Amanda
The sun has gently woken me. I don’t know what time it is. Although the light is faint and I see a canopy of green above me- trees. I would guess it’s 6:30am. Last night I set up camp at a Maryland state park and today the first thing I see are these great giants. The spectrum of greens highlighted by the rising sun is beautiful. I lay on my back and watch the light change the leaves until 7:00am. My mind wanders with the minutes that seem to last twice as long here. I imagine I am in the deep wilderness and I think about the life that exists at night. Perhaps there was wildlife that crept near my tent. Certainly spiders or ants, maybe some deer. Then my mind wanders to plants, I am curious what plants are growing here in Maryland. I work at a native plant nursery and have become more attuned to the flora and fauna of Virginia. My curiosity gets the best of me and I rise from my sleeping pad and zip open the tent. I decide I will walk around the campsite and see what I can recognize. Beneath the canopy of trees lives a host of plants, some herbaceous and some woody. The camping site I have slept at is not in the wilderness necessarily, there are campers a few meters away, all of us circling the communal bathrooms housed in a concrete block. As a result, the area is mostly trampled and sparse from many plants. I crouch down to take a closer look at the soil beneath. It is a light brown and quite sandy, I use a twig to scratch the surface and discover it is mixed with some orange clay. Still crouching, my eyes scan the ground for plants. I am immediately attracted to the showy lime green ferns that seem to be waving their fronds at me. I stop at a small stand of ferns and observe them. I don’t have any practice identifying ferns, but I use my instinctive senses to observe them. I touch the fronds and they are thick and a bit rough, I turn the leaves over and see two rows of black spots along the stem of the fern. I am pleased with this attempt and decide to write down my observations and do some research on fern identification when I am back home.
I rise in a slight panic, realizing that my alarm did not go off. The sun peeking through my window indicates that it must be around 7:00am. I realize that my phone died overnight because I forgot to plug it in and as a result my alarm did not go off. I I find it and walk downstairs with my charger in hand. I plug my phone in and see that the kitchen clock says 7:30am. I am relieved and decide that I will use this morning to do some research. I flip my laptop open and the first thing I check is the battery level. It’s below 50%, but I am eager to start researching, so I make a mental note to plug it in. I pull up a tab and type into the search bar “fern identification”. Google tells me that about 11 million results were loaded in about 0.68 seconds. The list of websites offer their suggestions and google provides a few drop down tabs of frequently asked questions. My mind begins to scan the text for the most accurate source. I am reading between the lines, looking for websites with .org .edu or looking at the domain names for relevant names that I recognize like ‘Audobon Society” or even ‘Journal of Natural Sciences’. I choose a source titled sciencelearn.org with a webpage titled “Classifying and Identifying Ferns”. The source is from New Zealand and the author writes that there are 230 species of ferns in the country. As I scroll down I look for identification terms. In a matter of seconds I learn that the name for a fern stem is rhizome and it can be creeping, vertical or erect. The website has pictures of a beautiful forest with large green ferns. The picture is attributed to the university of Waikato in New Zealand. I continue reading and learn that the black spots along the rhizome that I observed are called sporangia. Sporangia are the reproductive structures of the ferns and are helpful for identification. I read that sporangia can be grouped together into circles, elongated along the veins or arranged around the edges of the frond. The website also includes a video with a cover photo featuring a deep green fern, so I click play and watch. The 2 minute video shows an older man crouching in a stand of ferns. He describes the parts of a fern and repeats a few things that I read in the text above the video. At the end he notes something I haven’t heard before, that the fronds are not entirely the same as a flowering part of a plant because they serve a dual purpose. The fronds are both photosynthetic and reproductive. By this time I have about 30 minutes remaining. I find this bit of information very interesting and spend the next hour researching more about the patterns of sporangia on different ferns in Virginia. I find some examples of fern sporangia online and download them to include in this blog post. See below!
It is astonishing the amount of information held on the internet. I noticed that the type and amount of information I consumed during an hour researching ferns was packed with many new pieces of information about ferns. I was using my mind and eyes to scan text and make sense of what I was reading. I could feel my attention locked into the video and scanning and observing the fern images intently. While in contrast, when I was camping the amount of information was less and the type of information was more nuanced and instinctive. I used my eyes to scan the colors, light, and size of the trees and ferns. I had to crouch down to get a closer look at the fern instead of leaning forward and craning my neck at the screen to see the digital image. My mind wandered and more of my senses were used when I was outside observing the fern. When I was learning about the fern on the website, my mind was most active and my eyes were stimulated with many fern images and the sound from the video. Consider this for a moment, the plant nursery where I work has 300 varieties of native plants. My supervisor knows every single one by scientific and common names, can identify them at various stages of growth, and can tell you about their habitat. It took her about 3 years of working with these plants to build that knowledge base. The internet can load this information in less than a second!
I have noticed that the naturalists I work with have a personal understanding of the plants in the environment. In the field, this helps us make informed decisions about what is happening in the ecosystem based on the nuanced knowledge we have about the flora and fauna we are observing. We make informed decisions based on what we know and see in the field. We ask ourselves “Is it time to collect seeds?” or “Has this plant population increased or decreased? What does that mean for this ecosystem if a species is being crowded out?”. The internet is valuable as a knowledge base. We can access a lot of information, but can we retain it? Can we go out into the field and identify a plant? Or are we reliant on googling everything we see and absorbing text or video to give us an answer? I think it is important to have experiences in nature to help us notice details and retain information by using our senses instead of just memorizing things or reading them from a webpage.
