Creepy Corn Day (aka Halloween)

Corn stalks for sale at Lowes in New Jersey 

It's that time of the year again when spooky shenanigans slither into the normal daily lives of people. It's when kids in costumes defy the odds and gather candies from strangers, and the Simpsons treat us to another round of entertaining stories about really weird stuff. 

Yes, it's Creepy Corn Day (aka Spooky Corn Day, aka Halloween), which should be that celebration's official name, given that so much of the traditions associated with this day are related to the species Zea mays (corn/maize).

This was the thought that came to me while I was walking outside a Lowes in New Jersey last week and I saw another bunch of dried corn plants for sale. It made me wonder about all the other things during Halloween that involved this grass.

Corn Shucks

The dried bunches of corn that I saw are called corn shucks, and they were traditionally used by farmers during the end of the harvest to dry out the corn and to clear land for other plantings. The dried stalks were later used for bedding and feed for animals, and the corn itself was milled. During modern times, mechanical harvesters have obviated the need for this, but their common use in the past made people associate them with Fall and Halloween. Plus, they truly do look kinda spooky.

We're gonna get ya!

Candy Corn

I was not so familiar with this particular Halloween tradition, but it seems is very popular with kids. It's a type of candy that boasts a whopping 28 grams of sugar per handful, and is made out of various ingredients, including (you guessed it!) corn syrup. It is the most popular candy treat during Halloween in many states, and in 2019, it was estimated that more than 95% of holidays shoppers bought some of this confectionary. More than 9 billion of the candy is produced each year!

The candy seemed to have been first created by the Wunderlee Candy Company in Philadelphia in 1880s, but its popularity and association with Halloween did not occur until the 1950s, when the tradition of handing out candies to visiting children became popular.

Candy Corn

Corn Mazes

The idea and implementation of plant mazes has been with us since ancient times, but the use of corn fields to create mazes during the Autumn was not started until the early 1990s.

In 1993, a man named Don Frantz was flying over a corn field when the idea came to him. It didn't hurt that he had been involved in other creative endeavors, including  shows in Broadway and the Super Bowl halftime show. Frantz and another man named Adrian Fisher created the first corn maze in Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. They named it "The Amazing Maize Maze", and  the maze was modeled in the shape of a dinosaur named "Cornelius the Cobasaurus".

The popularity of corn mazes spread, and today they are another staple of  Halloween...ahem...I mean, Creepy Corn Day.

Grasses all day, every day, and grasses ever after, amen!

My life, as well as the lives of billions of other people, are intertwined with grasses...we are touched by them....from the time we wake up in the morning, to the time we sleep at night.

This was what I tried to convey during a talk with Matt Candelas of In Defense of Plants.

In my case, when I wake up in the morning, I (like literally billions of other people around the world) encounter members of the grass family, or derivatives of it, throughout the day.

The first thing I do in the morning is eat a bowl of oatmeal, and oatmeal of course is from the grass Avena sativa. 

When I eat my bowl of oatmeal, I put  some sugar into the mix of fruits, and around 80% of sugar in the world is derived from a grass, sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum).

I walk out to my car, and I'll see suburban lawns stretching to the horizon, and the turf grass of course is a mix of various grass species. In Florida it would be Stenotaphrum secundatum (St. Augustine grass), Paspalum notatum (Bahia grass) and maybe Cynodon dactylon (Bermuda grass), while in the Northeast you get various mixes of Poa pratensis (Kentucky bluegrass), Festuca spp, and Lolium spp.

Such species are what people normally think of when you mention the word "grass" to them. Ornamental grasses also fall into this category of grasses that are used in landscaping.

When I drive my car to work, the ethanol in my gasoline tank is likely as not made from Zea mays. In fact, around 40% of all corn production is used as bioethanol!

During lunch, I might go out and get a burger, and where would that be without the bread that frames the delicious ingredients between them? Bread of course is from a grass that we call wheat,  (Triticum aestivum and its ilk).

Maybe I also eat some snacks for lunch, and if you are brave enough to look at the ingredients of your candy or chips, you'll probably find something called high fructose corn syrup in it. This is a very common ingredient of packaged foods, because it adds to the sweetness of the food, and this is of course derived from a grass that we already mentioned above, Zea mays (corn/maize).

In fact, if you live in the USA, your body is probably mostly derived from that single grass species. Here is a great documentary that explores in some depth the ubiquity of Z. mays in American life.  

Finally, during some part of the day, I'll probably eat rice (Oryza sativa) during either lunch or dinner (and sometimes breakfast too!). Rice is, of course, one of those grasses that have been essential in the creation and and molding of entire civilizations (which I'll look into next time).

