Bad taxonomy can kill world records

Or, When the world's tallest dandelion isn't a dandelion. 

The motto of The Guinness World Records is OFFICIALLY AMAZING.  And that it is, officially amazing, but not only in the sense that they might think.  When I was a kid in Sweden I loved their orange-colored book, (1975 edition, maybe?) and I read everything in it, and stared at the photos of the man with the longest nails (how did he eat?) and the largest cat, amused and entertained and informed.  Now I get to come back to this memorable source of trivia, but this time for a botanical and work-related reason.

The world record for the tallest dandelion is nearly a foot taller than most people was found by two Canadians 2011.  They had their dandelion verified by two experts in Canada (see below) and accepted by the Guinness office as an official world record. From the Guinness website:

"The tallest dandelion measured 177.8 cm (70 in) and was found by Jo Riding and Joey Fusco (both Canada) in Ontario, Canada. The dandelion was measured on 12 September 2011. The dandelion was found on 4 August 2011 and was unofficially measured at 76 in. The dandelion was then officially measured by NutriLawn and The Weed Man on 12 September 2011 when it had dried out and was measured as 70 in."  (link)

There is no photo of the plant on the record website, unfortunately, but there is a youtube video uploaded by JO Riding, telling the whole story of finding and measuring of the plant. 

By the time the plant was measured it had been dried for weeks, but you can clearly see in the video that it had many leaves on its stem, and that there were several flowers on the top of several branches.  There is no clear taproot and no rosette of basal leaves. To conclude, this was no dandelion. (And just to confirm, the Canadian botanist Luc Brouillet who wrote the Flora of North America treatment for dandelions, agrees with this conclusion.  And he should know.)

There are many species related to dandelions (genus Taraxacum) that are similar to dandelions in having yellow flower heads and 'puffball' seed heads that eventually blow in the wind, but they are not dandelions, they below to other genera.  All of these are members of the sunflower family (scientific name Asteraceae), and dandelion and its relatives are members of the Cichorieae (aka Lactuceae) subgroup (=tribe) that has members with milky sap (latex) that you can see if you break a leaf or stem.

Dandelion (Taraxacum)  from Lindman's Bilder ur Nordens flora, Public Domain.

Here is a real dandelion, a species in the genus Taraxacum. All the leaves are in a basal rosette at the base, and from the middle of the rosette a light-colored, hollow stem comes up and holds just one flower head. There is a big taproot under the plant that can survive year to year, and that is why they are so hard to get rid of - you have to dig them out. It is a perennial problem - cut the flower head stalk off with your lawn mower and it just sends up a new one from its low stem and perennial root.

Milk Thistle (Sonchus arvensis), illustration from
Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (1885), Public Domain.

And here is a weedy look-alike, but check out the differences in the position of the leaves and the branched stems with many flowers.  This is a milk thistle (Sonchus), which is probably what was reported from Ottawa as the world's tallest dandelion. It is unclear if the two Ottawa companies that certified its height, Nutri-Lawn and Weed Man, also certified its species identity, but both companies should be very familiar with dandelions and other weedy species.  Nutri-Lawn is a lawn care company specializing in "ecology friendly lawn care" and Weed Man, another gardening company has a very funny green man as their home page mascot.  It might be that Guinness World Records didn't ask for species verification. 

And then there was this UK news story this summer, Man accidentally grows the 'world's tallest dandelion plant': 

Screenshot from The Telegraph (UK) website (link) by BotanicalAccuracy.com, 18 Aug 2016. Fair use.

" Mr Daniels is keen to get his dandelion officially measured as soon as possible before it starts to wilt or dry out. He added: "I'm not a gardener hence why I'm growing a dandelion, it is just luck that it has grown so big as I have done nothing to it over then let it grow." A Guinness World Records spokesman said: "We invite the claimant to make an application via our website in order for us to be able to ratify the achievement."

