Do you see me? No, don’t look far, just look down. Here I am, a strong growing bush. Yeees, now you see me. I know what you are thinking, I’m just a weed, one that you would rip away in your garden. But I am not.
My name is Lactuca orientalis and I am a distant relative of the nice green lettuces that you eat in your salad. Strange, eh? Because I don’t look like a lettuce…yet!
Welcome, this is where I live: the Pamir mountains in Tadijkistan. It might look like an hostile environment for you, humans, but this landscape is not barren for me. I have what I need.
What I struggle the most are the nights, though. If during the day it’s very bright and sunny, the nights can become quite cold, reaching temperatures below zero. Usually one night of freezing temperature is not a problem, but multiple nights for a longer period of time can be. In these circumstances, I struggle growing vigorous as you see me now, my leaves curl and become yellowish and lesions might appear on their surface.
One night after many cold nights, I prayed for my life. The cold damaged the membranes of my cells, leading to leakage of ions. Ice started to form between and inside my cells. They started to shrivel. A cascade of signals initiated throughout my body to prevent it to shout down.
I was growing three seeds til that moment. They were ready to fly with their little white feathers, ensuring I would continue to exist. And so, I let them go and I prayed that the wind would let them someplace benevolent where they can germinate, make roots and grow strong again and again and again.
Sam suddenly woke up from her dream. She worked all night on the herbarium and she must have dozed off at some point. She touched the plant speciment open in front of her. There was something small written on the bottom right corner of the page. She reached for her reading glasses and squeezing her eyes a bit she read “Lactuca orientalis, last speciment ever collected in the Pamir mountains of Tadijkistan in 1938.” Her eyes grew wider and wider. What kind of dream did she just have?!
This story is just the result of my imagination but its main character, Lactuca orientalis, is a real plant species which was firstly reported in 1875 by a French botanist Edmond Boissier in Iran. It is not an endangered species at the moment, so you might be able to spot it around the world, if you have an eye for wild plant species. The cold symptoms described at macro and microscopic levels are also based on real facts. If you would like to read more about the science behind, you can check the open access article below.
Laxman Adhikari, Rudra Baral, Dev Paudel, Doohong Min, Shiva O. Makaju, Hari P. Poudel, Janam P. Acharya, Ali M. Missaoui. Cold stress in plants: Strategies to improve cold tolerance in forage species, Plant Stress, Volume 4, 2022. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667064X22000264.