BY ALPER ÖZKAN (MSN/PhDIII)
d_ozkan@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
I must confess that I am, once again, in a pinch — for the last two days, I have been searching to and fro for a set of vials that I require for a test that should not have taken more than 20 minutes, and the sheer insanity of the situation has taken quite a toll on my nerves. With a project report looming and the crucial samples lost in transit, I believe you will appreciate the fact that writing a proper column is the least of my worries – though the necessity of writing one still stands. So, I will not, as had been planned, deliver a column on tsukumogami. (These are Japanese object-spirits that form when an oft-used item gains a soul of its own, and they come in a delightful variety of shapes, including sentient vegetable graters and a ghost restaurant that eats its customers. My favorite, the kameosa, is an old earthen jar that bears cracks that look just like eyes and a mouth, and can magically produce an infinite supply of whatever liquid it used to keep. There’s something charming about an old pickle jar with a mouth that vomits forth an endless stream of pickled onions, and there are few things I wouldn’t do to get my hands on a kameosa that produced, say, chocolate fondue.) I will instead fall back once again on familiar territory, and this week’s topic will be on biology — trees, to be specific (there’s a lot to say about trees, of course, and I will only be talking about a couple of species).
You might recall from the previous column that orchids can be incredibly refined parasites, and it should come as no surprise that parasitic plants are not limited to small, tree-inhabiting weeds — indeed, there’s nothing that prevents a parasitic plant from rivaling or even dwarfing its host in size, as is seen in the gigantic flowers of Rafflesia arnoldii that nestle on the relatively puny vine Tetrastigma. And while the rafflesias are famed for their massive flowers, and are even listed at times as the largest parasitic plants, the latter honor actually falls to Nuytsia floribunda, an Australian tree that can grow up to 15 meters in height. The largest member of the mistletoe order, this hemiparasitic tree retains its ability to photosynthesize, but water is a valuable resource in the arid regions in which it prospers — and the roots of Nuytsia, able to cover distances over 100 meters and armed with specialized organs that pierce and extend into the roots of other trees, are clearly well-equipped to secure the mineral nutrients and water that the plant needs. So greedy is this mistletoe-tree that its roots have been observed to attack and damage underground cables — or, as Wikipedia puts it, “it mistakes the cables for host roots and tries to parasitize them using its sclerenchymatic guillotine,” though I suspect that the real reason is not that the tree takes the cables for metallic roots: no indeed, the cables are attacked on purpose, and Nuytsia is slowly adapting to feed on electricity. Watch out, Biollante, you may have a rival in the making.
However impressive Nuytsia’s root-jacking trick may be, it is limited to only a select few plants — the true weapon of trees is their ability to produce a stunning array of toxins and signal chemicals (which recruit parasitic insects to hunt down a variety of pests) to protect themselves from herbivores (many herbivores are, in turn, quite unfazed by this development, and a great number of caterpillars even derive their own unpalatability from the leaves they eat). But even among the poisonous trees, the manchineel is infamous for its incredible potency: a fan made of a manchineel branch may cause blisters when waved (if you procure some thick gloves and eye protection, you can tie the branches on your person and become the nefarious supervillain Man-chineel! — I’m surprised there aren’t any comic books that use this idea), and so will wind that blows through manchineel groves — though neither of these effects compares to the pain of taking shelter under the tree during a storm, and the manchineel fruit is called the “little apple of death” for good reason.
P.S. Pokemon X and Y came out the 12th, and it’s your duty to the spirit of nostalgia to play them. The new region is based on France, so go ahead and try to see if anywhere seems familiar (there’s a comparative list out on the Internet, but that’s cheating). Also, I’ve caught wind that you can scale — and battle on — the Eiffel Tower, and that this generation’s offensive juggernaut of the Dragon type is a giant snail (clearly one of the best things to convert into a dragon, and I suspect it might be partially based on the Carcolh).
…The French will never be rid of that stereotype, will they?