News S.M. Tracy Herbarium solves mysteries of the plant world By Kay LedBetter Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service
COLLEGE STATION — When researchers across Texas, and at times worldwide, hold up a plant and ask, “What is this?” they very well may be talking to Dale Kruse or Stephan Hatch at the S.M. Tracy Herbarium. The looks of the non-descript metal building, hidden away east of the Texas A&M University campus at 3380 University Drive E. in College Station, provides no indication of the importance of the work going on inside the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Texas A&M facility. “We get the hard-to–identify things,” said Kruse, curator since 1999. “These plants include potentially invasive species, plants toxic to wildlife and livestock, weedy species in pastures and gardens, and at times just pretty flowers found along the roadside.” The S.M. Tracy Herbarium, a part of the department of ecosystem science and management, is a research plant collection with around 325,000 specimens housed
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Texas A&M AgriLife Communications photo by Kay Ledbetter
Dale Kruse, left, and Stephan Hatch look over a specimen file at the S.M.Tracy Herbarium.
in rows and rows of specially designed cabinets. Some specimens housed in the herbarium date back nearly 200 years ago to as early as 1819, said Hatch, who is the director and has been cataloging plants there for more than 40 years. The collections in the herbarium include specimens from vascular and nonvascular plants, lichens, algae and fungi. These plants are from every continent, including Antarctica, but the bulk of the collections are from the southern U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean. The Tracy Herbarium was established in the 1930s and is based on several early collections, including that of agriculturalist Samuel Mills Tracy, who donated approximately 10,000 specimens to Texas A&M in 1917. Designated a National Resource Collection in 1974, the herbarium houses about 110,000 grass specimens — the largest grass collection in Texas and across much of the southern U.S. Over the years, specimens have been added from various sources, Kruse said. Additions are obtained through annual collections by faculty, staff and students, who provide about 2,500-3,000 new specimens every year. In addition, an on-going exchange program with 30-35 other worldwide herbaria enhances the taxonomic and geographic scope of the collections. Large numbers of specimens have been acquired through the incorporation of orphaned herbaria, he said. This prevented the loss of many decades of work by researchers, and an immeasurable loss of research potential in the specimens themselves. One such case is the incorporation of Texas A&M’s biology department herbarium in 2012, Kruse said. With the support
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The Land & Livestock Post
December 2015 — Issue 2
P.O. Box 3000, Bryan Texas 77805 Jesse Wright • 979.731.4721 • jesse.wright@theeagle.com
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