This is not a dandelion either. All those little flower heads in a strongly branched inflorescence and the leafy stems with bluish-green leaves with light-colored mid veins indicate that this seems to be Lactuca, maybe prickly lettuce (Lactuca serriola). Lactuca is the same genus as your supermarket lettuce, but this is a wild species. This is how Lactuca looks like. Some species have blue petals, other yellow.

Wild lettuce or prickly lettuce  (Lactuca serriola) from Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen, Public Domain.

For the record, WeedZilla with a height of 12 feet isn't the World's tallest dandelion either, that is something else in the sunflower family. It is a giant weed indeed, but not a dandelion. Sorry.   

The strange thing is that dandelions are not hard to identify with certainty if you know what to look for.  The book Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook by Dina Falconi includes a great 'plant map' illustrated by Wendy Hollender of all the good key characters for dandelions. You can also read about dandelion's great benefits and ancient ethnobotanical uses.  

I am not writing this to point out that people identify plants wrong.  That happens all the time, and is just a matter of education, curiosity, and interest in plants that live around us.  There are plant identification forums online with over 50 000 members, and the fact that people are curious about strange, cool, and giant plants is a great thing.  People should ask about plants, and let themselves be amazed by them. It is OK to know little, especially if you want to know more and satisfy your curiosity.

The problem is the fact checkers at Guinness World Records who put themselves and their company into this embarrassing situation.  First, they should make sure they actually have the right species in hand. The easiest for this is to have photos of the plant while alive, you know 'pics or it didn't happen!'.  They should also require a pressed specimen of the plant, not just air dried, but pressed between newspaper sheets so it is preserved and flat.  That way specialists can look at it later and say: "yep, you have a true dandelion!", or "sorry, that is a milk thistle, nice plant anyway!"  This is called vouchering and is standard practice for all species reports, including DNA testing, species inventories, herbal plant identification, and chemical analysis.  There is no reason why Guinness World Records could not implement this, and have a botanist verify the species identification and have a link to an actual preserved specimen (the proof). 

So, what is truly the record for world's tallest dandelion? Well, there are reports out there that show real dandelion (Taraxacum species). So far, the record seems to be the dandelion found by a Norwegian boy, Bjørn Magne, with a 108 cm (42 inches) long flower stalk, and reported to World Record Academy in 2007.  Before then, the Guinness World Book of Records had a 39-inch tall Swedish dandelion from 2003 as a record holder. The Nordic countries seem to be great for further giant dandelion exploration.  To inspire you, here are some dandelions on Iceland's lava-covered plains in the never-setting sun of Nordic summers. 

Dandelions on Iceland. Photo and copyright by Didrik Vanhoenacker (thanks for letting me borrow the photo).

PS.  Thanks to Asteraceae specialist Torbjörn Tyler, field biologist-on-call Didrik Vanhoenacker, professor emeritus Arthur Tucker, and dandelion taxonomist Luc Brouillet, who all helped and gave feedback on research for this blog post.

NYT taxonomic inaccuracies, again

I just sent this letter to the Corrections office at NYT, a newspaper that "welcomes comments and suggestions, or complaints about errors that warrant correction." Lets see if this taxonomic mix-up warrants correction in their minds.

"Dear New York Times Editor,

In a recent article about blue cheese, you write:
"To produce Roquefort blue cheese, for example, cheese makers mix Penicillin roqueforti into fermenting curds. "(Sept 24, online and in print)

No, it is not Penicillin roqueforti. It is Penicillium roqueforti. Penicillin is the antibiotic drug derived from some Penicillium fungi. This looks like a typical autocorrection mistake, added after Carl Zimmer wrote the article. Check with Carl Zimmer, I am sure he didn't write it that way.

As you surely know, words matter. Here is the link to the species page for this species in Species Fungorum.

Thank you"

Update - sorry, but the link to Species Fungorum seems to be down because their website is currently down.  Try a little later.  

Update 2:  HAHAHA!  New York Times has corrected the spelling to "Penicillim roqueforti".   Not sure if this is an improvement...but it certainly is still incorrect.  Dear NYT, each species on this earth can have one and only one accurate spelling of its species name.

