Small Seeds; Big Problems
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Poison ivy is a native plant to North America, and reliable research points to its eighty million year history on this continent. The likely truth is that it cannot be totally eliminated from our environment. What we can do however, is learn to recognize it, and to remove it from areas where contact with people is likely. Another important point to remember is that poison ivy, even though it is a huge challenge and at times may seem too enormous to tackle, actually develops out of a tiny seed; a seed that we can learn to identify and remove (either in seed or early seedling form) before the situation spirals out of control.
The part of this website on case studies has a whole section about seeds and seedlings, and there are a number of pictures and botanical illustrations to help you identify the plant at this stage. I would suggest that you look it over if you haven't already, and familiarize yourself with what the plant looks like.
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A. This is a picture of three poison ivy seeds beside a ladybug. The photo was taken in the early winter of 2011. Overwintering birds ate the poison ivy berries from mature female plants, and dropped these seeds. It might be counterintuitive to note that these seeds are clean and free of other fecal matter, but I've found hundreds of these seeds, and by far the greatest majority are found in this clean condition, picked clean by the birds' digestive system. The ladybug was found on the roof dormant or dead, and the seeds were placed next to the insect to provide a familiar size comparison. B. This green hopper insect (I'm not sure of its correct name) is shown to the left of a poison ivy seed as a size comparison. C. Smaller than the keys on a Black Berry, eighteen poison ivy seeds lay straight in a row. Notice the natural variation in the colors of the seeds. To my knowledge, this is the first time that such a collection of post bird- ingested poison ivy seeds has been catalogued, photographed and presented. |
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