08/27/07 A natural cheatgrass seed killer

Farm and Ranch August 27, 2007 A potential biological control agent for the seeds of cheatgrass is the focus of a study at Gonzaga University in Spokane. Associate Professors Julie Beckstead and David Boose have received a total of over 247-thousand dollars in two grants for a three-year study of a fungal pathogen that been shown to kill cheatgrass seeds in soil. The grants are from the USDA and the Joint Fire Sciences Program. Beckstead says seeds that germinate quickly can survive the fungal attack, but slower-germinating seeds that carry over to the following year experience essentially 100 percent mortality. And it is the appearance of the fungus on those seeds that's given it the nickname "black fingers of death." Beckstead: "So the name simply comes from these black, they are the reproductive structures of the fungus that are coming out of the seed. And they can be quite distinct. They vary in length depending on a variety of conditions, but they are often a half a centimeter long. You can see them with the naked eye without a problem. You don't have to put it under a microscope to look at these organisms. And then every seed we saw it on it was killing them. Most of the seeds we saw this on, that we were collecting our samples on, all died. So we called it "black fingers of death." Beckstead says there are still a lot of questions that have to be answered with this research. More from her tomorrow. I'm Bob Hoff and that's the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.