Update 3: OK, now it is corrected to the correct spelling of the species name. "To produce Roquefort blue cheese, for example, cheese makers mix Penicillium roqueforti into fermenting curds."  I suggest you read the article, it is a very good read.
NYT also added a correction at the bottom of the article, but the correction does not refer to wrongly spelled scientific names in earlier versions, but to the isolating of the active compound: "An article on Tuesday about the evolution of molds used for cheese making referred imprecisely to the isolation of the antibiotic penicillin. While Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, he did not isolate the active substance." 

Kissing under the mistletoe, or is it holly?

Kissed someone recently under a mistletoe?  Did you check, maybe it was holly?

The tradition of hanging a little bouquet of mistletoe in the ceiling or door frame and being allowed to kiss whoever happens to stand under it is an old tradition, and a popular subject of movies, comics, postcards, and general holiday fare in both Europe and North America.  We are currently in what The New York Times calles the "hemiparasite season" in their recent article on mistletoes.  No other time of the year provides so much attention to these green mistletoe plants that live on trees, and are often common in Christmas decorations. Another traditional Christmas plant is the holly, a shrub that has spiny, dark-green glossy leaves and (usually) red berries.  The two are often featured together.

Old European Christmas card showing mistletoe (Viscum album) with white berries
and holly (Ilex aquifolium) with red berries.

Mistletoes only grow as half-parasites on trees, usually high up in the canopy, and stay green year round.  They are easiest to spot in the winter. 

Mistletoes (Viscum album) growing on deciduous trees in Switzerland.
Photo © by Jason R Grant, used with permission.  

Mistletoes (Viscum album) plant from Switzerland.
Photo © by Jason R Grant, used with permission.

And here comes holly:

Holly (Ilex aquifolium) from Switzerland.
Photo © by Jason R Grant, used with permission.

Unfortunately, the increasing plant blindness and under-education in botanical subjects we see in media and among the general public worldwide is spreading also into Christmas botany, and a few cases of 'kissing under the holly' have showed up. Some examples:

Sweater "Kiss me under the mistletoe" showing holly, not mistletoe. 
For sale on etsy, see link.  Photo © owltheshirtsyouneed on etsy (fair use).

Greeting card "Get under the mistletoe" showing holly, not mistletoe. 
For sale on etsy, see link.  Photo © TwistedOakGreetings on etsy (fair use).

There are some more examples here, and here, and here.

The two plants are nearly impossible to mistake for each other, unless you think each green thing is a green thing and nothing more.  Here is a simple table for those of you that want to dig into the separating characters. Note that this table are for the most common and traditionally used species of mistletoes and hollies, and that there are other wild species and cultivars with different berry colors.

	Mistletoe (Viscum album, etc.)	Holly (Ilex aquifolium, etc.)
Leaves	Small, flat or slightly twisted and spoon-shaped, with smooth edges	Very spiny edges, thick and glossy green, wavy (hurts when you touch them)
Branches	Green, easily seen between the leaves	Usually brownish, usually covered by the spiny leaves
Berries	White, nearly translucent	Red
Grows	As a partial parasite on trees, has a sucker root into a tree branch	As a shrub or small tree, has its own roots in the ground

The user FireFiriel on DeviantArt has clarified it once and for all with a nice drawing.

(This post was inspired and helped by information from reader IT in Sweden - many thanks!)

Coleus - I am calling your name! (But what is it?)

Many gardeners and naturalists are frustrated when we botanists change the scientific names of species. I feel frustrated too, when the crown vetch changes its gorgeous, easy-to-remember (for me) name Coronilla varia, to Securigera varia. Now the genus name sounds like a financial security company, not like a gorgeous crown of pink flowers.

But change happen, and it happens for a good reason. We are sorting out old problems and making things better and more logical in the long run. Keep on reading and you will find out what

Coleus hybrids.
(cc) photo by Pharaoh Hound on Wikimedia.

