Russian Thistle = Tumbleweed

I am a certifiable NPR junkie.  This afternoon as I drove towards home, I was listening to Science Friday on my local NPR station (to which I contribute $5 per month), and they were talking about invasive species.  I LOVE this topic, as one of my good friends in grad school did her thesis on the Chinese mitten crab.  I named one of our cats Mittens, in honor of this incredible crustacean.  My favorite mitten crab story that she shared with me was about some folks trying to smuggle a few mitten crabs into the US on a commercial air flight.  The crabs got out of the cooler under the seat, and started traveling up and down the aisles of the airplane, terrorizing the passengers and flight attendants.

borrowed from http://www.rimeis.org/species/images/es2.jpg

But I digress, as usual............

I know that invasive species are generally bad, but I have eaten so many blackberries on the Burke-Gilman trail between my apartment in Fremont and the University of Washington campus, that I have a little sliver of doubt about the "invasive" adjective put in front of many species.

One of the callers into the Science Friday live broadcast explained that the tumbleweed plants that you see in so many movies (and that I have dodged when driving across the desert in between AZ and CA) are actually an "introduced" species from Eurasia called Russian Thistle.

They "tumble" as a way to distribute their seeds in the surrounding area.

Hmmmm........