Today's blog posting is a reply to a thread on twitter. A piece of ignorant nonsense from a user using the pseudonym Tartanroots.
First of all. Look at this really lovely picture. If you do some research on the pictures on-line you find that this lovely little butterfly is one of those species which is particularly fond of ragwort. It is known to be in decline and the hysteria which is leading to persecution of this plant does not help matters.
Read the tweets and I will comment on them below
Urban Pollinators
Ragwort is great for butterflies in late summer; here are three Small Copper butterflies having a feast #pollinators
tartanroots
Urban Pollinators
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@ReadingUrbPolls@Team4Nature300@tartanroots The roe deer visiting my garden eats it - ragwort - with no ill effects. Must be immune!
Julie Stebbings
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To reply to the nonsense. Yes, ragwort together with the thousands of plant species that contain the same class of chemicals can be poisonous to cattle and horses but it rarely poisons them because they co-evolved with these plants and developed resistance. The resistance primarily takes the form of avoiding the plants. There are two problems, significant quantities in hay and cruel starvation where animals will eat anything in desperation. These are both issues for the owners of the animals and do not justify the level of hysteria and persecution of this important plant.
And before anyone says what about plants that die off. Well the toxins are like paracetamol. There are natural detoxification methods. One of the chemicals, that does this is the same one that makes paracetamol safe as a drug as long as you don't overdose. There are other mechanisms too.
The idea that ragwort destroys habitat for wildflowers is silly. It is a native wildflower itself. We regularly see the false claim that it is an Invasive Species
which is a scientific term used to mean a problem foreign plant. Not just a foreign plant , one that is also a problem
At this point I'll add my standard twitter picture explaining this.
Ragwort is also one of the most ecologically important of our native flora.
35 insect species totally rely on ragwort for food including 7 moth and 7 beetle species;
Another 83 species are recorded as using ragwort often as a significant food source, with a further estimated 50 species of parasite in turn feeding on those;
In addition to these 133 species, ragwort is a significant source of nectar for others including bee species that specialise in using yellow flowers and many species of butterfly.
Government research shows that of over 7,000 plant species in Britain ragwort is the 7th most important nectar-producing plant.
There is also a question of what happens to deer and I will come back to that as I have an excellent explanatory source, but first I'll explain just a little what I have to keep saying.
There has been a campaign against ragwort and it is based on a whole load of falsehoods. Bent surveys, false articles, fake statistics, it seems that there is no pseudoscientific perversion they will not stoop to using. They even penetrate government advice as I recently blogged
We were told that our ragwort was a serious problem in South Africa. This was real news to the botanical recorders there who had no record of it at all!
To give you an idea of how much risk there really is to animals. There is a French scientific paper where animals were deliberately poisoned. Why? because there was such an absence of poisoning records that they genuinely thought French ragwort might be different. It wasn't.
The idea has been put around that an animal exposed to the plant will die later, when this isn't necessarily true at all. There is resistance in just about every animal in one way or another.
Now to come back to deer. Just like any animal if you treat it cruelly and force it to eat large amounts of ragwort in hay where it looses its taste or by starvation where they will eat it in desperation, you can poison it
This however is an abstract from a scientific paper that explains it clearly.
I should note that in America our plant is known as tansy ragwort. It is the
same plant but it isn't native there and thus grows more prolifically and according to research is highly likely to be more toxic.
same plant but it isn't native there and thus grows more prolifically and according to research is highly likely to be more toxic.
This study was conducted to determine the susceptibility of free-ranging black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus columbianus) to tansy ragwort poisoning. The results showed that captive black-tailed deer would not consume tansy ragwort unless they were unable to acquire adequate intake from other food sources. Since some experimental deer consumed an average of 24% of their body weight as dry matter from tansy ragwort over a 42-day period without any symptoms of toxicity, it appears that deer may be relatively tolerant to poisoning by this plant. It seems unlikely that tansy ragwort would cause toxicity problems with free-ranging black-tailed deer.
And one thing to Tartanroots. Just because you think someone lives in a town doesn't make them ignorant of the countryside. You are the ignorant one here and Urban Pollinators is the knowledgeable one!