Wild species change genus for mainly one reason. We try to classify all species with their closest relatives, so that everything in a genus comes from one common ancestor species. That means, all species has one origin back in time and share a common history. To figure out this history and these relationships we use DNA and morphology, and build up evolutionary trees that shows the story of species evolution over time.

Of course, when most plants were first described, they weren't part of evolutionary studies. We first started to construct evolutionary trees using DNA and computers in the late 1980s. In the beginning of botanical taxonomy at Linnaeus' time we didn't even know about evolutionary theory, since that came about in the 1860s with Darwin. The start date for botanical nomenclature is Linnaeus book Species Plantarum from 1753. Before recent times, scientists gave species their scientific placement and names based on overall similarity or dissimilarity, not evolutionary relationships.

In the blogpost about "Magilla Perilla" we listed the scientific name for coleus as Solenostemon scutellarioides. We also listed two older synonyms as Plectranthus scutellarioides and Coleus blumei. A few weeks ago we e-mailed botanist Alan Paton, who works on the evolution of this plant group at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London, and asked him, "What is the correct species name for coleus, for real, and where does it belong?" 

His answer was maybe not what you expect. He said:

"I'm writing up the research at the moment. [...] Plectranthus including some other genera on one hand and Coleus and some other relations including Solenostemon form sister clades. The actual picture with denser sampling shows a slightly more complex picture than these earlier papers; but they give an outline which suggests Coleus should be recognized and Solenostemon would be embedded within it."

What does this mean?  Be prepared to see the scientific name your garden coleus change back to original genus Coleus in the near future, and Solenostemon will be no more (it will be merged into Coleus). Plectranthus will still be around but with fewer species and not include your garden coleus. So, coleus will be a Coleus again, which is very nice, and certainly easy to remember. It has been a mess with these names, but Alan is sorting it all out, once and for all. Check back here on the Botanical Accuracy blog when his paper comes out for an update.

It is really all about getting the right species in the right place in the giant evolutionary family tree, which includes over 300 000 plant species in the world. No wonder it is a little chaotic at times. But we have to do it, and we have to use the most updated scientific names possible to talk to each other about plants and understand our plants, across over the world. It is all part of the progress of knowledge.  And sometimes increased knowledge isn't that convenient to begin with.

References:

Paton, A. J., et al. Phylogeny and evolution of basils and allies (Ocimeae, Labiatae) based on three plastid DNA regions. 2004. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 31: 277-299.

Lukhoba, C. W., M. SJ Simmonds, & A.J. Paton. 2006. Plectranthus: A review of ethnobotanical uses. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 103: 1-24.

'What is in a (PLANT) name?' on the FLORIDATA website

Update on the magics of "Magilla Perilla"

Art Tucker and I have been getting a few e-mails about the blogpost explaining that Magilla Perilla is just a cultivar of the regular Coleus.  We thought we should clarify a few things for those of you that wonder and ponder the naming of plants.

1. Just because a name is listed in large, well-known databases run by organizations such as Royal Horticultural Society, doesn't mean the name is correct and accurate.  Many times common mistakes have been perpetuated throughout the online or printed publishing world. Often new facts have come to our attention, but the name has not yet been corrected by most sources. In printed books the mistake will live on until a new edition comes out.
2. Magilla Perilla is a coleus.  That has been shown by looking at scientific evidence such as anther morphology and annual versus perennial habitat. (See more information in this newsletter.)
3. Magilla Perilla is not a member of the Perilla genus.  If you are not convinced, grow some Perilla, some coleus, and then some 'Magilla Perilla'.  Do your own scientific studies and compare.  Hands-on science in the garden or backyard is a great thing.
4. What is the scientific genus name of coleus?  Well, that has now turned into a separate issue, and justifies its own blogpost, which will follow this one. 

 

Diagram showing where "Magilla Perilla" belongs = with the coleus, not the Perilla.
Copyright by BotanicalAccuracy.com

Dandelions - mistakes in the field

Dandelions are ubiquitous plants, common in fields and gardens, and also both beloved and hated.  We love their fluffy fruiting heads with their wind-blown small parachute seeds.  It is probably one of the most well-known plants in society (except for some common ones that we grow on purpose).

