Hi y’all! I’d like to open this page to discuss and list some of the features that have surprised you or me about cannabis, it’s friends, and it’s foes, be it in floral or faunal form.
I’d like to kick it off with Cannabis and a substance that’s called Calcium Oxalate, followed by Aphids’ impressive reproductional feats.
Cannabis makes this substance called Calcium Oxalate, and it does that from 2 compounds, namely Calcium and Oxalic acid. This substance is detrimental to our end product because even a slight bit of it will make us cough like a motherfucker and render any bud that has a good load of it unsmokable. The reasons for the creation of this compound are myriad, and it’s biomechanisms make it possible for us to tap into using it when it is really needed, and perhaps to remedy situations where it happens in measures way above what is acceptable or wanted.
Aside from making us cough, Calcium Oxalate in it’s many forms irritate not just us, but also animals that try to live off cannabis as a food source. It’s not just used by cannabis, but by many plants in the plant kingdom. It’s often the source of plant contact rashes, for instance, and they are also present in Cacti (IIRC irritant hairs are sacs holding needles of it). To understand how this all works, we need to check out the various forms in which Calcium Oxalate manifests. One form is a spheroid shape with ridges and points sticking out on all sides, another form is a sharp needle shape with on one end some extra barbs that stick out towards the victim, creating extra abrasion but making it hard for the needle to enter far into tissues. This needle does not come alone, however. It’s packed in bundles of tens to hundreds of needles, that have a thin veil holding it together in a sort of pressurized vessicle. The veil is thinner on the protruding edge so that when you brush up against it, the vessicle holding the needles will rupture on that side, the pressure inside the vessicle then shoots the needles into the tissue of who or whatever brushes up against it, creating a contact rash. Other needle shapes are found stretched across leaf structures, reaching the tips from the lighted side of the leaf to the backside of the leaf, so that when the leaf is chewed on, the person eating it will prefer to eat a plant with no CaOx crystals in the leaves. This is used by wild forms of lettuce, and this is why humans can’t enjoy wild lettuce, while geese, for instance, can eat them, but even they might prefer the specimens with less CaOx, as is often seen in plant-eating animals.
These same crystals are also found in food sources for humans, and even in our own bodies, as crystals in urine and in kidney stones IIRC.
The reasons for formation of this crystal, are not just to deter animals, however. The reason they are formed, is largely because Calcium is a signalling molecule, so it’s levels need to be highly regulated else it would cause faulty signals in the plant’s communication system, what in us would be our nervous system. So what the plants do, is they separate the excess Ca in their cells, put it in specialized CaOx generation cells called Crystal Idioblast cells, and in there couple it with Oxalate. To do this, they somehow create a ghost matrix of the crystal inside the cell, and the CaOx is then transported into the cell bit by bit, filling up the ghost matrix from the inside out starting as a small nucleus crystal in the miniature shape of the ghost matrix. Imagine that for a minute. It’s friggin magical.
So when there is greater influx of Ca than can be regulated by the plant without having signalling issues, something that will interconnect with how much magnesium is present because Calcium and Magnesium need to exist in a certain equilibrium to work right, the plant will couple it into a special cell and create a crystal we don’t want, and neither do the crittes that eat it. The other way around, it works too, but it’s a little more complicate than to say we can simply remove the CaOx this way.
The other way around, when Ca is deficient in a plant, the plant will start to make an enzyme IIRC that is capable of de-coupling the CaOx, but the amount of CaOx made is often higher than the amount than can easily be removed by enzymatic removal inside the plant tissues by the plant itself; thus, what is left for options to process highly CaOx containing plant tissues, is extraction. Theoretically this should work quite well and I think it’s something that is done to some extent in the industry, although the people who do it may not always be aware of the source of the cough. This might be where some bro-scientific stories could have popped up about weed that makes you cough like a mofo. The one that would stand out would be overfeeding, which, in the case of high Ca feeding, could be correct. High Ca containing soils is a more likely culprit when it’s outdoor grown.
