Feb. 26, 2001

Plant Detective

Herbarium curator has the answer when identifying a plant is a matter of life and death

The situation could have been deadly. The nurses at the Children’s Emergency Department at Wake Medical Center needed to know if the small, black berries a 2-year-old had swallowed were poisonous. And they needed to know in a hurry. So they called Alexander Krings, herbarium curator in North Carolina State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. It was just one of the 700 to 1,000 plant identification requests that the herbarium receives each year.

"Folks usually mail us a plant for identification through their county Extension agent," says Krings, a plant taxonomist in the College’s botany department. "But there are numerous species with black berries, and some such as nightshade can be extremely poisonous, so I rushed down to the hospital as quickly as possible to examine the material.

"Luckily, a specimen of the plant had been brought in, so I could identify it — creeping cucumber — and tell them it was of no grave concern to the child. There was a great sigh of relief from the nurses. You could tell they really cared. And I was pretty happy. There’s nothing so gratifying as helping a child."

Had they known the plant’s scientific name, the nurses could have accessed toxicity information from any one of several Web sites. But if you don’t know a species name, the Web is next to useless for poison plant research.

That emphasizes the importance of one of the herbarium’s unique community services: identification of unknown plants, Krings says. N.C. State’s herbarium contains 125,000 specimens, some of them dating back to the late 1800s.

Except for such instances as the WakeMed emergency or when state investigators pursue criminal leads, circumstances surrounding the hundreds of plant identification requests the herbarium answers annually aren’t usually so fraught with potential peril.

Requests come from diverse publics: on-campus researchers, county extension agents and farmers worried about field weeds or livestock owners concerned about toxic pasture plants, federal agencies, scientists diagnosing plant diseases of potential economic impact and home gardeners increasing their plant knowledge, he says.

Krings, not only a Web surfer, but a life-long salt-water surfer, came to botany naturally.

"Growing up in Charleston, S.C., I surfed a lot," he says. "Depending on the swell, my buddy and I would often be out there before dawn and well after sunset. You develop a longing to be there that’s difficult to describe. On spectacular days, you don’t so much remember the waves, but the way the light faded over the silvery, undulating ocean and the lone pelican coasting on the evening breeze.

"Love for the place naturally grew into an interest in keeping the water and beaches clean, which soon developed into a broader interest in the environment."

Pursuing his interest in environmental issues, he enrolled at N.C. State.

"There was nowhere to expand my knowledge on those issues but here. And there was always something about North Carolina that I associated with forests and greenery," he says.

As an undergraduate, he experienced an epiphany while camping with a college environmental group.

We were in the Shennandoah Valley and I looked around and realized I couldn’t identify any trees or a single plant around me. So I bought one of those ‘Golden Guide to Trees’ books at the park service concession, and that got the ball rolling," he recalls.

The camping trip sparked an interest that led to two N.C. State degrees: a 1995 bachelor's degree in natural resources and a 1998 master's degree in forestry with a botany concentration.

After a one-year stint as a biologist and head of computer-based projects at Zilker Botanical Garden in Austin, Texas, Kring became N.C. State’s herbarium curator.

While botanists might not face dangers as serious as ingestion of a poison berry, their ability to access accurate, organized botanical data is essential to their research. Yet since he became herbarium director in July, Krings has faced a botanical Catch-22 type situation.

When used off-campus, the information botanists need — the herbarium’s 125,000 preserved, archival-sheet-mounted plant specimens — faces inadvertent degradation or destruction and everyday wear-and-tear.

"Loans are very big in the taxonomy community," says Krings. "We’ve loaned 700 species in the past six months."

Although the sheets are delicate, with a few dating back to 1874, sharing them is one of the herbarium’s most important functions. Loans allow taxonomists to compare specimens from throughout a plant’s range, developing a more-refined understanding of variations and species limits, and increasing the body of botanical knowledge, he says.

Botanical researchers also need a standard of comparison — a type — by which to classify a newly discovered plant or confirm identification of a known one.

"One of the rules governing plant nomenclature is that an author must designate a physical specimen — the type specimen — to serve as a basis for a new species name," Krings says.

The herbarium’s 28 types and other specimens, most from North Carolina and the Southeast, are flat-stored in 108 steel cases in a climate-controlled 1,125-square-foot room in N.C. State’s Gardner Hall.

One way researchers, faculty and students can access plant information without harm to the specimens is to go online, Krings says.

"A Web presence makes the process a lot easier, because we can do digital loans and researchers can access information on what we actually have to loan and see who to contact," he says.

To that end, he recently posted images and labels of all types housed at the herbarium to the herbarium’s Web site, http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/botany/ncsc/index.htm.

Also at the site are information on poisonous plants and both native and cultivated trees, with taxonomic keys, floristic research at N.C. State, links to other online plant collections’ databases and a searchable catalog of the 400-volume taxonomic reference library housed at the herbarium.

From the site’s Southeastern Plant Resources page, you can click to plant atlases, gardening and horticulture information — including tree and plant fact sheets — related gardens, museums and arboreta. The information covers Carolina wetland plants, maritime forest trees, native pines, conifers and other Southern trees.

Recently Krings also added a work he just published with Dr. Jon Stucky, "Common, Woody, Piedmont and Coastal Plain, Wetland Plants of the Carolinas," complete with taxonomic keys and a linked, partially illustrated glossary to plant morphology. Soon he’ll add an online version of a North Carolina Agricultural Research Bulletin, "Plants Poisonous to Livestock and Pets in North Carolina."

--A. Latham