However, not only dandelions have these types of fruits, and some of the popular photos of dandelions are actually other species. The most common mix-up is with Tragopogon species, goat beards. Both are members of the sunflower family, the Asteraceae.  How do you tell them apart?

Dandelion (Taraxacum)
from Lindman's flora, public domain.

The common dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) has:

• yellow flowers (each head have many tiny, tiny flowers)
• leaves that are lobed with large teeth
• leaves in a rosette near the ground, no leaves on the flower stalk
• fruiting heads about 3-5 cm in diameter (up to 2 inches)
• the green bracts under the flowering  head are relatively short, and they barely just reach the full radius of the fruiting head.
• there are more seeds in each head

Note the difference in the leaves and bracts to the leaves of goat's beard.

In the sunflower family, each seed is also a fruit.  So a sunflower seed is a little 1-seeded nut.



Goatbeards (Tragopogon sp. ) have:

Goatsbeard (Tragopogon),
from Thomé (1885), public domain

• yellow or purple flowers (each head have many tiny, tiny flowers)
• leaves that do not have lobes, and are very long and narrow ending in a long sharp point
• leaves are present on the flower stalk
• fruiting heads usually over 5 cm (over 2 inches)
• the green bracts under the flowering  head are long, reaching beyond the full radius of the expanded fruiting head
• you can blow these seeds away too
• Other names for these plants are salsify and goat's beard. 

Below are some examples of stock photos that are sold as dandelion photos but actually are other species. Most photos marked as dandelions are correct, but a few are not. If you spend $40 and upwards on stock photos, I think you should assume you get the right species, don't you?

istockphoto for sale by user sunnybeach, marked as dandelion but showing goatsbeard.
Note the two long bracts hanging down from the fruiting head near the stem.
(Screenshot by BotanicalAccuracy.com, istockphoto image # 171660950.)

Another stockphoto, this time from Getty images, also showing goatsbeard (note long narrow and non-dented leaves). (Screenshot by BotanicalAccuracy.com, gettyimages photo # 128072731)

More examples on this Pinterest board: 'Dandelions' that are not real dandelions.

Are there cattails among the nymphs in the waterlilies?

Sometimes you run into botanical mistakes that just makes no sense.  Mistakes that are so strange, that you wonder not just want the author was thinking, but really, HOW did they get this wrong...  A reader of this blog (RO) sent me this example of such a preposterous mistake:

On Virginia Tech's online Weed Identification Guide, when you search for cattails, you find this:

Screenshot from Virginia Tech Weed Identification guide by BotanicalAccuracy.com.

A nice page with a species description, but... the genus is wrong.  Cattail belongs to Typha (in the family Typhaceae, they have their own little family).  Here is a typical cattail in fruit:

A pair of cattail 'cigars' which contain the developing fruits.
Photo by Amadej Trnkoczy on Flickr, Creative Commons. 

Instead of Typha, the listed genus name is Nympha, which not only is a non-existent genus name, but probably was meant to be Nymphaea, the waterlily genus.  Sure, water lilies often grow very close to cattails in the edges of lakes or ditches, but they are completely different plants. Compare here:

A great pair of Nymphaea, water lilies. Photo by Vilseskogen on Flickr, Creative Commons.

Nymphaea is of course named after the Greek nymphs, while Typha also comes from a greek word 'typhos', which is the ancient name for this plant.  Apparently cattails have long been associated with mythological creatures such as serpents and dragons.

The same information and mistake is showing up in University of Missouri's Weed ID iphone app, and they must have some kind of collaboration with the originators of Virginia Tech's Weed data.


My main issue here is that universities that put out online (or printed) botanical tools for the general public need to get at least the basic science correct.  People use these tools, which is great, but they will (and should) assume that the information is accurate, especially if if it is provided by a research and teaching university.

(Thanks to RO for sending me the link to the botanically inaccurate page.)