And I'm not even including all the times we use bamboo implements and tools!

So no matter how you look at it, the family Poaceae is by far the most influential and important plant family in the world. It's grasses all day, every day, and grasses ever after, amen!

It's Corn! A Kid and His Love for a Big Lump with Knobs

I admit I do not follow current fads, and I am definitely not on TikTok, Instagram, or most of the various social media channels out there. 

So it took me awhile to discover this interesting and funny meme that had taken first TikTok by storm, and then various other media outlets, including some mainstream news channels (where I finally found it).

A kid named Tariq was interviewed about his liking for corn, and his enthusiasm and love for it was captured later in a song that went viral (view video above).

Watch it and the original interview below and you'll be singing praises as well to corn/maize (Zea mays), which is definitely one of the most important grasses in the world.

 

The original interview:

Halloween Horrors in the Cornfields

Yeah, Zea mays (maize/corn) can be spooky

It's that time of the year again when pagan rituals (aka Halloween) sweep across this land, and in honor of that occasion I just have to list some of the horror movies that have made cornfields one of the least likely places to visit during night time.

I remember mentioning that I get spooked hiking forests at night, but I think being stuck in a field with tall grasses like corn would not be Disney time either.

We'll start with the better one of the lot - the movie adaptation of Stephen King's short story.

Children of the Corn (1984 original + all the sequels)

But here are more goodies that I dug up from youtube (in year descending order). I cannot vouch for their quality (other than Signs, Jeepers Creepers, and Escape the Field, which were ok), but if you're into dark and dangerous cornfields (and scarecrows!), you'll probably dig most of them.

This next one actually looked good, and was released by Lions Gate, a major studio. I dug it up (yes, I know I used the term "dig" twice...because Halloween) as a streamed movie in my cable lineup and watched it after posting this. It was ok, though the ending might be confusing. Reminds me of the 2010 Predators movie mixed with King's In the Tall Grass (more on that later).

Escape the Field (2022)

This next one is also in one of the streaming services, but it looks so horribly campy that I am giving it a pass.

Sharks of the Corn (2021)

The next several movies I have not seen, nor am I probably ever going to watch them (except for 1922 maybe, which is based on a Stephen King story).

Scarecrows (2018)

1922 (2017)

Husk and sequels (2011)

The Fields (2011)

A Brush with Death (2007)

Dark harvest (2004)

I watched this one a while back by M. Night Shyamalan and it was good drama, but probably not as good as his Sixth Sense, which was a classic.

Signs (2002)

Jeepers Creepers and sequels (2001)

Psycho Scarecrow (1997)- Full Movie

Finally, we'll end with another adaptation of a Stephen King work. No cornfields this time, but a field of another tall grass (Miscanthus spp in real life it turns out) that is just as deadly.

In the Tall Grass (2019)

Happy Halloween!

Frankenstein's Plants: Natural Genetic Engineering in Grasses

 

Frankenstein foreground from Wikipedia (Universal Studios, NBCUniversal). Background is Phragmites australis

The grasses (Family Poaceae) are the most successful and economically important plant family today. They are supremely adaptable and hardy, and exist in numberless hordes from the rainforests of the equator, to the driest deserts of the American West, and even to the cold and almost lifeless vastness of Antarctica. 

The ability of species in this family to adapt to different environmental conditions has been one of the factors which has made it so successful, and researchers have recently elucidated one of the reasons for this adaptability.

A new study has discovered that many grasses can readily absorb novel genetic information from  their environment, and incorporate them into their own genome (Hibdige et al, 2021)! They do this via a process called Lateral Gene Transfer (LGT), where a species can acquire new adaptive genes and traits from completely different species without any sexual reproduction.

Echinochloa crus-galli had evidence of at least 10 LGT

The groundbreaking study showed that many grass species have been involved in lateral gene transfer of multiple genes, some of the genes coming from other grass species that are far removed in terms of  evolutionary relationship.

The researchers looked at 17 species for protein coding LGT, examining from 15,000+ to  well over 30,000 genes for each species tested. They found that most of the genes had an evolutionary history similar to the species that harbored them, indicating that they had been passed down through the generations from parent to offspring as expected. But more than a hundred genes were found where the evolutionary history of the gene did not match the species.

