| BEN |
| BOTANICAL ELECTRONIC NEWS |
|---|
| ISSN 1188-603X |
| No. 540 June 21, 2019 | aceska@telus.net | Victoria, B.C. |
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This BEN issue is dedicated to Dr. Ed Schreiner who died on May 21, 2019, one month short of his birthday. He would have been 70 today.
Ed Schreiner died at age 69 on May 21, 2019. Born in Seattle on June 21, 1949, to Lois Hill Schreiner and Ralph Chiles Schreiner, Ed came to Port Angeles, in 1980, to work at Olympic National Park.
Earning his Ph.D., in 1982, from the University of Washington, Ed worked as a research biologist at Olympic National Park for his entire career. He served as editor of Northwest Science for 3 years.
In 1969, he married the love of his life, Linda. They had three children.
Ed was preceded in death by his father Ralph and sister Lori.
He is survived by his wife Linda, of Port Angeles; daughters Dawn Schreiner Jae (Debbie), of Redmond and Norma Steveley (David McLean), of Seattle; son Peter Lindsey Schreiner (Cheryl Stroben) of the Olympic Peninsula; mother Lois Hill Schreiner of Sumner; brother Tom Schreiner (Jean); and grandchildren, Isabelle, Brandon, Avery, and Annie.
[Published in The Peninsula Daily News on May 26, 2019]
Joseph Egoyan was born in Cairo in 1933. His mother, Arshaluys, was orphaned by the Armenian Genocide of 1915. His father, Yeghia, escaped the horrors that befell his community in the city of Arabkir in current day Turkey. Joseph Egoyan received early training in painting from the Armenian master Ashot Zorian, and his successful one man show in Cairo in his teens was the first young artist from Egypt to receive a full scholarship to the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago.
He later received a Teaching Degree (Art) from the California College of Arts and Crafts and taught at Oakland Tech High in California before returning to Cairo to teach at the American College. Upon his return, he met his wife, Shushan Devletian, and together they opened a private and design store called Ego Arts, which they ran for five years. Soon after the birth of his son Atom in Cairo in 1960, Joseph and Shushan Egoyan moved to Victoria where they had a daughter Eve in 1964.
The couple opened Ego Interiors on Fort Street in the early sixties, and it was the first gallery in Victoria to show the works of local artists, especially those of the Limners society, such as Maxwell Bates and Herbert Siebner. Ego Interiors was also a successful contemporary furniture store and ran for almost forty years, while Joseph also taught a course in interior decorating. With an average of twenty students a class, thousands took his popular course.
Joseph also won First Prize in the Vancouver Island Jury Show at the Art Gallery of Victoria and a controversial one-man show titled BIRDS was displayed at the B.C. Provincial Museum.
After a devastating earthquake in Armenia in 1988, Joseph helped raised a significant amount from the Victoria community and was commended for his extraordinary charitable work by The Canadian Red Cross Society as well as receiving an award from the Austrian Albert Schweitzer Foundation. His work is at The National Galery of Armenia and private collections around the world. Joseph Egoyan is survived by his wife Shushan, his children Atom and Eve, his grandchildren Arshile and Viva, as well as his brother Stepan and sister Araxi.
Early seral vegetation was studied on a former lake bottom after the removal of the 64-m-tall Glines Canyon Dam on the Elwha River. In 2015,vegetation cover of all vascular plant species was determined in 63 plots located on sites that emerged in 2011-2012. The sites had been planted and/or seeded or were permitted to revegetate spontaneously. The plots were further classified by substrate texture: coarse sediments on the valley bottom and fine ones on the valley slopes.
Plots were located randomly along random transects perpendicular to the former lake shore that extended into coarse sediment terraces perched above the floodplain. Additionally,32 plots were sampled in surrounding native forests near these transects. Data were analyzed by [the trendy] detrended correspondence analysis and by canonical correspondence analysis. Substrate texture that is whether fine or coarse appeared to explain most of the variability in vegetation. The distance to the forest and successional age (i.e., the time since the site had been drained) were also significant explanatory variables, while assisted restoration by planting and seeding appeared to be insignificant to date.
