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May 1, 1997 Vol. 3, No. 1 THE DRIFTING SEED A semiannual Newsletter covering seeds and fruits dispersed by tropical currents and the people who collect and study them. Dr. Charles R. (Bob) Gunn, Contributing Editor Cathie Katz, Editor and Publisher Sue Bradley, Business Manager John V. Dennis Sr., Columnist Pete Zies, Columnist The Second Annual Sea-Bean Symposium will be held at the Community Center in Melbourne Beach, Florida October 16 through 19, 1997 Drifters from Washington, Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Alabama … and possibly Canada and Africa will attend. Details about the events will be included in the next Drifting Seed in September. Dr. Charles R. (Bob) Gunn 120 White Squirrel Lane Cathie Katz Brevard, NC 28712 USA PO Box 510366 704-883-9719 Melbourne Beach, FL 32951 USA e-mail: [email protected] e-mail: [email protected] From Your Editors From Bob: Our December 1996 issue was mailed on time, and we appreciate your letters, suggestions, comments and support. I cannot let this opportunity go by without letting you all know how much I appreciate the plaque that you awarded me. The presentation message, printed in the December issue make this plaque even more important to me. The plaque overlooks my computer station, and even as I type this, I can look at it and remember you all. Thank you. Our Newsletter is the result of a fortunate meld of Cathie and my talents, but its success resides in your hands. We need to fill the following columns three times a year, and only you can do this: Feature Articles (mainly about collectors, collections, and contributors), News and Notes from Readers, Recent Literature, and Collectors’ Gallery (photographs). We welcome your suggestions for other columns. Please send me your notes and comments and disseminules for identification. If possible please send your articles on either 5-1/4 or 3-1/2 inch diskettes using ASCII or WordPerfect for an IBM compatible computer. From Cathie: Joyful news from Pete Zies and his wife Kristen. I received this note from Pete last week: “You may recall how I finally found my first Mary’s bean on the 17th of April. Kristen went into labor this weekend, and she took it with her to the hospital. She held it tightly in her hand throughout her labor (as required by the folklore) and took less than two hours to deliver our little girl! Noelle was born on April 26, 1997 and weighed 7 lb. 14 oz. Call this my own sea bean ‘experimentation.’ It seems that the folklore is true, since Kristen’s prior labor was over twice as long!” Congratulations! (Pete’s e-mail is [email protected].) Five months have already passed since our First Annual Sea-Bean Symposium … and only five months to go before the next one in October. I’ve already heard form most of the members of The Drifters who will be with us again at the Second Annual Sea-Bean Symposium, October 16- through 19. This year the Symposium will be in Melbourne Beach which is 25 miles south of Cape Canaveral, 150 miles north of Palm Beach and 65 miles southeast of Disney World. Directions and a few suggested hotels will be in September’s Drifting Seed which will be mailed in August. Also in the next issue of The Drifting Seed will be details about the 4-day sumposium, but I can tell you now that it will include a Bean-A-Thon in the tradition set in the 196-s by Robert Mossman (Jack Beans), Tar- Toes Thomas, Big-Foot Johnson, Diggin’ Duggan, Corrine Edwards, the Jessens, and Dr. Gunn in Palm Beach. Pete Zies is putting together a schedule of events, including the Bean-A-Thon. We’ll have lots of things to look for on the beach in addition to beans. Curtis Ebbesmeyer wrote about a spill of Lego® toys last February off the coast of England. Maybe we’ll find some during the Bean-A-Thon. Curtis says that he has written to Lego® in Denmark for more information. It’s possible that millions were spilled. October is also a good time for finding bottles, toys, shells, and mermaids’ purses. From all the phone calls and notes that I’ve been receiving from beachwalkers this past year, sea-beans are back on schedule – maybe not as plentiful as in previous decades, but certainly a lot more plentiful than the past two years when our beaches were neglected by the Bean Powers. We hope to compare all our past finds at the Symposium, as well as compare what we find October 16 through 19. (These dates were chosen because this is typically the beginning of sea-bean season in Florida.) What will this year bring us? We hope to gather enough information to shed some light on the beans’ periodic arrivals. In February, I spent a few days in South Florida giving nature presentations and writing talks. I was also a guest on NatureScope, a Palm Beach