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The Agave

The Desert Food Chain Producer - Part 5

Named after the Greek term for “noble,” the agave, with its distinctive rosette, or spray-like, arrangement of succulent leaves, bears a clear resemblance to its botanical relative, the yucca.  Moreover, the agave, like the yucca, serves as a food and material resource for various animals.  However, the agave, unlike the yucca, also yields raw stock for several potent beverages that give a whole other dimension to the notion of “food chain.”

Family Resemblances and Differences

The agaves, which include more than 200 species, evolved, like the yuccas, in the New World.  Their range extended from southern Nevada and southern Utah across our Southwestern deserts down through Mexico and Central America and across into Caribbean Islands.  Since the 15th century, their range has expanded across the Atlantic, propelled primarily by the Europeans.  For instance, I have seen the AgaveThe Agave americana, the classic “century plant,” growing in Algeria, a former French colony, in villages near the Mediterranean coast.

More than a dozen species of agave grow in the Southwest, especially in the desert grasslands of the basins and in the wooded foothills of the mountain ranges.  They seem to prosper on the slopes that have slightly acidic soils and a rocky overburden.

The typical, relatively massive agave leaf, with its stiletto point and wickedly barbed edges, would serve as a weapon for Conan the Barbarian.  The typical Southwest yucca leaf, by contrast, with a more rapier-like shape and mere filaments along its edges, would serve as a weapon for Zorro.  In some Southwestern species, an agave leaf rosette may span perhaps a foot and a quarter; in others, several feet.  The leaves’ rosette arrangement and channel shapes serve to funnel rain water to the heart of the plant.

The leaves range in color from green to grayish green to bluish green and often bear decorative bands in various shades of green and brown. They range in shape from short and thick to relatively long and narrow, with some laser-beam straight, others elegantly recurved, and still others inelegantly twisted and bent.

 

Sometimes leaves bear imprints from the tight clasp of neighboring leaves before their rosette fully unfurled.  The agaves’ leaves, according to John Moore’s article, “Agaves and Yuccas,” in the Colorado State University Cooperative Extension Demonstration Garden internet site, “have special cells for water and food storage.”  In fact, he said, “All the water storage and energy storage of the plant is in the leaves.”  Like yuccas, the agaves – in a botanical strategy designed to minimize water evaporation – open their stomata (leaf pores) during the coolness of night to gather the carbon dioxide they will need for photosynthesis during the sunlight of the following day.

The Agave

Most agaves have a very abbreviated stem.  The leaf rosette almost seems to spring directly from the roots.  Although some yucca species – Our Lord’s Candle, for instance – have little or no stem, various others such as the Joshua Tree, Torrey and Soaptree yuccas often have stems that range from 10 to 20 feet or more in height.  Some agave species produce small plantlets – clones sometimes called “pups” – from their abbreviated stems, at the base of their leaf rosettes.  “In this way,” according to the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum internet site, “clones (multiple, genetically identical, individuals that originated from a single seed) form colonies that may persist for centuries or longer.”

The agaves, like some yucca species, have shallow, fibrous, radiating root systems that race against competing plants’ root systems and high evaporation rates to capture as much water as possible from the desert’s infrequent rainstorms and snow melt.

An agave, unlike a yucca, spends years, often decades, accumulating water and carbohydrates in its heart, preparing for a seminal and life-ending event – the botanical ritual of blooming.  When it matures, having stored sufficient resources, the agave begins to flower, producing its blossoms during the summer and early fall.  “The carbohydrates,” says the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum internet site, “provide the energy that fuels the rapid development of the inflorescence (the flowering structure, including supporting stems), which is usually massive compared to the plant that produces it.  In all but a few species the rosette dies after flowering and fruiting, having spent all of its life energy to produce a huge quantity of seeds.  

The plants literally flower themselves to death.”In their closing days, memorialized by white to yellowish white to orange or greenish blossoms, some agave species flower during the day, inviting hummingbirds as well as bees and other insects to feed on an abundant reservoir of nectar in return for the critical service of pollination.  Other species flower during the night, attracting not only Hawk-moths and other nocturnal insects, but also long-nosed bats, by a banquet of foul-smelling nectar, receiving payment by way of pollination.  Indeed, according to the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park internet site, “An estimated 100,000 lesser long-nosed bats converge on southeastern Arizona in late summer for the agave bloom, and an even larger number feed on agaves not far south, in the Mexican state of Sonora. These gray and cinnamon-brown creatures are valuable pollinators of the cacti and agaves they frequent”

Representative Members of the Agave Family

Like other desert succulents, especially the cacti, the agaves almost seem to take a perverse delight in confounding taxonomists—the scientists who would classify and name the plants.  As far back as 1871, Sir Joseph Hooker, a famed English botanist, remarked that the agave species were “difficult to name accurately”  Authority Jan Kolendo, who quoted Hooker in “Issues of Agave Nomenclature,” published on the Globalnet internet site, added, “The confusion continues to this day.  There are so many unresolved issues that agavologists will be kept busy for some time to come.”  The agaves confuse the “agavologist” still further because they have migrated so much in the company of both prehistoric and historic man that biological scientists sometimes have trouble tracing individual species back to their origins.