Spontaneous succession on fine sediments led to a species composition approaching that of adjacent natural forests. Invasive species were much less abundant than expected. Spontaneous restoration of vegetation on fine deposits in drained lake bottoms can rapidly produce a desirable vegetation composition and structure. On coarse sediments, the active restoration may be useful to accelerate the development of native vegetation communities.
We developed a method combining passive baiting (animals which are not trapped) with DNA metabarcoding of the feces acquired, to study fungi in the diet of small mammals. Mammal and fungal species were identified using genomic DNA of 596 fecal samples collected in five regions of eastern Canadian boreal forest. For identification of the small mammal species, the cytochrome b region was used.
A total of eight species of small mammals displayed hypogeous fungi consumption, with northern flying squirrels (Glaucomys sabrinus) and red-backed voles (Myodes gapperi) as top consumers. For identification of their fungal diets, the ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region was used.
We recovered 722 Ascomycota, 429 Basidiomycota, 81 Zygomycota, 4 Chytridiomycota, 1 Glomeromycota, and 44 unidentified fungal taxa. Of these, 28 were hypogeous sequestrate fungi (underground fructification) which presumably are dug out by small mammals for consumption.
Otherwise, for the remaining fungi, epigeous (above ground fructification) or microscopic fungal species, it is unclear which ones are selected by the animal as a dietary source or result from incidental contamination. Our paper presents a promising approach for tracing mycophagy in small mammals and our results suggest that fungi diversity is important for the diet of some small mammals.
Ed Schreiner was a compulsive gardener, and with his green thumb, he competed in variety and colours with the Olympic National Park behind the fence of his garden. His particular obsession was growing dahlias. This his passion reminded me of Cougar Annie, the legendary figure who lived in a remote property at Boat Basin on the remote western coast of Vancouver Island.
Ada Annie Rae-Arthur, later Ada Annie Lawson (1888 - 1985), better known as Cougar Annie, was a pioneer who settled near Hesquiat Harbour at Boat Basin in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada. She cleared about 2 ha of the coastal forest and developed a garden where she grew ornamental garden plants. Dahlias were her favourite plants; she propagated them and shipped them to the customers in British Columbia, Pacific West Coast and farther in North America.
In her best-selling biographical book about Cougar Annie, Margaret Horsfield Mentioned Annie's passion for dahlias but did not go to more details about It (Horsfield 1999).
Peter Buckland bought Cougar Annie's property in 1981 and restored Anna's garden. I asked Peter to give me some details about Cougar Annie's passion for dahlias, and here is his answer:
"Cougar Annie's venture into the plant nursery business was more about supplying business for Boat Basin Post Office than for additional income. As Postmistress, Ada received a small monthly stipend that, given her frugal ways, was likely sufficient to finance her living costs."
"In her later years, during the mid-1970s, I designed small advertisements with her for submitting to prairie newspapers such as Winnipeg Free Press and Saskatoon Producer. Dahlias and a 'Garden-surprise package special' were offered at a price that was virtually all that the postage was. This ploy attracted many orders and gave the appearance of a busy post office to ensure the continuance of the small Postmistress salary. (There were no 'locals' at that time using the post office services even though there was twice weekly delivery from Tofino Post Office via floatplane!)."
"In 1981, when Ada was effectively blind, I transported several post office letter bags full of undivided dahlia tubers to Vancouver for eventual sale at the Granville Island Public Market. Moments after take-off, the floatplane hit an air pocket, and the plane dropped 100 feet in one second. The dahlias were scattered throughout the cabin. Could be a first for a dahlia business."
"Later in the year, I succumbed to Annie's relentless pressure to purchase the property and to provide her with caretaker help. No dahlias were dug up for winter storage. The winter was harsh, and the entire crop was lost."
When I told Ed Schreiner about Anna's Boat Basin garden, he was interested in the "old Dahlias cultivars" Annie could have had, but at the end, he did not have time to find out more about it.
Ed Schreiner is the last one of our botanical triumvirate friends (with the late Ed Tisch and Nelsa Buckingham) whom we had on the Olympic Peninsula across the Juan de Fuca Straight. Thank you, Ed, for your friendship! You will always live in our memories. Adolf & Oluna Ceska
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