pHake Lake Fake-Out

One of my favorite things about taking Experimental Ecology Lab is getting to walk around in the Bernard Field Station and take field notes on whatever I see that interests me. After years of taking classes that required me to sit down and turn out problem sets, I could finally go for a walk in a secluded place on my own terms…for credit! Early this March, on a warm sunny morning, I decided I wanted to check out the only body of water in the BFS, known as pHake Lake (pronounced “fake lake”)—an artificial lake known among Mudders for being the place where the robots are tested for the core engineering class. (Yes, making underwater robots is a graduation requirement for all Mudders. I swear we’ve got the weirdest core curriculum I know of.) I was curious to see how the biota around pHake Lake differed from the rest of the BFS, but the organisms I saw along the way kept catching my attention! I already knew I was in for a treat when I saw a baby desert cottontail dash across the trail to hide from me. These rabbits are always a delight to see, looking like mini jackrabbits with their comically large ears (they coexist with jackrabbits in some areas as well), but I’ve only ever seen one or two juveniles. This is what an adult looks like.

 

 An adult desert cottontail [1]

 

Closer to pHake Lake, I approached a hill just south of the lake and immediately noticed a plant I had never seen before, a low spreading forb with hot pink flowers and lots of stems. The flowers were pleasantly scented, and honeybees seemed to go crazy for them. I didn’t bring my phone that day, so I had no way to photograph or ID this plant, but I dug around later on the Bernard Field Station website and determined that this was a wishbone bush (Mirabilis laevis, family Nyctaginaceae).

 

 

My drawing of the wishbone bush (Mirabilis laevis) I saw [2] 

 

 

 

An actual photo of another wishbone bush [3] 

 

The cluster I saw was so big (about 1 m by 1.5 m in area) that I wasn’t sure if it was composed of multiple genetic individuals tangled up in each other or a single individual that had reproduced clonally. Several other plants were poking out of the cluster, including storksbill, mustard, and some sort of grass. I kind of wondered if this wishbone bush was acting as a nurse plant for these others, providing shelter for them so they can safely establish. This happens a lot in dry areas like Southern California—when collecting data for my senior thesis on Joshua trees, I’ve come across several different kinds of shrubs protecting baby Joshua trees (and some adults!) If I were a tiny seed in the hot, dry BFS, I would want to grow under a shady canopy that wouldn’t dry out so fast.

Right next to the wishbone bush was a very tiny plant that I also couldn’t identify. This one was only a few centimeters high and had feathery leaves like fennel or yarrow, but didn’t have a noticeable scent. I’m still not sure what this one is.

 

 

My own drawing of the unknown plant [4]

 

I didn’t make it to pHake Lake that day, so I tried again three days later, this time determined to get there…and immediately got distracted by cool plants again. (Yeah, I’m one of those people who can’t stop pointing out plants while going on walks with friends.) At the base of the hill where I found the wishbone bush, I saw one extremely small plant that at first appeared to have bright red flowers. However, upon closer inspection, it was most likely a storksbill with some kind of infection that produced these grainy red growths on its leaves.

 

An infected storksbill? [5] 

Next to that plant, I noticed some kind of herb that had soft green leaves shaped like rabbit ears, with white sticky undersides. It looked and smelled sort of like the California cudweed (Pseudognaphalium californicum) that I’d seen in other places around Claremont, so I figured this one was at least in the same family (Asteraceae), if not the same species. I’m most likely right about the family—my iPhone thinks it’s a California mugwort (Artemisia douglasiana), which is in the same family as cudweed and, somehow, in the same genus as the sagebrush that occurs all over the BFS (Artemisia californica), despite their very different growth habits. Though if any plant family would be a good guess, it would be Asteraceae—one of the biggest plant families around, with over 20,000 species. Would you have guessed that this was related to dandelions and sunflowers? Maybe if it was flowering…

Potential Artemisia douglasiana in the foreground, with a fellow Artemisia (California sagebrush, A. californica) in the background. Big shoutout to genus Artemisia for producing some of my favorite smells in the world, especially big sagebrush (A. tridentata, which I haven’t seen in the BFS but can be found in other places around the western US). [6]

When I’m in the BFS, I’m always amazed by how many times I’ll be walking around with a specific destination in mind (e.g. pHake Lake, the outdoor classroom) and then stop to look at a plant I’d never noticed before. And then another. And another. The BFS is so rich in life that it’s almost overwhelming to try and take it all in, but what does that say about the ecosystems I spend most of my time in? If the biodiversity in the BFS seems so much greater than in the rest of Claremont, I can’t help but recognize that as shifting baseline syndrome at work, since that’s probably what Claremont would have looked like before it was called Claremont. It wasn’t always trees and PhDs and sprinklers on lawns, y’know.

Media Credits

[1] Photo by Sarah Baldwin. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desert_Cottontail_(54168170811).jpg
[2] Photo by Callie Dawson.
[3] Photo by Steven Thorsted. https://calphotos.berkeley.edu/cgi/img_query?enlarge=0000+0000+1001+0177
[4] Photo by Callie Dawson.
[5] Photo by Callie Dawson.
[6] Photo by Callie Dawson.