Book Reviews

Ferns, Fungi, and Frightening Things

Daniel D. Palmer. Hawai`i’s Ferns and Fern Allies. University of Hawai`i Press: 2003. 324 pages (including index). $60.00 cloth.

How do you tell an Australian tree fern (aggressive invader) from one of Hawai`i’s natives? To the trained eye, it may be a simple matter. For those of us with no training whatsoever, making the distinction is not so easy.

Fortunately for us, Daniel D. Palmer has a straightforward approach: Look for scales. If the plant has them, it’s probably the unwelcome but ubiquitous Spaeropteris cooperi. If it has only hairs, it’s the native hapu`u. (A page in the appendix helpfully describes the difference between hairs and scales, for those who, like me, are complete neophytes.)

Palmer’s book is much, much more than the “Complete Idiot’s” guide to Hawaiian ferns that I might find useful. But as someone to whom pteridology and its related terms are as foreign as Urdu, I found his book surprisingly readable. Helpful glossaries explain the specialized terminology and provide illustrations of the various parts of ferns. Palmer’s introduction provides an overview of the ferns in Hawai`i that any motivated layperson can follow.

Palmer offers some amazing fern facts as well (Joe Moore, take note).

• Hawai`i has 161 native species, 114 of which are found nowhere else.
• The notorious aquatic fern Salvinia molesta does not reproduce sexually at all, but rather is a sterile hybrid that “spreads by proliferation and fragmentation.” The earliest infestation was found in Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, in 1959. It was first noted in Hawai`i at the Hawai`i Tropical Botanical Garden at Onomea. (This area, where a private plant collector had his estate, is proving to be a notorious beachhead for invaders: it was ground zero for the state’s miconia infestation.)
• Fern reproduction is complex, to say the least. “The fern life cycle is characterized by having two separate stages, each with differing free-living plants: gametophytes and sporophytes,” Palmer writes. The sporophytes are what we commonly see as ferns. The gametophytes, formed upon the germination of spores, are typically heart-shaped, flat, green, and inconspicuous. From gametophytes grow the showier sporophytes. “The sex life of the ferns is often complicated and outrageous by human standards,” writes Palmer. Hybridization is common among closely related species, although it can occur even between ferns of different genera.

As useful as Palmer’s book is for the reader innocent of any knowledge of ferns, specialists in the field will surely want his work on their shelves as well. He delves into the intricacies of taxonomy and discusses the finer points of debate that divide the “splitters” (those who use the least variation between plants as the basis for describing a new taxon) from the “lumpers” (those who tend to see variation as response of individuals of the same species to differences in climate, soil, or other growing conditions).

Palmer is a retired dermatologist, but he has devoted much of his life to the study of Hawaiian ferns. For years, he was tutored by the late botanist Warren H. Wagner, who was, like Palmer, a part-time resident of Michigan. If it does nothing else, Palmer’s work serves as a reminder of the extraordinary contributions amateurs have made to Hawaiian botany and zoology. He follows in the honorable tradition of one of the earliest, William Hillebrand, one of the living greats, William Mull, and perhaps the greatest botanist ever to work in Hawai`i, the incredible polymath Joseph Rock.

— Patricia Tummons

Don E. Hemmes and Dennis E. Desjardin. Mushrooms of Hawai`i: An Identification Guide. Ten Speed Press: 2002. 212 pages (including index). $39.95.

Like magic, mushrooms often appear out of nowhere one day, and are gone the next. The fact that a single bite from one of them can put you in the hospital, send you on an hours-long psychedelic trip, or tickle your taste buds, adds to their mystery. (Volvariella vovacea, one of the more delectable varieties, can be almost indistinguishable from the deadly Amanita marmorata, which damages the liver and kidneys when eaten.)

“We have to admit that a common reaction by most is to assume these mushrooms are poisonous and to deal with these critters by stomping them into oblivion,” Hemmes and Desjardin write. “Surely, some education is needed.”

Indeed. And Mushrooms of Hawai`i, a very readable, and often witty identification guide, dispels much of the mushroom mystique, explaining which are and aren’t safe to eat, and how to locate and identify them..

The tiny Coprinus plicatillis, for example, can be found on lawns among another species called Dunce Caps early in the morning. Called the Japanese Parasol, its 5-15 millimeter cap is translucent, almost paper-thin and disappears with the first strong morning sun. The paragraph on its physical description ends, as they all do, with a comment on its edibility. It reads: “Edibility: edible but why bother?”

More interesting facts for Joe Moore:

• Juices of the poisonous and hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria added to milk will kill flies, hence the name Fly Agaric.
• Increased heat and moisture from breathing on part of the cup-shaped Peziza arvernensis will force the mushroom to release a cloud of spores.
• Chorophyllum molybdites looks, smells, and tastes good, and, to some, is perfectly edible. It also happens to send more people to the emergency room than any other Hawaiian mushroom, as it can cause cramps, vomiting, hypothermia, and diarrhea for those whose stomachs can’t handle it.
• The rare endemic Humidicutis poilena (poilena is Hawaiian for “yellowish cap”) is known from a single kipuka off the Big Island’s Saddle Road.