TV show, arranged by Steve Bass and Nancy Leeds at The Gumbo Limbo Nature Center. While I was there, Debbie Wilson gave me two beautiful Mucuna pods (grown by C. B. Jessen) which I now treasure and include in my presentations. Their Center is a naturalist’s paradise. Visiting Drifters would benefit from a trip to Boca Raton to see their facilities. My trip to Kenya has been postponed until next year when I’ll be able to spend more time collecting sea- beans there. My schedule at The Applied Physics Laboratory wouldn’t allow enough time for a long trip, and since I’ll be unemployed when my field office closes next year, I made the logical (but sad) decision to wait. On the positive side, I’ll be able to finish my Florida Nature Book series, and learn Swahili. The Drifting Seed/May 1997 2 Featured Articles A Study of Drift Fruits and Seeds in Papua New Guinea By Helen Fortune Hopkinds Masons Arms, Hutton Roof, Carnforth, Lancs. LA6 2PE, United Kingdom While I was teaching botany at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, from 1985-1991, I made a collection of drift fruits and seeds from several beaches on the north and south coasts of the island of New Guinea. I collected intermittently at first, and then as I became more intrigues with what I found, I pursued my interest in a more organized fashion and enlisted others to help. I know of two previous studies of drift disseminules in the region. One was made by the botanist on the Challenger Expedition, which circumnavigated the world from 1873-1876. He collected drift disseminules from several localities during the voyage, including off the mouth of the Mamberamo River in the western part of New Guinea, now called Irian Jaya (part of Indonesia). These specimens are preserved in the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London). The other study was done by the German botanist and missionary, Gerhard Peekel. He was based in New Ireland for much of the first half of this century and seeds from his drift collection are illustrated in the “Flora of the Bismarck Archipelago” (Peekel, 1984). My collecting produced a diverse assemblage of entire fruits, empty pericarps, woody or corky endocarps and seeds, with occasional bulbils of Dioscorea and fern rhizomes. Small seeds were often overlooked as my principal method was to walk leisurely up and down a beach, often with friends for company, putting what I found into my collecting bag to sort out in the evening. Only rarely did I sit down on the beach and sift through a small patch of sand to find the smallest fruits and seeds. Samples from New Guinea contain many well known drift species though some are less well known. I have identified much of my collection using books, by comparing specimens with living plants and dried herbarium materials and with the help of either specialists on drift fruits or botanists who have a specialist knowledge of particular families of plants and of the flora of New Guinea. But the identification of some, even highly distinctive, drift seeds is still problematical, and I plan to continue working on these in 1997. A few are illustrated here. If anyone can suggest names for any ot these indets [unidentified seeds], I would be pleased to hear from them. The diversity of drift disseminules from New Guinea is quite high, compared for instance with collections from Fiji and islands in the Coral Sea (see Smith 1990 & 1994). So far, fruits and seeds from 48 families have been identified. In terms of the number of species, the most diverse family by far is the Fabaceae (Leguminosae) with 29 and other important families include Anacardiaceae, Combretaceae, Euphorbiaceae and Arecaceae (Palmae). In terms of biomass, magrove species were usually dominant in samples from the south coast, especially those which have comparatively large disseminules including species of the Rhizophoraceae, Xylocarpus spp., Heritiera littoralis and Nypa fruiticans. I found considerable variation between collections from different beaches (Fig. 1). Some species common on the north coast, such as Barringtonia asiatica and Calophyllum inophyllum, were rare in the south, reflecting differences in coastal vegetation between the two areas. Hisiu beach, at the mouth of the Aroa River, was often the sources of material that was rarely or never seen elsewhere, and had probably been washed down the river but then got no further than onto the nearby beach. In contrast, the beaches on Motupore Island near Port Moresby produced the seeds of many species that did not grow on the island, as well as numberous plastic sandals, bottles and lumps of expanded polystyrene that were trapped by the receding tide amongst the stilt roots of Rhizopora in the mangroves on the landward, sheltered side of the island.