What’s Alabama’s most valuable asset?
Its genes.
I don’t mean to be insulting, but I’m not really talking about your genes, or my genes, or the genes of any person you or I know.
I’m talking about the native genes of Alabama, the genes that have survived here for many millions of years, genes that often exist nowhere else in the world, genes found in Alabama’s fish, turtles, salamanders and mussels; in its rare sunflowers, carnivorous plants and mints; in its hickories, which are more diverse than hickories anywhere else on the planet.
And for the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about the genes of Alabama elms.
That’s because Alabama’s American elms aren’t like the elms in most other parts of the country. Most significantly, they’re different because they’re still alive in great numbers, while native American elms in places like New England and Michigan are all but wiped out by disease.
Only recently have scientists woken to the fact that American elms in the southern tier of the United States must be very different than elms up north.
American elms here are more genetically diverse, with more ways to genetically adapt to new challenges. The fact is, elms that have evidence of southern genetics now perform better up north than the elms that are “native” there.
They may look similar, but the American elms north and south are virtually separate species – and it appears the trees from the Cumberland Plateau and coastal plain areas of the Deep South are closer to the foundation stock of American elms, and are the ones most capable of shaping the future of elms in America.
Strangely, though, Alabama almost let the rest of the country define our American elms out of existence. We let researchers who’ve never seen an Alabama elm determine what an American elm should be, based entirely on their research on elms in their Boston, Buffalo and Bloomington backyards. They weren’t aware that Alabama’s elms were so dramatically different because they had never sampled elms south of Washington, D.C.
The bigger shame is that folks in Alabama never did either.
What we overlooked with elms we’re in danger of overlooking with all of our Alabama genes, and the consequences of that are dangerous for all of North America. Scientists are increasingly aware of the importance of the few places, like Alabama, Georgia, northern Florida, the Carolina lowlands, where life survived for millions of years while life in much of the rest of the country was crushed by glaciers, drought and other severe impacts of climate change. Those places are refuges for genes that were lost elsewhere.
And it’s increasingly obvious that the trees and plants and creatures that now cling to the northeastern and north central states bet their future on life in a cold world, and are going to be particularly poorly adapted as the planet continues to warm.
The states of the Deep South, and Alabama perhaps more than any other, have the genes that the forests of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Maine will need to survive this century.
The trouble is, we still don’t recognize the importance of our own Alabama genetics. Our universities have done a poor job studying them. And most of us have no idea what an important asset those genes are. Shoot, if we’re going to purchase trees for our Alabama yards, we’re more than likely going to import them from Ohio or Pennsylvania – while bulldozing the the native Alabama tree genetics that Ohio and Pennsylvania desperately need.
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There’s one more thing that elms and other trees in Paint Rock should teach us about genes. Increasingly, we recognize that some of the most important Alabama genes aren’t prisoners to our species boundaries. Or maybe I should say that our often arbitrary species concepts may ignore the genetic differences that will be most critical to the survival of our ecosystems. We carelessly slapped species identifications on American elms, and in the process lost a half century of restoration potential.
The evidence of our sloppy species concepts is everywhere. I am alternately appalled and amused by efforts to rid Mobile Bay and Delta of roseau, the giant reed (Phragmites spp.) that is so dominant in many areas there. It started, as so many of our misguided efforts do, because we let folks in other regions tell us what our species are. An invasive form of the giant reed from Europe had begun to take over marshes in New England. Their congressional representatives managed to get a big pot of federal funding to control it, and folks in Alabama realized, hey…we’ve got giant reed, too. Let’s get a chunk of that change.
But no one stopped to consider that while the European giant reed had come to North America only in recent decades, there are photos of giant reed dominating areas of Mobile Bay and Delta dating to the 19th century. There are accounts of the earliest French settlers building their houses of roseau in the early 18th century.
To the casual observer – and that unfortunately included some scientists – the European plants and the Gulf Coast plants looked the same. And a full-scale eradication program was initiated to eliminate a plant that had been part of Gulf Coast life and ecosystems for as long as we had records.
Thankfully, it wasn’t very successful. And a researcher willing to take the time to understand the plants in more detail realized that though they looked similar, the group of plants we dubbed giant reed or phragmites was in fact made up of multiple “haplotypes” – populations of plants with distinctly different genetic profiles. The populations from Mobile Bay were so different from the European populations, the researcher demonstrated, they needed to be seen as different species. Soon it became obvious to most biologists that the species even looked different, once it was recognized they were different.
But even if Karen Saltonstall had not made the case for new species, these plants were so genetically different we obviously needed to think about them and manage them as if they were separate species.
Unfortunately, our whole system of conservation is based on these kinds of crude species concepts. We pretend that protecting sugar maples in New England is protecting sugar maples throughout North America. But thanks in part to the work we’re doing in Paint Rock, we now appreciate that the sugar maples of Alabama and the Southern Cumberlands have very little in common with the sugar maples of New England. As with elms, New England seems to have one genetic variant of sugar maple that slipped in behind the glaciers. In Paint Rock, we’re looking at the possibility that we have two or three “sugar maple” populations that are so different they can grow side by side and never cross – and it’s quite likely that all of them are not only genetically distinct from the sugar maples in New England, but also genetically richer.
Oaks, hickories, maples, elms, buckeyes, rhododendrons, ash, violets, fire pinks, sunflowers, silphiums – it’s like we just got off the boat with Columbus, and are seeing these species for the first time, and we’re working to identify the genetic strands that make them so different from plants elsewhere. It’ll be nice and useful to lump some of them together as new species. But in a place that is an ancient refuge for species, as Paint Rock and much of Alabama is, even individual trees matter, and we ignore the differences between individual trees at our own peril. That’s why we are identifying and following literally every individual tree over our 150-acre census plot.
At Paint Rock, we celebrate and honor species. And that’s why we take species with a grain of salt.