Final week of Botany!

Hola todos! This week in the Arts & Sciences track was unfortunately our last studying plants with the incomparable Miguel Sundue Ed.D.

source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Maize-teosinte.jpg

We ended our discussion on the subject by talking about the various methods that plants utilize to move (yes, they move and quite a bit too). Plants generally move in response to certain signals, for example to a touch or to light or even to gravity. We learned about secondary growth in plants which gives us most of the plants we think of as trees. Secondary growth refers to a plant's ability to expand outward, in the horizontal. We also talked about the domestication and artificial selection of certain plant species by humans. This process was of critical importance to our ability to form permanent communities and some now think it was crucial to our acquiring larger than average brains. The process in general includes people choosing to grow plants that have desirable characteristics thereby promoting their success (reproduction) and allowing those desired traits to be passed on. For example, the wild ancestor of corn is thought to have had hard, inedible grains, but people found irregular types with softer grains and grew and breed them till, over time, we got the corn we have today. Michael also created a presentation about iconic plants of Oaxaca, including plants such as agave (used to make mezcal) and dahlias (often decorating Frida Kahlo’s hair).

Our last week was also accompanied with a little poster project where each of the seven of us researched a specific species or genus and presented our findings to one another. These species included Agave americana, commonly used to make mezcal and tequila among other things; Erythroxylum coca, one of the plants from which cocaine is made; and Psychotria poeppigiana which has uses in traditional medicine. The presentations were all very well done and showed us how greatly our understanding of plants had deepened just in the past three weeks.

Our second to last day of class we visited the Botanical Garden here in the city. This place was stunning! Grown there was just about every Mexican species you could think of and many others. We witnessed the traditional Milpa; corn, beans, and squash grown together to supplement each other nutritionally and in other ways. We saw what was probably the most diverse collection of cacti I have ever seen, some towering some 20-30 feet above us. We saw the sacred tree of the Mayans, the Ceiba tree; a massive tree with large, sharp spikes all around the epidermis. These trees can reach heights of 200 feet, poking through the canopy of the dense rainforest. The Mayans held these trees sacred because they believe the tree symbolized their world; the roots were symbolic of the earth and the canopy, the heavens. The trunk connects the two.

This friday we finished the class, said our good-byes to Miguel who is heading back into the mountains to collect fern samples, and prepared ourselves to head of to our village stays. When we return it will be on to our next and final class about the Anthropology of Music in Oaxaca!  


Jack and Gemma