Science Friday - Inside Iowa State’s Herbarium | Science-Inspired Art From ‘Universe of Art’ Listeners

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

The Ada Hayden Herbarium preserves hundreds of thousands of specimens, including some collected by George Washington Carver. And, as the “Universe of Art” podcast turns one, listeners discuss solar music boxes and what it’s like making art with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.Inside Iowa State’s Herbarium With 700,000 Plant SpecimensHerbariums are plant libraries—they contain fragile specimens of plants collected from near and far, and they are meticulously described and cataloged so that someone can reference them in the future. At Iowa State University, the Ada Hayden Herbarium contains more than 700,000 specimens, about half of which are from Iowa.Ira talks with herbarium’s director, Dr. Lynn Clark, and curator Deb Lewis about how plants are preserved, why herbariums are so important, and what it takes to manage a plant archive.Science-Inspired Art From Two ‘Universe of Art’ ListenersLast week, we kicked off a first-anniversary celebration for Universe of Art, our science-meets-art spinoff podcast. A lot of listeners have written in since the start of the podcast, telling us about the science-inspired art they’ve made in their spare time.Last week, host D. Peterschmidt spoke with Todd Gilens, a visual designer who worked with the city of Reno, Nevada, to create a mile-long poem on the city’s sidewalks about the connections between urbanism and stream ecology.This time, we’ll meet two listeners. Craig Colorusso is a punk rock guitarist-turned-sound artist who creates public sculptures and experiences that enhance visitors’ connection to nature. Two of his projects, Sun Boxes and The Bridges At Coler, use solar panels to play reflective, calming music he composed. “You have this idea where you are in nature and you are listening to something that is powered by nature,” he said. “I think that’s perfect.”And we’ll meet a listener who prefers to go by Chris, who was an engineer and avid artist who made mosaics and crocheted before developing Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). It’s a debilitating condition characterized by extreme fatigue that can’t be improved by rest, and can also include brain fog, pain, and dizziness. It’s similar to what many Long COVID patients experience. Chris’ condition is considered severe, and caused her to lose the use of her hands, and thus her preferred art mediums.However, Chris could still use her left hand with a rollerball mouse and realized that she could use programs like Chaotica to create fractals that she adds to collages in Photoshop, resulting in colorful collages. “They’re just beautiful and I’m doing art again and I’m so happy about it,” she said.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Herbariums are plant libraries. They're filled with fragile specimens that have been carefully documented and stored away. Every specimen has a label that indicates where it was collected, who collected it, the date. Every specimen is like the page of a book. It's Monday, May 6th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm sci-fi producer Rasha Arredi. The oldest herbarium specimens are hundreds of years old, and they're still chock full of information for scientists to go back

and look for. So today on the show, a sneak peek into the Ada Hayden Herbarium at Iowa State University, and later a birthday celebration for Science Friday's podcast, Universe of Art, featuring some of your own stories. Here's Ira Flato. We've brought SciFri to Ames, Iowa this week. We're at Iowa State University. The Ada Hayden Herbarium contains more than 700,000, 700,000 specimens collected from the Hawkeye State and beyond. Joining me here in the Iowa Public Radio Studios are Dr. Lynn Clark, director of the Ada Hayden Herbarium, and curator Deb Lewis. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you. Thank you. I've got to get the Lewis and Clark out of the way first, right? You've heard that just a few times, I'll bet. Yes, yes. I'll bet you have. Deb, if I walked into your herbarium, what would I see? First of all, you would just see metal cabinets, sort of resembling a gym locker room.

But if we opened those cabinets, we would find dried and pressed plant specimens or maybe packets of mosses and fungi or similar things like that. Rose and rose and rose, yes. Because you have 700,000 specimens in there. Yes. Wow. And Lynn, give me an idea of what the range of things that you have in those cabinets. So we would have, as Deb mentioned, the fungi, the mushrooms, lichens, like the stuff. that grows on tree barks, you actually pry the bark off to make the specimen.

