by Sarah McCarthy | April 2020
Imagine you’re walking and you come across a plant or creature that looks unlike anything you’ve seen before. You don’t know what this thing is- but its bright colors and sharp features set off some internal alarm. You feel as if this unknown thing is out of place, is threatening to the norm, could it be a new invasive species?
A few of us had this experience while working in the Ohop Creek Protected Area a few months ago. We were focused on adjusting some bird boxes in the trees and were distracted by an unusual plant on the ground. It was February and there were several stalks standing tall, taller than the trees and shrubs planted a year ago. It had a bright red stem and long, drooping, sharp, bright green leaves. It looked out of place, downright alien. Instinctively, we knew not to touch it.
Caper Spurge at Ohop Creek Protected Area.
Fortunately, we live in a time where we can access seemingly limitless information from devices in our pocket and as they say, ‘there’s an app for everything’. To identify the strange plant we’d found, we enlisted the help of a smartphone app called Seek by iNaturalist. This app uses a photo and crowd-sourced data to instantly identify plants and animals. Amazingly, we were able to name our unknown plant within minutes of finding it.
According to Seek, what we found was called Caper Spurge. Other names for the plant include Euphorbia lathyris, Paper Spurge, Gopher Spurge, and Mole Plant. Our suspicion that the plant was invasive was confirmed, the Caper Spurge is native to Southern Europe, Northwest Africa, and Western Asia.
All parts of the plant are toxic, which is the origin of the name ‘Mole Plant’. It is planted in gardens to repel pests such as moles. This is also the reason it was brought out of its native range.
It’s always exciting to learn to identify a new species; the instant gratification provided by the Seek app is fantastic. This new tool gave us the information needed to immediately control the new weed, and is a great addition to our stewardship tool box.
And it turns out that the Caper Spurge is easy to remove. The shallow roots easily come up with a shovel. We donned gloves for handling and disposed of it in plastic bags to prevent any vegetative regrowth.