We can use this feature to our advantage when we are to grow fields of marijuana, as the outside plants could be supplemented with more Ca quite easily (not just cannabis, but a lot of plants make this compound!), creating less appetizing plants in the outside perimeter. We could then simply extract those plants on the outside perimeter, or we could even just compost them if you don’t mind the loss. After all, if it’s a calculated tactic, it’s not really a loss anyway. It’s a win!
It also makes a good deterrent for thieves of guerilla or other outdoor plots, who might try a testbud from easier to reach plants on the outside perimeter,in the process hopefully getting thoroughly scratched and thorned by plants with lots of CaOx in them in between the outside perimeter pot plants, before coming to steal the big loot that is set up harder to reach but without the excess Ca in the soil. Both a bad cough in the sampling and the excessive Ca in thorny and irritant plants in their path might trick them into thinking the harder to reach plants are not worth going for.
Some forms of CaOx crystals in plants.
While most insects and animals that chomp on tissues, do very much have trouble with these crystals, animals that use sucking parts like aphids rarely have trouble with the crystals, simply because they aren’t likely to suck them up.
And with that I would like to move on to the marvel of the horrendous Aphid reproduction cycle!
This bit will be a tiny bit shorter than the previous.
As some of you will probably already know, aphids are like tiny Russion dolls. They are born with not just a baby aphid inside them, but yet another baby (well, embryo) aphid inside that one. Science doesn’t really know yet how far this aphid-in-an-aphid-in-an-aphid goes, but 3 generations have already been observed. As each generation becomes smaller, it’s not hard to imagine anything beyond 3rd gen to be hard to observe. In some species, you can see the embryos shine through their abdomen because of a different coloration between adults and embryos.
Aphids have, depending on species, one or two host species they live on, and in the latter case they usually alternate between hosts seasonally. The cannabis aphid only lives on cannabis and hemp plants, and is a force to be reckoned with. They have plagued me year after year. Most years they seem content keeping outdoors and I always seem to have some plants that don’t get bothered by them and some others that are more heavily infested than the average, so it’s not the biggest issue, but they are definitely a tenacious problem!
Right now, I have just a few winged adults on my plants, from the lifecycle of aphids, that tells us they have recently moved into their current host environment, as an established infestation consists of mostly unwinged specimens. The adults switch reproduction into a winged morphology when the host plant is getting filled up, so the winged adults can venture on to new places, enabling the current host to be used as a sort of distribution station to start new colonies from.
When aphids in other plant species make the leaves produce galls, the leaves, to the untrained eye, look like they have sort of undifferentiated cancerous leaf growth in them, but in reality the leaf growth is highly structured, following a distinct pattern that the aphids steer by sending out signalling chemicals through their saliva as they suck plant juices from the leaf’s cells. The galls protect the aphids from the elements, providing them not just with the perfect environment, but with ample food, as these gall-affected leaves know a very high nutrient influx. When these galls are damaged, by either predators or by human hands, the aphids don’t leave the galls for new ones, no, they repair their precious homes by sending precisely the right chemicals in the right places to make the host plant/tree repair the leaf for them, growing the damages shut again with fresh leaf growth, a feat that the plant couldn’t even accomplish for itself.
Some aphids also have warrior castes, when this happens in gall species these warriors will not provide protection for all the aphids, but merely for the “grandmother clan” that is living inside each gall, fighting off any other aphid “gall family” even within the same species and the same plant host.
Biological controls are usually deemed necessary to keep aphid populations properly in check, and even though our beloved Lacewing larvae are like miniature alligators with a fierce temper and a complete lack of fear, some aphid’s warrior castes are known to be able to wrestle them into submission with nothing but their hind legs!
Know some other wonderour feats of nature, and perhaps how to use them to our advantage? Share the wonder!
Cheers!