In addition to encyclopedic passages, Mushrooms of Hawai`i includes a few hundred gorgeous pictures of mushrooms and other fungi. While fungi aren’t usually equated with beauty, the full-color photos depict specimens as delicate and lovely as any flower, in shades of baby pink, deep red, and bright yellow. And their shapes go far beyond the simple toadstool. Mushrooms alone can resemble horsehair, coral, starfish, toasted bread, and charcoal briquettes. There is even a species that is nicknamed, and looks just like, “Mouse Feces on a Stick.”

With support from the National Science Foundation, Hemmes and Desjardin have been cataloging Hawai`i’s mushrooms since 1990. They have found 310 mushrooms species, 44 of which are new to science, including two new genera.

Hemmes and Desjardin, biology professors at the University of Hawai`i at Hilo and San Francisco State University, respectively, have received many awards for their work over the years. Hemmes, who is also chair of UH-Hilo’s Biology Department, was named Professor of the Year in 1999 by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation. Desjardin, director of the H.D. Thiers Herbarium at San Francisco State, was awarded the Alexopoulos Prize from the Mycological Society of America and the W.H. Weston award for teaching in mycology.

Together, they have created a beautiful, entertaining, informative, and practical piece of work for anyone wanting to better understand an often-overlooked family member in Hawai`i’s natural world.

— Teresa Dawson

Yvonne Baskin. A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines: The Growing Threat of Species Invasion. A Shearwater Book published by Island Press: 2002. viii + 371 pages (including index). $25.00.

As vast as the invasive species problem is, no one can hope to be encyclopedic in covering the issue. And with books and articles on the topic having experienced a geometric expansion over the last decade, any writer addressing the subject will hope in vain to find unplowed ground. But if writers were limited to being comprehensive or original (or, in the rarest of circumstances, both), they might as well fold up their laptops for good and spare themselves the effort of trying. And so they soldier on.

Yvonne Baskin’s A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines is one of the most recent volumes on this subject. She was invited to undertake the book by one of the foremost scientists working in the field of invasive species, Stanford University’s Harold Mooney. In his capacity as head of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, Mooney granted Baskin access to the inner workings of the Global Invasive Species Programme, an international consortium formed in 1997 under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme. As Baskin writes, she “shadowed the work of GISP” for two years. She also traveled around the world “to see firsthand the invasive species problems” that GISP scientists and researchers were addressing and “to meet the people on the front lines.”

Her story follows her travels, for the most part, and she often lets the story be told by the people she is interviewing. To her credit she does not shy away from history, and as a result, the reader obtains fascinating insights into how we got to where we are. There was, for instance, the train car outfitted by the U.S. Fish Commission in 1873 that brought bass, catfish, walleye, and other species from the East Coast to California, with a few spiked in most major rivers in between, “for luck.” And while we may shake our heads smugly at such naivetŽ, from the perspective gained over the last 130 years, it is not quite so easy to distance ourselves from more contemporary problems arising from lack of an effective quarantine system. A shocking example Baskin provides comes from Louisiana. There, the owner of a roadside exhibit of snakes was able to obtain for display three live brown tree snakes from Guam thanks to a bureaucrat simply having rubberstamped customs forms that made no secret of the species being shipped. (The snakes were later confiscated and the owner fined $1,000).

More than relating the sad histories of global invasions, Baskin also devotes much of her book to scientists’ efforts to find a formula that will let them know what species have the traits that make them likely invaders – a ‘Holy Grail’ of weed risk, as she frequently describes it. And she mentions several success stories, including one from South Africa, where the government pays farmers to remove non-native pines that steal water from free-running streams.

No book on invasive species is complete without mention of Hawai`i. I’m fully sympathetic to the reasons that led Baskin to focus her writing on problems that are particularly illustrative or exemplary and so can understand why she limits her discussion on Hawai`i to issues faced by natural resource managers in the two largest national parks (Haleakala and Hawai`i Volcanoes).

But in attempting to portray the big picture, it is also essential to get the details right. And it is here, specifically on the subject of feral pigs, that Baskin stumbles. Pigs are among the worst of the invasive species in native Hawaiian forests, she correctly notes, adding: “There is little hope of eliminating pigs throughout the rugged terrain of the park, especially given that pig hunting remains a fiercely valued tradition among native Hawaiians” (p. 74). With this, she betrays an insensitivity to nuance, apparently not recognizing that the most ardent champions of pig hunting are not native Hawaiians at all, but are drawn from the ranks of more recent immigrants.

It’s a small point, to be sure, and it should not detract from an otherwise splendid work. But if Plague makes it to paper or a second edition, I would hope to see this passage rewritten.

— Patricia Tummons

Volume 13, Number 11 May 2003