Probably not what Bryan Adams was singing about...

April 23, 2015 6:58 PM

In 1963, a new volcanic island called Surtsey (previously) was born south of Iceland. In the summer of 1969, botanist Ágúst Bjarnason, who had been monitoring the progress of plant growth on the new island, made a discovery that he has kept secret until now.

"Once when I was in Reykjavík I received the message from Surtsey that a mysterious plant had been discovered in the lava. Those who discovered the plant, three or four foreign nature scientists and one Icelandic botanist, weren’t able to identify it..."

posted by Blue Jello Elf (30 comments total)

It's an island. There are no guards. The class of people who own boats capable of making a visit includes a lot of entitled assholes who think rules only apply to other people and they should be able to sightsee wherever they want.

People seem to have a particular blind spot about boats. Near here is the Michoud Assembly Facility where the Apollo first stages were assembled, and later STS fuel tanks. There are layers and layers of security and all kinds of paranoid electronic access controls for vehicles and visitors -- but anyone with a 14 foot flatboat can paddle up from the other side of the Intracoastal Waterway and just walk onto the facility without so much as a how do you do. It's half a mile of waterfront and they don't even have cameras.
posted by localroger at 7:11 PM on April 23, 2015

That's exactly how tomatoes and many other fruits are meant to be propagated. Small edible but indigestible seeds deposited in a pile of ready-made fertilizer about the landscape. Someone must have had a burger or a salad before they went to the island...
posted by jim in austin at 7:24 PM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

I actually know where that is roger!
I believe they use the Gatorzuol submersible survellance platform. Night vision, infra red, and mini- missiles. Decked out, 360* ring mounted tri-blimey zoom lens and duck call.
Submarine races up the coast from Jax.

So I'm guessing the tomato plant grew from the villainous intruder with no boatside pooping experience.
As an aside, the other stories in the link are cool.
posted by clavdivs at 7:33 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]

Shimato, that's an Icelandic word, no?
posted by Oyéah at 7:34 PM on April 23, 2015

Ain't no use in complainin'
When you got a job to do.
Spent my evenings out on the island
And that's when I went poo.
posted by lagomorphius at 7:36 PM on April 23, 2015 [5 favorites]

Tomato seeds can survive trips through sewage treatment plants; sometimes you can spot where the sludge is spread by the lush profusion of tomato plants growing.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:59 PM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

Someone has taken over clavdivs account. That is not the coherence or grammar of the clavdivs of old.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:10 PM on April 23, 2015 [3 favorites]

Keep paddling, fish.
posted by clavdivs at 8:26 PM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]

Seems like the same old shit to me.
posted by maryr at 9:04 PM on April 23, 2015

Bryan Adams was 10 in 1969, so he probably wasn't singing about 1969, either.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:33 PM on April 23, 2015

Tomato seeds can survive trips through sewage treatment plants

A friend of mine grows wine in Puglia. The specific nature of his estate's soil had earned him a special dispensation from local health authorities to fertilize new vineyards with, well, sewage. After a meeting at the local treatment plant, he noticed workers at one of the drying beds preparing for lunch... by picking the ripest of the plentiful ciliegino tomatoes growing right there in the hardened sludge.

It reconciled him with the idea of what would soon be lacing his own terroir.
posted by progosk at 11:11 PM on April 23, 2015

So a botanist is weirded out by the fact that a plant grew out of manure?
posted by chavenet at 2:57 AM on April 24, 2015

I've also heard a story that a tulip grew there early on. Though now I'm thinking that the story may have been corrupted by the time I heard it (as a child in the 80s) and ip the original story was about the tomato plant.
posted by Kattullus at 3:22 AM on April 24, 2015

People seem to have a particular blind spot about boats scientists.

