4/7/2024 0 Comments Tumblewees animated gif![]() It swished and sounded prickly, and seconds later, it was gone. The tumbleweed landed on the ground, bounced, and the wind whisked it away. ![]() This afternoon, I led Polly onto the prairie, tumbleweed in hand, and turned our tumbler free. For good measure, I added a piece of pink marking tape. Then using gaffer’s tape I use on my movie camera, I tied my message into my tumbleweed. I’m traveling with my mule Polly from Canada to Mexico. Then I wrote a note on one of my business cards. I picked the biggest one, the prize tumbleweed, and gave it an orange belt brighter than a prairie sunrise. After I caught my tumbleweeds, I piled them up in a corral in Keyes, Oklahoma. This is where the fluorescent orange spray paint comes in. They’re just too many of them out here for one with a dirty note tied to it to be noticed. They pile up so high in ranchers’ corrals they have to be shoveled out before stock can be worked They pile up so high in the road ditches they have to be bull-dozed off. They pile up so high on fences they rip the barbed wire off. The stretch of prairie I’m crossing in my wagon right now, the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, are covered in millions of tumbleweeds that bounce north in mass migrations one day, only to pass me headed south with the next front. Today mule Polly and I chased down a tumbleweed. I’m giving in to the call of the man alone at sea. Call it loneliness by any name, but that’s what it boils down to. Call it the loneliness brought on by watching the last Sandhills cranes whirling south on those northern busters. Yep, call it the shorter days of November getting to me. Nope, I’m launching notes tied to something else. No, I’m not stuffing business cards into my empty wine bottles and tossing them into the buffalo grass, hoping some rancher finds them and returns them before his prize Angus bull crushes them underfoot. So, traveling across the Great Plains by mule wagon researching mid-America marine fossils, I’m giving messages another go. I’m still waiting for the first message to be returned by Neptune or someone combing his beaches. I did it because I was curious and lonely. I’d take an empty bottle, scribble a note on a scrap of paper, cram the note in the bottle and toss it into the sea. While sailing alone around the world from 1998 to 2003 on my sailboat “Sea Bird”, I launched dozens of messages in bottles. ![]() I’ve even launched some bottles of my own. When I sail, I keep an eye out for bobbing bottles. When I walk on the beach, I look for bottles with corks in them, hoping one of them might contain a note. I have always been charmed by messages in bottles. I thought, “I need to put a message in a tumbleweed and see if I hear back from anyone.” Messages in Bottles This stategy is not limited to the seed plants some species of spore-bearing cryptogams-such as Selaginella-form tumbleweeds, and some fungi that resemble puffballs dry out, break free of their attachments and are similarly tumbled by the wind, dispersing spores as they go.Can you send a message in a tumbleweed? How would you do it? I was traveling across America with my mule Polly. In this case, many species of tumbleweed open mechanically, releasing their seeds as they swell when they absorb water. Sometimes they germinate after the tumbleweed has come to rest in a wet location. This needs to be the case, because the structure needs to degrade and fall apart so that its seeds or spores can escape during the tumbling. Most tissues of the tumbleweed structure are dead. Tumbleweed species occur most commonly in steppe and arid ecosystems, where frequent wind and the open environment permit rolling easly. Sometimes, only a hollow fruit or inflorescence detaches. In most such species, the tumbleweed consists of the whole plant apart from the root system. This structure will detatch from its root or stem and will roll on the ground. The structure that is pushed by the wind is usually called tumbleweed. Several plant species that grow in arid, steppe-like environments use the wind to propagate.
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