Wild Green Minute
About
The Wild Green Minute is a short fact file segment exploring Florida's wildlife and wild places.
Produced in collaboration with WKGC-FM Panama City, each episode features one of Florida's wild places, organisms, or other natural phenomena. From river otters to Spanish moss, listen in for a quick bite of natural history.
Scroll down to hear past episodes and learn more!
Episode 27: Sweetgum Trees
Though most of Florida’s trees remain green year-round, one species that can be counted on for a colorful autumn show, at least in the state’s northern regions, is the sweetgum tree!
Sweetgums are medium-sized broadleaf trees that typically live in the vicinity of wetlands. Their distinctive, five-pointed leaves emit a sharp, fragrant smell when crushed, and provide excellent shade on lowland trails throughout the year. Millennial listeners will recognize them as resembling the tree stars eaten by cartoon dinosaurs in the Land Before Time animated series.
Sweetgum trees are wind pollinated. Because of this, their flowers look very different from what we would typically picture for a plant seeking to attract and communicate with pollinating insects or vertebrates. Instead of the large petals, bright colors, and attractive scents, their flowers look like lumpy green piles of, well, plant, growing from the tips of branches. Their seeds are winged and flutter in the wind as they fall, gaining distance from their parent tree to avoid competition for light and resources.
Their range includes most of the southeastern United States with isolated populations across Mexico and Central America, and they were used as incense by the Mayans. Sweetgums may live for up to 400 years and typically have tall, straight trunks around two or three feet wide.
Note: This fact file was originally written for broadcast exclusively in Florida during the fall season, from the perspective of Rhett Barker.
Episode 26: North Atlantic Right Whales
Every year, the waters off Florida’s Atlantic coast are visited by giants: North Atlantic Right Whales!
The fourth largest whale species, North Atlantic Right Whales can grow to lengths of 59 feet and weigh as much as one hundred ninety eight thousand pounds. Once relatively common throughout their range, they were given their name by whalers because their high fat content and habit of hanging out near the water’s surface made them the “right” whale to go after. In fact, North Atlantic Right Whales’ body mass is up to 45% blubber!
North Atlantic Right Whales are now limited to two small populations on the coasts of North America and Europe, and possibly a third, tiny population in the mid-Atlantic. The biggest group has between three and four hundred individuals and summers in New England and migrates to the southeast’s warmer waters for calving season every fall.
North Atlantic Right Whales are baleen whales, referring to the long, stiff, hair-like structures they have in place of traditional teeth. To eat, they take in enormous gulps of water, then expel it through their baleen to filter out the mass quantities of small prey that makes up their diet.
They typically live from about twenty to sixty years, though based on the lifespans of their close relatives they might have the capacity to live to well over a hundred years in good conditions.
Note: This fact file was originally written for broadcast exclusively within Florida, from the perspective of Rhett Barker.