The furor over bats dying off, and the peculiar resistance of bat scientists to the likelihood that they were spreading the affliction, was quite revealing.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:02 AM on April 24, 2015

To complete my thought: scientists sometimes have to go, too, even if they haven't prepared for it.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:03 AM on April 24, 2015

Landed on Surtsey
Pooped out my last to-ma-to
That was the best dump of my life
In the summer of...
posted by El Brendano at 6:34 AM on April 24, 2015

It sounds like a completely natural method of plants getting to the new island. I don't think it should have been removed. Why do scientists pretend humans aren't part of the natural world?
posted by Bee'sWing at 7:35 AM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Because God put Man on earth to rule over nature, not become one with it. Western philosophy loves dualistic systems.

Same reason the mind and body are presented as independent counterparts.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 8:21 AM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

So a botanist is weirded out by the fact that a plant grew out of manure?

No, by the introduction of a non-native plant to the protected island.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:05 AM on April 24, 2015

Johnny Wallflower: "So a botanist is weirded out by the fact that a plant grew out of manure?

No, by the introduction of a non-native plant to the protected island."

It is a volcanic island. It rose out of the sea. It has no native plants.
posted by Splunge at 12:53 PM on April 25, 2015

True; I meant "human-propagated" as opposed to natural appearance of the plant.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:03 PM on April 25, 2015

In this case, the human actor behaved in an entirely natural fashion. If a seagull had eaten the tomato and planted the seed, how would that have been more natural? What's unnatural is arbitrarily deciding that human-pooped seeds are undesirable, while animal- or bird-pooped ones are OK.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:41 PM on April 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

The whole point of the experiment was to see what happens without humans, hence the restrictions on visitation. But I'm not defending that, I was responding to someone who wondered why a botanist would be weirded out.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:47 PM on April 25, 2015

If the whole point was to see what happens without humans, they should have kept all the scientists out. Since they didn't, I think the point was to see what happens without humans who aren't scientists. Then they went and falsified the results by removing that (presumably) scientist-introduced tomato plant.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:00 AM on April 26, 2015

Are you being deliberately obtuse? It's sure coming across as pointlessly stupid.
posted by five fresh fish at 8:32 AM on April 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think his point is that the scientists do not seem to think they are part of the natural world, which is probably not quite correct.
posted by localroger at 9:35 AM on April 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think his point is that the scientists do not seem to think they are part of the natural world, which is probably not quite correct.

There is a lot of argument and very deep thinking about exactly this point in ecology and related fields. The debate alone over the term "anthropocene," for example, gives a hint of this. Some experiments and applied approaches are really sophisticated in how they consider the human role in the ecosystem, and others are really simplistic in considering people to be totally separate. (The language and thinking generally on ecological issues is often extremely simplistic -- I recently heard someone describe an area as "pristine" that by my rough count has been logged at least five times, among other high-impact uses.)

The article was brief and seemed more of a personal report of an isolated incident, rather than a nuanced explanation of an experimental approach. I doubt the scientist involved is unaware of how humans are part of the world's ecosystem, but if the current protocol there is to avoid as much as possible the introduction of species and impacts by humans, then pulling up the tomato plant makes sense. Personally I would be more interested in reading about the tracking of these kinds of unavoidable impacts, rather than the removal of them, but I'm not involved in the science there and that's not my decision to make.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:46 AM on April 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Of course. My comments were reactions to Mr. Wallflower's carelessly-worded remarks ("non-native plant," etc.) Fish may think I'm being obtuse, but the fact remains that scientists are also humans and have impact when they appear in places that haven't seen humans before. Pretending that they don't, and attempting to erase evidence that they do, is what strikes me as stupid.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:47 AM on April 27, 2015

Doubling down on it, are you? Shit, if there's so much to be learned by studying how humans bring life to a dead island, I guess they should have brought a pack of seeds and started a garden! It's only natural! Bring some peat and some 4-4-4 ferts! It's what humans naturally do! We can learn so much about nature this way!
posted by five fresh fish at 6:56 AM on April 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Nothing like what I said or implied. Try again.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:48 AM on April 27, 2015