Star Tribune
Scientists think a fungus could conquer invasive buckthorn
People fight buckthorn with everything. They cut them with chain saws, yank out the seedlings, douse stumps with Roundup, imprison them under coffee cans and shovel out the roots. They sic goats on them.
But buckthorn springs back to life like a zombie, a pernicious invasive, with multiple strategies to outcompete native plants and take over a landscape.
Now University of Minnesota scientists are studying whether they can turn the plant on itself, exploiting an orange fungus that buckthorn hosts. If they succeed, the result could be the first environmentally friendly natural biocontrol, other than hungry goats, for a famously tough-to-kill plant.
Researchers tried for years to find an insect to do the job, with no success. Meanwhile, the invasion of buckthorn and its removal is estimated to have cost Minnesota millions, not including all the hard-to-quantify impacts from lost native biodiversity, said Mike Schuster, an invasive plant specialist in the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
The new potential ally is crown rust, or Puccinia coronata, a fungus found on most buckthorn plants in the state. Crown rust is a notorious attacker of wheat, oats and barley that’s been studied for more than 100 years, but never for the potential to control its buckthorn host, said Pablo Olivera Firpo, the U plant pathologist leading the project.
Crown rust starts out looking like orange measles on buckthorn then grows into raised cluster cups, a mass of little spore-spreading tubes. Some of the masses resemble a fuzzy caterpillar crawling up a stem.
“Can the rust suppress the growth of seedlings … or kill them?” That’s the question that preoccupies Olivera Firpo.
Trouble is, nobody knows how many of the 17 known crown rust species in the world exist in Minnesota, or which ones are most destructive to buckthorn. Olivera Firpo’s team plans to figure that out with a three-year $364,000 grant from the Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center, supported by the lottery-funded Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund.
If they find a suitable strain that doesn’t affect crops, researchers plan to attack the buckthorn using a mat of straw infected with the fungus. After buckthorn trees and shrubs have been hacked down, the mat would be spread over the area to stop the prolific seedlings from re-sprouting.
“In an ideal world, that’s the product,” said Nick Greatens, a post-doctoral researcher on the project.
For now, Greatens and the team are collecting hundreds of samples of crown rust-infected buckthorn plants. Common buckthorn, the most prevalent in Minnesota, and glossy buckthorn are the two species brought to Minnesota in the 1800s as ornamental shrubs and privacy hedges. The state restricts them as noxious weeds.
A laboratory on the U’s St. Paul campus holds a collection of rust-infected buckthorn leaves and twigs from William O’Brien State Park, Brown’s Creek State Trail in Stillwater and Reservoir Woods Park in Roseville, among other places.
Researchers vacuum up spores, freeze the samples, extract the DNA and sequence it to identify the species. Then they will inoculate buckthorn seedlings to find the types that best suppress seedling growth.
Olivera Firpo’s team is not the only one probing fungi as a buckthorn biocontrol. Across the hall, a separate team with another Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center grant takes a broader approach. They are sleuthing out dying buckthorn plants around the state and studying the organisms killing them to see if they could be exploited for biocontrol. They’re not targeting crown rust, but different fungi that cause cankers on the plant and also wilt pathogens, said Robert Blanchette, the plant pathologist leading that project.
The answers can’t come fast enough.
Everything about buckthorn seems designed to make it thrive. The berries on female plants contain a laxative ensuring birds spread it widely, and the roots emit a chemical in the soil that inhibits other plants.
Alexandra “Sascha” Lodge, terrestrial invasive species coordinator at the Department of Natural Resources Forestry Division, would welcome an assist from a native fungi. Because buckthorn is shade tolerant, it proliferates in forests where it quickly crowds out other plants and wildlife. The department treats state forest lands for buckthorn the year before a timber harvest.
Buckthorn is a nightmare to remove, said James Shaffer, natural resources supervisor for the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board. He’d love a non-herbicide option: “I’ve been hoping to see something like this pop up.”
When the Minnesota Supreme Court this week declined to hear an appeal by the University of St. Thomas regarding the environmental impact of its new hockey/basketball arena under construction, neighbor and arena foe Dan Kennedy said the “ethical” thing for the university to do was stop construction until neighbor concerns are addressed.
Not going to happen, university officials said Thursday.
While a public review of a revised Environmental Assessment Worksheet continues through Nov. 7, construction of the 5,000-seat Lee and Penny Anderson Arena continues. In an e-mail Thursday, a university spokesman said the arena is expected to be completed in fall 2025.
“The University of St. Thomas is aware of the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision to deny its petition to appeal and is reviewing the potential impacts of this decision,” an emailed statement from St. Thomas said. “Last week, the City of St. Paul published an updated EAW for public comment, and that process will continue. Construction of the Lee & Penny Anderson Arena will also continue, as permitted by law.”
But Kennedy said he believes that decision is not only wrong, but illegal. Because the state Court of Appeals this summer ruled the project’s first environmental review was inadequate, its site plans and building permits are invalid, said the president of Advocates for Responsible Development.
“We need somebody to specifically tell the University of St. Thomas that they must comply with the law,” Kennedy said. “This is an institution of higher learning, with a law school. They should comply with the law.”
Kennedy said he thought the Minnesota Court of Appeals had insisted on exactly that. In August, the appellate court ordered the city and university to conduct a new Environmental Assessment Worksheet. The previous assessment didn’t do enough to study the arena’s potential harm to the neighborhood’s parking, traffic and air quality, the court ruled.
“The reason why is that more sunlight in the morning time helps reinforce waking up, and having less light in the evening is less stimulation,” he said. “So when we’re winding down, preparing for sleep, having fewer hours of sunlight in the evening can help promote that process of falling asleep.”
Akingbola acknowledges that it can be sad to walk out of work or school when it’s already dark out, but in the long run, standard time is the way to go.
The U.S. already tried daylight savings year round in 1974
Despite the medical advice, there have been calls in recent years to make daylight savings time permanent.
Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, tried to pass a bill as recently as 2021 to make daylight savings time permanent, but it did not pass the Legislature.
The U.S. tried once before. According to Minnesota Star Tribune archives, due to an energy crisis, President Richard Nixon passed a law in January 1974 that made daylight savings a year-round thing.
A month into it, the Minneapolis Tribune ran an article saying there were calls to reverse the decision because there were more accidents in the pre-dawn darkness, particularly involving school children waiting for the bus. Under daylight savings time in January, sunrise wasn’t until well after 8 a.m. in Minnesota.
Karl-Anthony Towns may be in New York City, but his heart is in Minnesota.
On Wednesday night, Towns had some sweet seats for a Billie Eilish show at Madison Square Garden with his partner, Jordyn Woods, when she caught him watching the Timberwolves play the Chicago Bulls in a preseason game on his phone. Her video, posted to her Instagram story, made rounds on social media Thursday.
In the video, flames are literally spewing out from Eilish’s stage, lights are flashing all around and others in the crowd are head bobbing. And there is Towns, holding his phone in both hands and muttering to himself as the Timberwolves are down 88-75 late in the third quarter in a meaningless game.
“I promise he was enjoying the concert,” Woods wrote in the video’s caption.
The Wolves would go on to lose that game, 125-123. A nail-biter.
Towns’ trade to the New York Knicks for Julius Randle and others stunned the NBA world and all of Minnesota, where he was a beloved player for nine seasons and a leader on a team rapidly ascending toward championship contention.
“It was a lot of emotions,” Towns said. “Some amazing moments and times in nine years of my life in Minnesota, a place that I’ve called home. Guys who are not just teammates to me but brothers. We were like brothers. It definitely was a wild day, definitely coming to work.”
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