Do you bring the bark in with it? Or the rock. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Wherever it is, that's what you grab. But also the plant kingdom, including things like mosses and liver warts, ferns, pines, and their relatives, all the flowering plants.

So all the things like grasses, daisies, mints. Wow. I know this is like asking. about your children. But I have to ask you, do you have a favorite specimen in your collection? Well, for my master's, I studied a group of plants called Pimpernel's. But I also really enjoy coming across specimens that were collected by Ada Hayden and others, George Washington Carver, who I think we'll get to in our discussion a little bit, and those very important historical collections. Do you look at any just for fun when you go in there? Yes. Yes. Yeah?

We often give tours of the herbarium and as we do so we get to pull out some of our favorite plants and so it's like getting reacquainted with those fun plants again. Do you have one that you well I work on bamboo so yeah that's a hot topic these days. It's a very hot topic and it so happens that the bamboo cabinets are facing the main entrance. And so Deb usually pulls some out, and I always do as well. So cool. And why Lynn is it so important to maintain her bearings? What do they do for us? They do a lot of different things. There's the basic biodiversity documentation. Every specimen has a label that indicates where it was collected, who collected it, the date, anything else like substrate that might be really important.

And we all, certainly nowadays, we always georeference the specimen. So we actually put the coordinates. We go back and do the georeferencing for specimens that were collected before that was standard practice. So going with the library comparison, every specimen is like the page of a book. And so we can document the distribution of a species. It's flowering times. you can take pollen off of it. If you're studying fossils, you need to identify pollen.

This is a standard use for herbaria. Just to get data from the specimens, if I have to write a description of one of the new bamboo species, which I do a lot, I go to the herbarium and I look at all the variation that I can find. So I can get data. We can get DNA. Right. Oh, of course.

Out of specimens. And as things are going extinct now, right? Yes, absolutely. that DNA is even more important. Yep. What makes the Ada Hayden Herbarium so special, then? Well, for one thing, we document the 2000-plus species of flowering plants that occur here in Iowa, as well as, as Lynn mentioned, the mosses, fungi and other things that we keep in the herbarium.

We have special collections that were made by, like, our mycologist, Dr. Lois Tiffany. It's always fun to come across her specimens, those collected by Ada Hayden that we've already mentioned, and even George Washington Carver. Let's get into them. Let's talk about Ada first. As you say, the herbarium is named after Ada Hayden. Who was she? Well, she was an Iowa farm girl who grew up just north of town. She loved plants just throughout her life, even as a child. Their farm had a farm. an area that couldn't be plowed and put into agriculture. So she was able to collect plants from those prairies and wetlands that were left on the farm. And that got her off to a great start. She, while still a young woman, met Louis Pamel, who was on the faculty at Iowa State as a botanist.

And he invited her to come and study at Iowa State. And she got her bachelors, her masters, and was the first woman. to get a PhD from Iowa State in any field. Wow. And only the fourth overall. Yes. Yes. Wow.

And Iowa Stateland has a very famous alum, as we talked about it, before, George Washington Carver, a pioneer in agriculture and botany, especially his work on peanuts. He was also the first black student and later faculty member at Iowa State. So how is his legacy preserved at their birth? It takes the form of several hundred specimens. He collected both flowering plants and a lot of fungi. About, what, 500 fungi, 600, something like that, and about 300 specimens of the flowering plants. So this is the largest collection of carver specimens.

When he went to Tuskegee, he kept sending stuff back. He and Pamel were very close. They were about the same age. Pamel was obviously a very forward-thinking kind of guy. Yeah. I mean, he really contributed to the herbarium. He didn't found it, but he really enlarged it. But he mentored people like George Washington Carver and Ada Hayden.

