Susan Wall transfers a specimen of Hieracium canadense Michx., also known as Canadian hawkweed, that was collected in August of 1949 from Norway, Maine to archival paper in the botany lab at Coastal Maine Botanical Garden the on Monday, November 19, 2018. The herbarium at the garden was established in 2014 and the facility opened in June this year. But with climate change and a looming biodiversity crisis, scientists say these preserved collections of old plants are more important than ever.
And so our collection of 825,000 specimens is special only to, it's special to Duke. It's not replicated anywhere else. ... And so when you open a case, you're faced with all these sheets that are stored in boulders. And so these plants, whenever they were pressed and dried, glued to these sheets, are stored according to a very special classification. So they're easy to find and you locate the cabinet you wish, and you go in and have a look at the material that you need to maybe describe a new species, maybe to look at the variation a species encompasses.
PRYER: Yes, indeed it is the home to the lady. 15 years ago, my lab group was very intent on listening to her music in the lab while we were looking at herbarium specimens, processing them for extracting their DNA and that sort of thing. And I hadn't heard of her, but watched her on the Grammys in 2010, and she appeared in a costume that was so remarkable in that it looked exactly like the sexual stage of a fern gametophyte. And ferns are what I study.
But when we had the sequence data, all aligned at 1 point in a certain gene, there was a molecular signature where the nucleotides G, A lined up for all 19 species of the Gaga fern. And so the closest relatives and that area did not spell out Gaga. They spelled out something else. And so that was taken as a signal to us that we were doing the right thing.