Academics

SJC PLANT ROOM NEWSLETTER

SPRING 2002

Hello, everyone. Every so often the Plant Room issues a newsletter to inform faculty and staff about our great facility and to suggest classroom uses for the plant materials. Many faculty in biological sciences, geology, art and other disciplines take advantage of what is available as well as other pertinent news and developments.

First of all, our new Plant Room Assistant is Sarah Chaffin. She is very knowledgable about plants and horticulture, so feel free to ask her any questions you may have concerning plants in the Plant Room and/or horticulture. We also want to thank Don Hyder and many other generous people for donating fine specimens such as Strelitzia reginae, the bird-of-paradise plant, a relative of bananas and many other wonderful species.

We have a fine selection of carnivorous plants, such as cape sundewsfrom South Africa and Venus' flytraps from North Carolina sand bogs. They are good subjects for leaf variation and morphology studies or a discussion of evolutionary trends in nitrogen-poor environments. Plant responses to stimuli could also be illustrated by these plants.

Possibly the most used portion of the Plant Room is the aquatic plant area. Elodea sprigs are used to show cytoplasmic cyclosis and plant cell organelles, such as chloroplasts, nucleus and nucleoli, vacuole and cell wall. Sometimes even mitochondria may be seen in good illumination. Also, with good growth lighting, some of the cells will be suffused with reddish anthocyanin in the cytoplasm, which makes a nice contrast to chromoplast specific carotenes, lycopenes and xanthophylls. Our ghost plant Crassula/Sedum is the best I've found for epidermal leaf peels.

We have three established "ponds" in the SJC Plant Room: The large horse trough has some green algae and blue-green bacteria species, floating mosquito ferns (Azolla sp) as well as snails and small invertebrates. The 20 gallon tank labeled "the pond" has different invertebrate species such as rotifers, nematodes, sometimes planarians, paramecia and other ciliates as well as green algae and lots of diatoms. Sometimes one finds Vorticella on leaf bits and amoebas in the globs of debris. Students must be patient, for it often takes several minutes for amoebas, in particular, to warm up and get a move on. The small tank nearest the light has the best selection of unicellular green algae and blue-green bacteria (Cyanobacteria). It also has lots of rotifers and nematodes.

Always be sure to pipet materials from the bottom debris, as this has the greatest diversity and best chance of seeing interesting subjects for students. Be sure to note that diversity will be reduced in winter, but there's still plenty going on! If you order aquatic invertebrates for your classes and you have some left over, the pond always appreciates an infusion of new genes.

We try to keep the tanks as "gunky" as possible and free from pesiticides, oils, etc. so please be careful with soaps and lotions on hands. Also, if you need Elodea for classes, please just remove a sprig for your students in a beaker of distilled water and leave the fishbowl in the Plant Room. Otherwise, the entire Elodea colony will become contaminated with bacteria from student handling. Thanks!

Ferns are another plant group we have in abundance: button ferns, tree ferns, epiphytic ferns, golden polypody (Phlebodium aureum) and many others. Golden polypody, Boston fern and our Hawaiian tree fern (Cibotium sp.) sporulate readily and are great for class study. We also have the most primitive vascular plant known: the whisk fern (Psilotum nudum). Ours grows beneath the Hawaiian tree fern. All the ferns, ginkgoes, cycads, pines and other primitive plants are great for geology labs, so students may get a feel for what the plants may have looked like, say, in the Age of Dinosaurs or Carboniferous Period.

We also have a nice selection of economically important tropical plants. Coffee, banana, bamboo, cardamom, and others may help to illustrate a lecture or two. We hope to acquire more economic and historical species in the future. Many of our plants flower in winter, such as our Phalaenopsis orchids, red powder puff tree (Calliandra haematocephala), angel's trumpet (Brugmansia "Charles Grimaldi) and bromeliads, just as they do in their wild tropical environments. Some of our plants have a ready supply of several species of scales and mealybugs, homopteran insects that readily exhibit parthenogenesis on a big scale. Other plants may be easily cloned and/or vegetatively reproduced.

In any event, please feel free to use the Atrium plant materials for your classes (i.e. clip off leaves) and the Plant Room as a teaching facility for tours and discussions. Feel free to contact me at X3244 (Herbarium) if you have any questions or requests.

A list of the Plant Room's holdings is included for your information.

Linda Mary Reeves