Along the Way

Tim Lycett, when he fired me, said someday I'd thank him. This seemed, at the time, unlikely. I had a wife, one toddler, one infant, next to nothing in savings, and no particular prospects.

I was then the managing editor of the Indio Daily News, a plucky little California daily with some 20,000 loyal read-ers. He was the editor, brought in when the newspaper was acquired by the Detroit News.

We never quite meshed.

I figured a managing editor should think up all sorts of good story ideas, send reporters careening out all charged up, and dive for pearls in the copy that resulted.

He figured a managing editor should make sure there were no mistakes anywhere in the paper every day.

People who know me are laughing by now, especially editors. I am not, how shall we say, obsessive about details. Jim Lycett couldn't have thought of a worse job description into which to fit my somewhat quirky talents.

Not that he didn't try. He hammered on me for six months or so, then fired me. I have been looking for wise and philosophical ways to view the experience ever since.

Which brings us, by an admittedly roundabout route, to the scarlet gilia and the benefits, to some plants, of being grazed.

The scarlet gilia is a scraggly looking weed that is beloved of mule deer and elk in the Sierras, the mountains of Arizona, and elsewhere. It is also the first plant to provide solid proof that being chomped on sometimes actually increases the reproduction of plants that have evolved in conjunction with the animals that chew on them.

We owe this insight to Ken Paige of the University of Utah and Thomas Whitham of Northern Arizona University.

Of course, biologists have wondered for some time whether plants might have come up with some clever response to being gobbled by grazers.

GETTING ALL CHEWED UP SOMETIMES CAN PROVE TO BE BENEFICIAL

Samuel McNaughton of Syracuse University showed several years ago that when grasses are cropped systematically by herds of animals they produce a lot more foliage. He reasonably concluded that animals took to eating in herds, in part,

By Peter Aleshire

to enhance the production of the plants that they like to nibble. Not that they thought it out, mind you. It's a matter of adaptation. Those animals with an inclination to travel in herds wound up with more food and left more young who grew up with an inclination to travel in herds.

But this wasn't good enough for Paige and Whitham. They wanted to get to the heart of the matter in evolutionary terms. To wit: do plants that are grazed upon put out more leaves and more seeds? This is the bottom line: whether an organism produces more offspring. If so, then the characteristics its offspring inherit will be perpetuated, gradually spreading throughout the population. So the researchers went crawling over the mountains of Arizona counting scarlet gilia flowers. They found that whenever a single strand of gilia is cropped, up to four new strands sprout from the roots. As a result, gilias that have been chewed produce several times as many flowers and seeds as those that remained untraumatized.

Just to be sure, they grew 40 gilias in the lab. They chopped off half. Sure enough, the chopped-off plants eventually produced twice as many seeds. The researchers even checked the seeds and found they were just as good as the seeds of the uncropped plants. Cropping even enhanced the growth of the plants' roots. You'd think a plant that had to put all that energy into resprouting would have less energy left to make fertile seeds. Instead, being chewed up is downright beneficial. It's another of those wonderful ironies of Nature.

Animals of one sort or another have been savoring gilia for maybe 15 million years. In that time, those plants most cheerful in the face of being eaten produced the most offspring of similar disposition. The result is a plant that actually prefers a good chomping.

This line of metaphor has real possibilities.

Is it possible, for instance, that being fired made a better man of me? Did I clean up my act? Did I get my priorities in order? Did I realize that a family is a lot more important and reliable than a career?

Well, actually, a lot of that did happen. I did grow from the experience.

So, was Jim Lycett right? Have I finally come to realize that I ought to thank him after all?

Nah.