The AgaveA few of the more notable agaves in our Southwestern deserts include the Utah agave (Agave utahensis), the Desert agave (Agave deserti), The Golden-flowered agave (Agave chrysantha), the Lechuguilla or Shindagger (Agave lechuguilla), the Harvard agave (Agave havardiana), and the classic Century Plant (Agave americana).

The Utah agave, the northernmost of the clan, grows in the eastern part of the Mojave Desert and the southern part of the Great Basin Desert at elevations between 3000 and 7500 feet.  A relatively small agave, it typically has  a rosette that measures roughly a foot to a foot and a half in height and in width, but it may produce a bloom stalk that rises 15 feet above the rosette.  It can tolerate not only the heat of a desert summer, but also the belo- zero Fahrenheit temperatures of a southern Great Basin winter.

 

The Desert agave, also relatively small, grows primarily in the western Sonoran Desert.  As the name suggests, the species – which may husband its resources for decades before it flowers – has adapted superbly to the desert, even the harsh lower Colorado River Valley region.  Its stem produces plantlets, slow-growing siblings that may form a dense circle around the mother plant.  “Rings 20 feet…in diameter in California’s Anza-Borrego Desert State park may be more than a millennium old,” according to the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum Internet site.

The Golden-flowered agave occupies a very restricted range in the northern Sonoran Desert, in central Arizona, at elevations from 3000 to 6000 feet.  One of the most spectacular agaves in bloom, it produces brilliant golden yellow flowers on a stalk that can rise as much as 20 feet above the plant’s rosette. The Lechuguilla or Shindagger, a formidably armed plant that stands as a symbol of the Chihuahuan Desert, grows sometimes as a labyrinthine mass of fierce botanical daggers and dirks on foothills at elevations of 4000 to 5000 feet.  “This formidable plant was a dangerous obstacle in early Southwestern exploration,” James A. MacMahon said in his Audubon Society Nature Guide, Deserts.  “The sharp leaves pierced horses’ legs and a rider who fell might lie impaled.  Today, leaves of small plants puncture tires of off-road vehicles...

The AgaveThe Harvard agave, sometimes called Harvard’s Century Plant, holds the distinction of being the largest and perhaps the most handsome of the agaves that grow in western Texas’ Big Bend National Park, usually at elevations of 4000 to 6000 feet.  A night bloomer, it sets a flowery feast of smelly nectar for the long nose bats and nocturnal insects.  The Century Plant – and here I’m referring specifically to the Agave americana – qualifies as one of those of uncertain origin, although it occupies a wide range in Mexico and, more recently, in our deserts of the Southwest.  Tolerant of diverse climates and soils and a prolific producer of pups, the Century Plant “has spread throughout the temperate and tropical areas of the world,” according to The Succulent Plant Page internet site.  One of the larger of the agaves, the Century Plant rosette may reach seven or eight feet in height and span 12 feet in width, with individual leaves reaching six feet in length.  It produces a bloom stalk that may reach 30 to 40 feet in height.  It has been called the “Blue Steel,” a reference to the color of its leaves. 

The Agave’s Place in the Food Chain

Although they present their nectar, like fine wine, to their insect, bird and bat patrons, the agaves, especially compared with the yuccas, tender a sparse salad bar for a relatively small number in the wildlife community, for instance, bighorn sheep, javelinas and rodents.  The plant may, in fact, be toxic for some animals, including, for example, rabbits.   Agave weevils do manage to chew into the leaves, and according to the Maricopa County Cooperative Extension Home Horticulture internet site, “They lay eggs into the holes and the larvae burrow into the plant to feed. Agaves collapse into a putrid, rotting mess during late summer as a result of bacterial rot and internal infestation of Agave Weevil larvae." 

The agaves nevertheless have held high importance as a commodity in the economies of both prehistoric and historic Native American peoples across the Southwest and deep into Mexico.  Harvested just prior to flowering, when the plant’s energy storage reaches its peak, an agave, roasted, becomes a “sugary, high calorie, and nutritious food,” according The Marana Community in the Hohokam World, written by Suzanne K. Fish, Paul R. Fish, and John H. Madsen.  I’ve eaten roasted agave.  It does taste slightly sweet, maybe something like cucumber or squash.  It may be high calorie and nutritious.  It is certainly “chewy.”  Agave roasts meant brutal, back-breaking and probably communal labor for the Native Americans.  Apache women, for instance, joined together for the roast in the spring.  First, they had to free the agave rosettes from the desert soil.  In prehistoric times, they had to use agave knives – broad, flat stone tools with flaked cutting edges – to slice the heavy and spiny leaves away from the rosette, leaving a pineapple-shaped heart that might weigh as much as 50 or 60 pounds. 

