Plant of the day is: Sagittaria secundifolia or Little River arrowhead
Why?: There are over 80 species I could have chosen, so why this one? Well, this is actually a plant native to a very small area in northeastern Alabama...the Little River if you could guess? This plant is critically imperiled and its last known population exists in a small area of the Little River system. It is endangered because it is very sensitive to water quality, a very sensitive indicator if you will. The usual human causes for water/soil degradation are at fault for this species problems: building shopping malls, surface mining, agriculture, building roads, Walmart, w/e ...*sigh*. Other species nearby are also endangered but you can check the Wiki. We need to treat our soil and water better though. /end rant.
Taxonomy: Yep, moving along with the A families. This is a member of Alismataceae or the water-plantain family. Alismataceae is a fairly small family with only 11 genera and between 85-95, these are generally water loving plants and mostly perennials. They have a cosmopolitan (fancy word for wide distribution across the world) distribution and are more often found in the northern hemisphere. See species ID notes for further morphological characteristics
Habit/Range: Well like I said earlier, northeastern Alabama along the Little River. For a more detailed view here is a link, and the lack of a conservation plan from the .gov site it came from. yay. US Forestry site does have a recovery plan though. This site lists it as occuring in 7 counties. Finding a map of the Little River was more annoying than I was willing to get into so I'm going to contact some map nerds I know to look into this for me.
ID: O.k. the good stuff (for me). This is a monocot and as such, they tend to have flowers in parts of 3. This plant has 3 petals and 3 sepals. The petals themselves are usually very short lived but are white. Let me elaborate, the male flowers on top have white petals and the female flowers on the bottom do not have petals. I find myself questioning now pollination methods and just not having the will to spend another 10-15 minutes figuring it out...later. You can find these out in the wild growing right out of the bedrock at rivers edge. When the water levels drop a bit they send out their little flower stalk and flower. When the water levels are just right, reportedly they can float right on the water. Super cool, what an experience that would be. They flower from May to August so, if you in that area of the world and hiking along the river, keep an eye out!! Seeing these flowering and growing where they grow is going to be helpful. Unlike most other members of this genus/family it kind of lacks that characteristic arrowhead leaf formation. In the photo below if you look you can see the flower structure coming out of the water. Enjoy.
That's all for now, hope I get to see this plant before we destroy it.
Also for my own purposes researching, the end of these will become a kind of link dump to eliminate the need to look stuff up again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittaria_secundifolia
http://warnell.forestry.uga.edu/service/library/index.php3?docID=72&docHistory
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