The specimens are filed in the herbarium. When you open up the drawers or the doors, do you get a little rush, sort of a little, I'd be a little, like tingling. I'm opening up some very famous work here, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And a lot of his labels, we relabeled many of his specimens because we had to put the fungi into packets of archival paper. They were not stored that way originally. And I spent a good amount of time as a grad student retyping those labels. But we saved all of his handwritten labels. So those are in the packets or sometimes attached to the sheet of the specimen. So you can actually get a sense of his, you can read his handwriting.

And same way you feel about that? Oh, yes, definitely. It's always fun to be able to pull out George Washington Carver specimens and have them on display or to talk about Carver and Hayden. Yeah, yeah. Let's come back to the present day for a moment. And let's say that I knock on your door and I'm holding a brand new plant species that I think I've plucked from the woods, right? How do you go about preserving that first? How do you

verify it or know, you know, you're just taking my word for it? What do you, what's the process? So the first thing is we have to preserve the specimen. Right. And so we would wash off, knock off the soil and then press it between sheets of newspaper. And then we have boards that we tightly tie around it. And we have a dryer. Right. Go in there. And then it would end up being mounted on archival paper with the label. But at any point, after it's dried, we can study it to get that data that I was talking about. How big are the leaves? How hairy are they? What is the flower like? All the different parts that we would have to know about. And then we have, in addition to all the specimens, because you can compare specimen to specimen, but we have lots of books that

have identification resources in them. So we call them dichotomous keys. And so you actually go to the group of the plant, whatever it happens to be, and you have a series of choices. And well, is it like this or like this one, like this or that? And you go all the way through.

And if you can't reach a satisfactory answer, then you probably do have a new species. Do I get it named after me? No, that's considered really tacky. name it after yourself. To name it after yourself. I see. The trick is to get somebody else to name it after you.

Oh, yeah. Well, see, I'm new at this. Right. I don't know what. Lynn, what's the weirdest plant in your collection? And what makes it so strange? Oh, the weirdest plant. Yeah.

You have a fun fact about, you know, one of your plants. I'm trying to think we have so many. There's so many strange things. Wait, wait, wait a minute. Yeah. There are so many strange. things? Maybe that's what I'm asking. Yeah, I mean, strange.

Of course, depends on the context, but people walk in and they don't know that we have this huge collection of bamboos from South America. Right. People don't know that we have... What's it doing in Iowa? What's it doing in Iowa? We actually, one of my former students and I named a bamboo

species from the United States. We have native bamboos in the U.S. But there's plants that, for instance, there's parasitic plants. They don't make any chlorophyll so they don't photosynthesize, they actually have connections through their roots or through fungi to other plants. Interesting.

And they are bizarre looking. They don't, they're, they're not green. They're white or they're pink or they're red or something. So to me, those are some of the really oddballs, but to a lot of people, you know, a bamboo might be a strange plant. Can some of your samples last for centuries? Yes. Yeah, tell me about that.

Well, once they are pressed and dried and stored in conditions that will help to maintain them. Right. And we use archival quality supplies whenever we are processing the specimens, too, so that, you know, not only will the plant hold up, like people have probably maybe collected a four-leaf clover and stuck it in a book and then found it years later when they opened that book. and it still is intact. Well, we similarly dry things, as Lynn described with using a plant press, and they will hold up, we say virtually forever, as long as the paper that supports them,

the paper that the labels are printed on, all of the inks and things that are used on the specimen. If those are archival quality, then they will hold up for hundreds of years. But I thought I heard you say you press them with newspaper. Initially. Oh, initially. They're not staying on the newspaper. They're not going to stay in the newspaper.

No, no, they end up. It's the, because you don't want to use high quality stuff to do that initial step. Right. And of course, I imagine researchers and students from around the world want to come in and look through your archives. What kind of level do you have to be at to come in and use your library of stuff? Can I be just an undergraduate and say, I want to look at this? Or, you know, writing a book? Yeah.