They had to dig large roasting pits, which they filled with firewood topped with flat stones, according to James L. Haley in his book Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait.  Following a traditional ritual, they lit the firewood, allowing it to burn down to the coals.  They covered the heated flat stones with damp grass.  They placed the agave hearts on the damp grass and covered them with more damp grass.  They topped off the pit with soil.  They built another fire on top of the filled pit, beginning several days of roasting.  When the agave hearts had cooked fully, the Apache women had to dig them from the pits and carry them on their backs, in burden baskets, to their camps.  There, they preserved the roasted agave hearts by drying them in the sun. 

The agave held so much importance for the eastern Apaches, especially those in the ranges of the Guadalupe Mountain National Park and the Sacramento Mountain National Forest, that the Spanish called them the “Mescalero” Apaches (after the word “mezcal,” a Spanish term for the agave).

Near prehistoric and historic Indian camp grounds across the Southwest, you can still find archaeological evidence for agave roasting pits – often marked by large concentrations of fire-cracked rocks – and you can even find stunning archaeological evidence for agave agriculture in some areas.  For one example, Fish, Fish and Madsen suggest that prehistoric peoples in the Sonoran Desert may have imported agave plantlets from their native ranges, ultimately from as far away as Mesoamerica—the great city states in southern Mexico.  Through immense investments in labor, they may have planted tens of thousands of agave plants in fields that covered square miles in the northern Tucson Basin.  Fish, Fish and Madsen estimate that cultivated agaves may have played an important role in the diet of a population that numbered in the hundreds.  In a second example, the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum internet site says that the Indians of the Hohokam Puebloan tradition cultivated a species known as the Hohokam agave in areas that covered hundreds of thousands of acres, and in a few sites colonies of the agave survive to this day.  All of the [agave] populations from Caborca, Sonora, to New River, Arizona, are so similar that they may be one genetic clone."

Beyond their role in the food chain, agave flower stalks are used by birds for nesting and perching, and, according to Moore, man has used the agaves “for…soap, clothing, rope and other fibers, needles and thread, paper, glue, weapons, military instruments, medicines, red coloring matter, forage, and ornamental and hedge plants.” 

Pulque, Mescal, Tequila

If the agaves have served both a food-chain and a utilitarian purpose in the economies of prehistoric and historic peoples in the deserts of the Southwest and in Mexico, they have found true botanical stardom as a source for the liquids used in fermenting the intoxicating drinks called “pulque,” “mescal” and “tequila.”  The sugar-rich juices from the leaves of mature plants can be “fermented into pulque,” according to the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum internet site.  “Steamed heads or central stalks are mashed and allowed to ferment with added liquid.  After several days, the resulting fluid is distilled in the potent liquor mescal…  Tequila, the most famous legal variety of mescal is made from the single species Agave tequilana, grown near the town Tequila in Jalisco.  Tequila is to mescal much as Chardonnay is to wine.” As I can testify from my partying days 50 years ago at University of Texas in Austin, tequila is to a hangover much as a siren is to a headache.

“Throughout the history of the New World the agave has been closely associated with mankind in a multitude of ways” Jan Kolendo said in “The Agave: A Plant and its Story,” published on the Globalnet internet site.  “In the pre [Spanish] conquest era [in Mexico] the agave was well established as an important feature of everyday life and religion and played an important role in the human sacrifice which especially the Aztecs practiced to such an extent [that it] horrified even Cortez and his soldiers…  These [sacrificial] events seem to have been marked by the consumption in large quantities of pulque the victims were taken to the temples and were given pulque to consume”   Meanwhile, the priests’ “enthusiasm for sacrifice was fuelled [sic] by drinking pulque  On a typical sacrificial night it was an [sic] legitimate act for all the celebrants participating to carry on drinking the pulque without restriction.”

The agave moved seamlessly from the ancient cultures of the Mesoamerican city states into the new cultures of the post conquest, giving rise to the dicho (or, “saying,” taken from The New Farm, “Review: Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History”) “Para todo mal..mescal..para todo bien...también.”  “For everything bad... mescal... for everything good... the same!” 


Next The Desert Grasslands

By Jay W. Sharp

Video available on this subject. Click Here for a short video on how the Food Chain works Video available on this subject.

Index

Part 1 Desert Food chain - Introduction
Part 2 Desert Food chain - The Producers
Part 3 Desert Food chain - The Cacti: A Thorny Feast 
Part 4 Desert Food chain - The Yuccas
Part 5 Desert Food chain - The Agave
Part 6 Desert Food chain - Desert Grasslands
Part 7 Desert Food chain - Desert Shrubs
Part 8 Desert Food chain - The annual forbs
Part 9 Desert Food chain - Mavericks of the Desert Plant
Part 10 Desert Food chain - Outlaw desert plants
Part 11 Desert Food chain - Animals: The Consumers
Part 12 Desest Food chain - The Insects
Part 13 Desest Food chain - The Ugly, the Uglier and the Ugliest

Also see: The Desert Food Chain for the young student

 

 

 
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