Zea mays (maize/corn) had at least 11 LGT

This evidence of LGT was found in 13 of the 17 species tested, with Alloteropsis semialata showing 20 instance of LGT! The species that showed evidence of LGT included not only wild species, but several domesticated ones as well, including maize, millet, and wheat. In this case, maize (Zea mays) had 11 LGTs received from Chloridoideae and Paniceae, while wheat (Triticum aestivum) had 10 LGTs received from Andropogoneae, Chloridoideae and Paniceae. The researchers noted that the LGTs may be beneficial for the crops, as the transferred genes included functions related to abiotic stress tolerance and disease resistance. 

Such instances of LGT are an amazing way for a grass to "leap frog" the slower evolutionary pathways and suddenly acquire traits very quickly, some of which are not only useful but staggering in their significance. For example, in another earlier study (Christin et al, 2012), researchers looked at the grass genus Alloteropsis, which contain species that  use C3 or C4 photosynthesis. They discovered  that fundamental elements of the C4 pathway (which is very adaptive in hotter and drier environments) were acquired via LGT from C4 grass taxa that diverged from the Alloteropsis group more than 20 million years ago!  

Distribution of LGT in tested grass species

The mechanism of this lateral transfer of genes is still unresolved, although the researchers noted that it seems to be more prevalent in species that have rhizomes. Such grasses have the capability of producing full individuals from broken pieces of their rhizomes, so one could imagine a situation where an LGT between these below ground structures and a concomitant separation of the rhizome later could lead to new separate individuals with sexual apparatus containing the gene. 

I am reminded again of the rhizomes of cogon grass (Imperata cylindrica), which have very pointed tips and have been shown to puncture other species of grass as the cogon expands. Perhaps such instances of hostility was a gateway to the prevalence of LGT in grasses, or perhaps it is only one of many multiple mechanisms for such an absolutely amazing phenomenon.

The sharp pointed rhizome of Imperata cylindrica

 

Literature Cited

Christin PA, Edwards EJ, Besnard G, Boxall SF, Gregory R, Kellogg EA, Hartwell J, Osborne CP. Adaptive evolution of C(4) photosynthesis through recurrent lateral gene transfer. Curr Biol. 2012 Mar 6;22(5):445-9. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.01.054. Epub 2012 Feb 16. PMID: 22342748.

Hibdige, S.G.S., Raimondeau, P., Christin, P.-A. and Dnning, L.T. (2021), Widespread lateral gene transfer among grasses. New Phytol. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.17328

Where does the corn go? The answer maize surprise you!

 

I probably have to apologize for that pun, but I do like sweet corn (which is more accurately called maize, and whose scientific name is Zea mays). It makes for a good snack, and of course I love some of the other foods where maize is a major component, such as corn tortilla.

But it should come as no surprise to people that unlike rice, which directly feeds several billion souls, the vast majority of the maize crop does NOT go into directly feeding people. In fact, when I looked it up, I was surprised to find out that only a very small percentage of whole maize makes it to the table.

The largest use of maize is for feeding animals (around 40%), and right behind it is its use as biofuel (around 30%). Less than 10% of the total crop goes to either food or drink in the USA, and even the majority of that ends up as high fructose corn syrup. Unfortunately, very little of that crop goes to making the sweet juicy snack that I love.

For a detailed and interesting look at how this very important grass species impacts the country, I highly recommend watching the documentary King Corn, which is available in its full length below.

Enjoy and learn!

Why does maize (corn) feature so much in people's nightmares?

A nightmarish visage

They stand like dark sentinels, their leathery surfaces wrinkled and tough, the corn cobs peering out from behind thick leaves like grotesque mutants. It's almost Halloween, and as expected I see a lot of gardening stores and Farmer's Markets selling dried maize plants. 

If you've never seen such merchandize, then let me assure you they sometimes really do look creepy, and quite a fitting decoration for a tradition that was once a Celtic celebration to ward off ghosts.

Halloween sentinels

But why does corn feature so prominently in horror stories and movies, and in the nightmares of people? Witness for example, Stephen King's classic story "Children of the Corn", or movies like "Husk" and "Night of the Scarecrow." Is there something about this species that inspires such fear and sometimes revulsion?

I think it has to do more with cornfields, than the actual plant itself. There is just something slightly frightening about seeing endless rows of identical maize plants. They rise above you when you walk into them, enclosing you in a moist claustrophobic environment where your imagination can be pushed into thinking about some unpleasant possibilities.

Could you get lost in such a maze, perhaps fated to wander forever within its green bosom? And what are those sinister sounds that you hear, the faint susurrations, the whispers of the corn as the wind caresses their ripe and decaying bodies? What slavering monsters, both human and unhuman, lurk behind the next towering stalk?