☾

Winter, spring, summer and fall, four seasons, four loves

(ID in ALT text)

Artist:  ㄒㄒ★シシィ |  (NS)Twitterまとめ

Scanlated with permission:

It's actually amazing, there are so many plant genera that are not closely related to anything else and just have a couple living species: One (or two) from mid latitude Southeast Asia, and one from the Southeastern USA.

For example, the two living lotus species (sacred lotus and American lotus), the two living tulip tree/ Liriodendron species, the Chinese and American sweetgums (Liquidambar spp.) the Chinese and American trumpet vines (Campsis spp.) the Chinese, Japanese and American wisteria (Wisteria spp), the Chinese, Taiwan and American sassafras (Sassafras spp.) I KNOW i'm forgetting many of them because there are so many. Twins!!!!

And there's so many iconic plant groups shared in common between East Asia and SE USA. Like dogwoods, magnolias, rhododendrons, we even have our own bamboo!!!

I think a lot of how strangely familiar each ecosystem would feel to someone visiting from the other one.

And I bet there's a lot of ecological knowledge and insights we could share with each other...

@scatteredcloud That's a great question, and the answer is that it isn't convergent evolution, they really are closely related species with a common ancestor!

That's SO much distance! How did they do it? I don't really understand it myself.

Were they once one species with a super wide distribution all around the world, and the intermediates went extinct? Did the ancestral species migrate from one area to the other when the climate was different?

When studying the genus Arundinaria (American bamboo!) I learned that Arundinaria split off from all other temperate woody bamboos about 2 million years ago. Apparently, 2 million years ago, a bamboo moved from Asia to North America, and nothing like that ever happened again...or at least if it did, the evidence went extinct.

So was there a time when bamboo stretched from sea to shining sea, all across the Beringia land bridge and everything, and the family tree was pruned by ice ages...or what???

Its really strange because a lot of these shared plant genera, are limited to warm temperate to subtropical climes, so the ice ages would have REALLY fucked their entire shit up. Arundinaria was reduced to a tiny area along the gulf coast during the last glacial maximum.

I wonder if there's a pattern, do species mainly evolve in Asia and immigrate to USA, or what...?

But basically they used to be a species much more widely distributed but the ice ages obliterated them from most of their range, however they stayed alive in the two places on earth conditions were still good for them. L. tulipifera genetic diversity is way lower than the Chinese species, because there weren't as many suitable refugia for the trees to go during the last glaciation.

With Nelumbo (lotus), this study suggests that the two lotus species could have split from each other as late as the Pleistocene, and it's the same story, the common ancestor species used to be super widespread, but the ice age wiped out most of its range, and the plants had to recolonize from the two places they survived.

However with Campsis spp. the two species are estimated to have diverged 24.4 MILLION years ago which is. Insane.

The two sassafras species are said to have diverged 13-17 million years ago,

According to this article the Wisterias diverged approx 13.4 million years ago, with the American one actually traveling from Asia to America, rather than a more broadly distributed population being interrupted.

The distribution I'm describing is called "amphi-Pacific" and we...don't really have an explanation for a lot of the species that exhibit it

But the most common explanation is that amphi-Pacific species are relicts of a much wider distribution

So genus Camellia doesn't have any North American members, bUT there is Stewartia and Franklinia, which are ONLY North American and Franklinia is ESPECIALLY interesting because it grew only in this tiny area in Georgia (USA) and went extinct in the wild, and only still exists as a cultivated tree.

SO it is believed that there used to be way more of those guys but the ice age nuked them. Same with Stinking cedar, that freakish little tree that only grows in a tiny area of Florida

ANYWAY. Now-Asian-restricted species that used to be in North America but went extinct: Paulownia. There are fossils of it from the Tertiary period. Koelreuteria went extinct in North America in the Eocene.

On the other hand, we have almost no common genera with the other Mediterranean biomes, like California and, well the Mediterranean Sea, (which do have genera in common among them) but we have a lot of convergent evolution in plants:

Little doodle of Batjokes from my little sketchbook. Joker trying to play with Batman.

Batjokes 🦇🃏

toxic yaoi moment AGAIN