questions were quickly answered.

Volunteer Dave Wooten (left) records docent
Lynn Fouchey as she explains the tropical house
in the conservatory at Matthaei Botanical Gardens.

How is this different from just showing them a video?
For me, this was the most important question to answer. We were lucky to have the ability to hear actual responses from the children. This created a more personal experience than simply showing a video. We would ask the kids to notice things about the plants we were showing, respond to questions about the plants, and have them recall things we talked about earlier. We even had a Q&A section at the end of the tour and were able to not only answer their questions, but also show them by moving the camera to what we were talking about.

Can we give these kids a similar experience through a screen as to actually being here? Will they really learn anything?
From my experience, the students were able to learn about as much in a virtual tour as they could if they were physically there. Some experiences, of course, aren’t available in a virtual tour—like the smell and feel of the plants, or kids not being able to fully look at what’s around them. Yet overall I see this as a nice option if schools don’t have the opportunity for a real-life visit.

Last January, Saline, Michigan, Harvest Elementary
schoolchildren participated in a first-ever virtual tour
beamed from Matthaei about biomes and plant adaptations.
A virtual tour puts everyone on the same screen, so to speak:
because each child views the same video, the  program allows
all the kids and teacher Nicole Toth to enjoy a similar
learning experience.

What are the benefits of this kind of tour?
There are several when you compare a virtual to an in-person tour. It’s a great opportunity if travel isn’t available for whatever reason. Students still enjoy a new experience in a new place, which demonstrates that they don’t necessarily have to leave their school to do so. It’s also beneficial because each student gets to experience the exact same tour and stay together in one group. Finally, the teacher gets to go on the tour with the students as one group and she knows exactly what the kids learned.

As of this writing, virtual tours aren’t fully up and running as a Matthaei-Nichols program...yet. There are still a lot of things to consider before we decide whether to make virtual tours a reality, but the idea that it could be in the works is an exciting thought and I think it is something that we should keep exploring!

Samantha Pilon, Children’s
Education Intern. Sam is
from Southgate, Michigan,
and just graduated with a
Bachelor of Science degree
in Program in the Environment
with an emphasis on terrestrial
ecosystems.

Welcome 2017 Math & Science Scholars

High-school students from across the country and around the world get a taste of college each summer. Our own Associate Curator David Michener introduces the students to the world of plants and landscapes.

Matthaei-Nichols Associate Curator David Michener began his Michigan Math & Science Scholars class session in late June with high school students hailing from the U.S. and China, South Korea, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere. David’s class is “Life, Death and Change: Landscapes and Human Impact.” The course immerses students in real-world landscapes. 

Michigan Math & Science Scholars prepare
a tree branch to learn about how trees move
water from the soil into the atmosphere.

Michigan Math & Science Scholars prepare a tree branch to
learn about how trees movewater from the soil into the
atmosphere.

The Michigan Math and Science Scholars program offers a pre-college experience that exposes students to a breadth of curricula offered at the University of Michigan while introducing high school students to current developments and research in the sciences. The program is open to any high school rising sophomore, junior or, senior from around the world. Three 2-week sessions are offered; students are given the opportunity to attend one or two sessions. Read more about the program here.

On Wed., July 5, David was in the lab and out in the field teaching the students about leaf transpiration. We asked the students for their reactions to the leaf transpiration lab experiment. Many hadn't heard about it before and were surprised and intrigued by the problem of extrapolating the surface area of the leaves of an entire tree from a single branch---among other problems---to determine how much water is being returned to the atmosphere. "I've studied it in class before but this is the first time I've seen a real-life demonstration of the process, so it's pretty cool to see how it works" said one student from Washington, DC.

Matthaei-Nichols Associate Curator David Michener (in blue plaid shirt), takes Michigan Math & Science Scholars on a botanical road trip through the Arboretum and Matthaei during his course "Life, Death and
Change: Landscapes and Human Impact."

After they take his course, says David, “the students will never see the same world quite the same way." All environmental studies presume a landscape,” he continues, “yet what seems to be a simple landscape is often far from uniform or stable." A great deal of information critical to anyone entering the “green” sciences can be detected for analysis—including factors that may fundamentally control species diversity, habitat richness, and animal (let alone human) behavior. Resolving human from non-human agency is an engaging and important challenge, too—one scientists and green professionals grapple with repeatedly. The real-world landscapes of David’s course range from the nearly pristine to the highly humanized, giving students the opportunity to solve problems that at first might seem impossible to solve.

“Critical thinking skills are essential rather than prior biological course and field work,” David notes. “The students come prepared to look, measure, analyze, discus and learn how the interaction of plants, soils, climate and time (and humans) influences landscape development.”

Students learn to develop basic skills in plant recognition and identification that they can transfer to other terrestrial communities. The course addresses questions about the current vegetation, its stability over time and its future prospects. Practical insights into the realities of biological conservation are gained as students study how we can manage species and landscapes for future generations. At the end of the course, students will have a conceptual skill set that helps them assess how stable and disturbed the “natural” areas are near their home, “and prepares them to put instructors on the spot in college classes to come,” David adds.