This informal experiment suggests that the agent/s are mobile in water, and will affect healthy fronds sharing water with a diseased frond, especially when the diseased fond is at the "crinkly phenotype" stage (which may be the earliest stage of the presumed infection).
Be warned! This experiment is exceedingly preliminary, undoubtedly naive, suffers from small sample sizes, has not been replicated, and includes no quantitative data nor microbe-scale assays. They have been carried out by an untrained enthusiast.
If that is not enough to scare you off :} you can find lots of detail and time course photography in this report.
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ReplyDeleteThis is brilliant! What could possibly be transmitted that quickly as to infect the healthy fronds? Chemical, Bacterial or Viral? I'm wondering if the yearly Milfoil treatments on the lake have anything to do with the die off. Good work!
ReplyDeleteIs it possible that people would forage for the fiddle heads? Just wondering.
ReplyDeleteThere is very likely to be some foragin. But the die-off that we see - its pattern, its spread, and maybe especially the death of each individual affected fern - which fiddlehead harvesting would not cause -- suggests that some as yet unknown pathogen is at work.
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