We get visitors doing all sorts of things, and a lot of them are hardcore botanists, but we have, the herbarium has a very important educational function. Right. So we do have, we use them, we give tours to students from grade school on up. We use that, I'm teaching a class right now, I'm just finishing on plant diversity, and those students get a herbarium tour, and we, you know, use the specimens. I'm going to give you a question. I usually give to researchers, but I think you could use this also. And it's my blank check question.

If you had a blank check, which I have here in my back background, of course. Absolutely. And you had unlimited resources. What would you do with that money to either increase the quality of your work or research or find something? You can, any piece of hardware you need, anything like that. Oh. We could dream.

Well, dream big. We certainly can. That's what it's for. That's why you have the blank check. What would you do with it? Well, for one thing, our computers could certainly be upgraded that we used to create labels and to capture label information from specimens. Maybe the state's listening right at this moment.

That would be very nice. But we also need to invest in people to mount the specimens and to file them away and to make sure everything is correctly placed. And to answer these questions that we get, we routinely get dozens to hundreds of questions about plant identification, for example, or other questions, or once in a while we'll get something

for forensic analysis. And you get other... All sorts of things. Yeah, because I understand that you get other herbariums getting lumped into yours, right? Like a few months ago, duke's herbarium shut down. Yep.

And which was a big surprise to everybody. It was. So this is where you could, you could also use extra money or to? Yes, we could use extra money to incorporate. Not that we want to be doing that. We would like to see a strong network of herbaria in many places. So that's disconcerting to hear that these other herbaria are shutting down. It is.

You know, think tornado. redundancy, for one thing, but also that educational aspect, being able to have a local resource for people. Because many places when they divest themselves of a herbarium, they are also not replacing the people who have that knowledge to use the herbarium effectively and to teach about. Yeah. Are you hopeful about the future here of the herbarium? It's safe? certainly hope so with having gotten the collections here from the other two state universities. We are hopeful that that will be reason enough to maintain the collection. Right. And that we, you know, rank so highly in numbers of specimens.

We're about 11th in size among university collections in the country, even though Duke is a little bit larger than us. So we know that that unfortunately can happen. but we're hopeful that, I mean, we serve sort of as the state herbarium of Iowa because we are much, much larger than any other herbarium in the state. Well, let's end on that hopeful note then. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Dr. Lynn Clark is the director of the Ada Hayden Herbarium, and Deb Lewis is the herbarium's curator.

Thank you both for coming in talking with us today. You're welcome. Thank you. Last week, we kicked off a one-year birthday celebration. for Universe of Art, our Science Meets Art Spinoff podcast, and a lot of you have written in since the start of the podcast, telling us about the science-inspired art you've made in your spare time. The show's host, Dee Petershman, has been talking to some of you to find out more,

and today we'll hear from two listeners who found unique ways to connect nature to their art. My name is Craig Collaruso, and I make things that make sound. More specifically, I make sculptures that have a sound element to them. We'll get to what exactly those sounds are in a second. Spoiler alert, they're very peaceful. But Craig, who's based in Arkansas, wasn't always interested in making contemplative sound art sculptures. Well, I started out in punk rock. I was in a bunch of bands, toured all over the country, and I love music.

But at some point, I remember specifically being on tour and realizing there's a barrier between the audience and the performer. And I think that's fine, but I just didn't want to be part of that. I wanted to make something where you could literally feel like you're part of it. Craig remembers recording with a band he was in and coming to a realization in the studio. I wanted to do things more than just to make sounds. And I realized that sculptures and paintings were informing the music I wanted to play more so than other music. He made that pivot a little over 20 years ago, and one project that ticked off everything on his new checklist was a piece called Sunboxes. Sunboxes is 20 speakers that are all individually powered by solar panels, and each box

has its own guitar note that has been recorded and programmed to play continuously as long as there's enough sun. The catch is that all those tracks are a different length, and so as they repeat, they line up differently. Can you describe the experience of just walking through them? Yeah, I mean, as you're in the middle of the array, you start to realize that, wow, there are 20 things making sound, and I can hear them all. It's one of those things where it's loud enough So the participant feels like they're engulfed by sound But at the same time you can still hear

