| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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here at the Academy Wanderer in the Woods When Curator of Botany Tom Daniel speaks about his favorite family of plants, he fairly glows. Listening to him rattle off the names of some of the 300 or so different genera in the Acanthus family, the Acanthaceae, one suspects he must have been born with a passion for plants. Not so, says the soft-spoken botanist. "As a kid I wasn't particularly attracted to plants or natural history at all. But I grew up in a rural area, and I was a wanderer. I'd walk for miles, looking at things. In a way, I'm still doing that now as a systematist; I'm just exploring more remote areas." A more subtle influence on Daniel was his father, who had a passion for gardening. "He'd come home from work and head for the garden," says Daniel. "He grew flowers, vegetables, everything." It wasn't until Daniel took a botany course in college biology, though, that he began to study plants seriously. In that lab, he says, he suddenly realized he'd seen all of the plants before--in his father's garden--but didn't know what they were. Daniel decided to learn something about them and enrolled in a course on local flora. An enthusiastic professor who preferred to lecture outdoors and lead field trips was a good match for his student's urge to explore, and Daniel quickly became "hooked" on botany. Another professor's suggestion for his doctoral dissertation became the focus of the research that still engrosses Daniel today--inventorying and classifying the eleventh largest family of flowering plants. With more than 4,000 species, the Acanthaceae, or shrimp plant family, occur primarily in rainforests and arid or semi-arid regions within the tropics. Most Californians know the family by the "shrimp" and "polka dot" plants sold in local nurseries, two species that, although non-natives, thrive in California's moderate climate. Daniel has named close to 100 species, and published numerous monographs and revisions. He also studies the diverse floral forms among the shrimp plant family and documents the plants' pollinators, which include bees, flies, hawkmoths, butterflies, hummingbirds, various perching birds, and bats. Some of the areas from which Daniel collected species just a few years ago are fast disappearing. "There is an area along the Gulf Coast of Mexico in southern Veracruz that was prime rainforest ten years ago," says Daniel. "They built a road through it, people moved in, and now the forest is almost gone." Daniel hopes that the work he will be doing in Madagascar, inventorying its species of Acanthaceae (of which 80 percent are endemic) and identifying "hot spots" of diversity and endemism, will help that country in its efforts to set aside reserves. "Studying these plants is something that so deeply needs work," says Daniel. "It benefits scientific knowledge and conservation efforts because these plants are so prevalent in tropical areas." While Daniel works to document disappearing species, in Project Phoenix he and other botanists are attempting to revive California species believed to have gone extinct or been extirpated from their native haunts. Project Phoenix is a joint effort of the Center for Plant Conservation in St. Louis and the California Department of Fish and Game to determine whether the seeds of some presumed extinct plants in the collections of the Academy, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden might still be viable. The project's ultimate goal is to reintroduce some of the plants where they once grew. In the meantime, Daniel is working on completing a revision of the Flora of San Francisco, which has not been updated since 1958 when much of San Francisco's Sunset District consisted of sand dunes and grasses. Daniel is overseeing the processing of Academy specimens collected since the last revision and entering them into a database, which will eventually be published on a website. The state's botanical bounty is the focus of California's Wild Gardens, a new California Native Plant Society book about botanically rich wild places, on which Daniel was a consultant (see Reviews). While Daniel appreciates the fact that many people are now growing native plants in their gardens, he wants people to understand the importance of saving natural habitat. "Saving natives in gardens isn't really saving the species. It's a last resort--saving them until you can reintroduce them into restored habitats," says Daniel. Daniel has recently been appointed to the steering committee of a new international venture with ambitious goals. The Species Plantarum Project, which will eventually involve most of the world's plant systematists, is planning to produce a comprehensive account of the Earth's flora. The first volume, available in both electronic and print media, should be available later this year. When he is not busy studying California native plants, inventorying collections, or publishing chromosome counts of shrimp plant species, Daniel prefers to be out in the field, finding plants. "It's like a game of hide-and-seek," he says. "I'm basically still a kid walking around the woods." Lisa Owens-Viani is a freelance environmental science writer. |
Winter 1998
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