The plant that bites: Mexico’s sticky, deadly mistletoe
Ten years ago, I visited a city park in Zapopan that a group of enthusiastic volunteers was transforming into a bosque-escuela, an “arboreal school,” where they would someday be able to teach the public all about three different kinds of forest.
Throughout the park, they had planted many trees, and as we walked among these saplings, the environmentalists pointed out a problem they had not anticipated. The smooth branches of all these young trees were covered with hundreds — perhaps thousands — of small, sticky seeds.
Engineer Ricardo López, a leader of the group, told me these were the seeds of Psittacanthus calyculatus, which most people call el muerdago (the plant that bites). In English, we call it Mexican mistletoe.
The seeds were less than an inch long, covered with a very sticky glue called viscin, which has properties beyond those of a commercial adhesive.
To my astonishment, I learned that the seeds I was looking at had been deposited during the past week, forcing the volunteers to wipe the branches clean every Saturday, typically removing around two kilos of seeds.
“This is happening all over western Mexico,” López said, “and it is going to be hard to survive.”
Muérdago attack strategy
What Mexicans call muérdago is one of around 150 species of mistletoes and dwarf mistletoes that have developed efficient procedures for tapping the water supply of trees, weakening and in many cases killing their hosts. Here’s how it works.
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Cook said that in some cases parts of the haciendas had been transformed into municipal buildings or the former chapel was now the local church, but in others, the old hacienda had been wonderfully preserved.