ambient sounds of the environment Like wind and trees You can hear animals like insects You can hear people crunching on leaves as they walk You know, it just makes me feel more Not necessarily presenting something But just enhancing what's already here Craig did a similar project for the Kohler Mountain Bike Preserve

in northwest Arkansas. Still using solar panels, but a power speaker is embedded in a pedestrian bridge, which play a similar kind of composition made up of guitar, clarinet, and bass clarinet. Yeah, I'm a big fan of solar, and now you have this idea where you are in nature and you are listening to something that is powered by nature. I think that's perfect. I didn't want this to be an art experience, you know, art with a capital A. I just wanted this to possibly make someone's day better.

And actually, Craig's heard from a handful of people whose day was made considerably better by this piece called The Bridges at Kohler. One couple got married on the bridge, and another fella proposed to a woman on the bridge. And, you know, I thought it was just great that I made something that people want to include in these, like, milestones of their lives. And for our last listener artist, we're going to hear from a woman who wants to go by Chris.

And Chris has Emmy CFS, which, if you haven't heard of it, stands for myelgic and cephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome. People with this disease often experience extreme fatigue that can't be improved by rest, but can also include brain fog, pain, and dizziness. And because of this, Chris didn't have the energy for an interview, so instead we communicated over email, and with her permission, I asked my coworker Annie to read a condensed version of what she wrote to me. I have MECFS. I'm considered severe, housebound, and bedbound during relapses. I can do my basic daily self-care activities, but my husband does all chores.

Chris got ME CFS 18 years ago, after she contracted a virus. She was an engineer for a cell biology research company where she made software and complex gadgets. And early on, I couldn't do advanced math and logic anymore. She thought it was just the flu at first, and to feel better, she tried working out to reduce symptoms. It had the opposite effect. I ended up exercising myself into full disability over six months.

I finally gave up when I realized I was a little. too weak to drive to work. In the ME-CFS world, this is known as post-exertional malaise. Long COVID patients can experience the same thing. And before this, Chris was a pretty active artist in her spare time, dabbling in drawing, painting, mosaics, and crocheting. But her hands stopped working well enough to do physical art. I don't really get to start with an idea and then make something anymore.

And Chris was at a loss. Art can be such a steadying, calming force in your life, especially if you're dealing with the chronic health condition. Was there a way that she could work within the limitations? of ME-CFS and still create? Then I discovered fractals. Chris found out that she could still use her left hand with a rollerball mouse to navigate Photoshop.

I create worlds and characters using fractals from programs like chaotica and apophysis. I generate them randomly and pick out the beautiful ones. The fractals can supply beautiful backgrounds that I assemble into worlds of trees, grasses, flowers, oceans, rivers, rocks, stars, and planets. Then in Photoshop, I map sections of the fractals onto shapes of an animal, wings, face, body.

The fractals supply the detail in intense colors, since so much of nature has a fractal character to it. The result is whimsical, beautiful, humorous, and abstract, like nature. The randomness of the fractal generation gives the process a feeling of discovery. They're just beautiful. And I'm doing art again, and I'm so happy about it. Had I known about post-exertional malaise soon enough, I may not be housebound, and I might still be able to use my right arm and hand for art.

Art does give me a cushion between me and the cruelty of ME-CFS. Even now, 18 years later, I miss my work and colleagues, and that feeling of contributing to the world. But art is glittering around the edges, making me smile. Thanks, Chris. And you can check out Craig and Chris's art on our website. That's at ScienceFri-D.com slash listener art. Lots of folks help make this show happen, including Santiago Flores

Emma Gomez Diana Plasker Tomorrow on the show How Climate Change is affecting cemeteries in coastal Louisiana Join us I'm SciFrag producer

Rasha Iridi