Echinacea supplements are a staple in many American medicine cabinets, especially during cold and flu season. The plant is thought to boost the immune system and help ward off illness.
Yet despite its abundance on drugstore shelves, Echinacea is suffering in the wild. The term ‘Echinacea’ actually refers to a genus of plants in the daisy family. There are nine wild species that grow in prairies of the central and eastern United States.
One species in particular, the narrow-leaved purple coneflower – which is found in the Great Plains – is rapidly losing ground. While the plant once grew on vast expanses of land, roads, railroads, and row crops have left only small, isolated patches of suitable habitat. This fragmentation is a problem because bees can only carry the plant’s pollen a short distance.
When purple coneflowers grow in small, disconnected patches, pollination becomes difficult, and the pollen that does reach plants is often low-quality. Isolation also causes plants to become genetically related to one another, leading to inbreeding and a weakening of the species.
Ruth Shaw is a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota.
“This feedback between ecological and evolutionary consequences is – it appears from our work – an important issue for this species, and I imagine that it is critically important in many other populations of other species that are subject to fragmentation or other sorts of disturbances.”
Hopefully, this research will help Echinacea remain abundant.
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Web Extra
Full interview with Ruth Shaw, a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota
[audio:http://wamcradio.org/EarthWise/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/shaw_full_web.mp3|titles=shaw_full_web].
Web Links
The truth about Echinacea: Plant commonly used for colds and flu suffers from disappearing habitat
Photo,taken Jul;y 20, 2011, courtesy of From Sand To Glass via Flickr.
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Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Support for Earth Wise comes from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY.