It’s sort of like the Florida panther. Why protect the Florida panther when there are California panthers and Andean panthers? Because species sometimes have regional “races” or genetic distinctions that are very important regionally, and often important to the evolutionary health of the species broadly.
Gama grass is one of North America’s most famous grasses, a close relative of corn and “ice cream” for bison and cattle in the early days of our country. So we’re very interested in restoring gama grass to the Paint Rock bottoms.
But gama grass seed from the Midwest — where most sold seed comes from — isn’t adapted to our climate. There are a number of regional genetic variations in gama grass that are important to preserve, including adaptation to heat, adaptation to length of growing season and flowering times, and resistance to disease and insects. Texas alone has at least 5 genetically distinct populations with an enormous range of attributes and adaptability. And even the flowers and ability to cross pollinate can be very different regionally (gama grass has a very complicated reproductive strategy that has helped ensure its survival, but has been nearly lost as population diversity dwindles). To make things worse, many gama grass cultivars have been selected purely for use in grazing systems out west, emphasizing forage yield and weight gain potential, and have likely lost some of their disease and insect resistance, their desirable attributes for native systems, and their long-term evolutionary viability.
No one has ever really tried to focus on collecting gama grass seed from the Tennessee Valley (or from Alabama for that matter), and that’s too bad, because from what we’re seeing, it was probably once a dominant member of the ecosystem, particularly around the lower reaches of Paint Rock. We’ve been running to stay ahead of the mowers and herbicides, but we’ve managed to collect seed from a number of populations around Paint Rock River. Because the populations can become too isolated as they’ve become rare, it’s better to collect seed from a larger area that once included regularly interbreeding plants, to preserve all the genetic information of this population and to avoid a kind of in-breeding depression (as as happened with the Florida panther). So we’re trying to rejoin the populations west of Huntsville with those east of Huntsville (under the fairly safe assumption that Huntsville and its agricultural fields and suburbs have become a wall of sterility over the past century or two that has largely blocked normal genetic exchange across the valley). But we want to make sure that the genetics of Paint Rock gama grass survive for many more millennia.