By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee Presumably I’m courting a jinx, but October was a fairly quiet month on conservation. Instead of an action alert, I thought I’d write a brief thought piece about the limits of CNPS conservation and science activities, and where we need to expand. One limit is that we don’t do marine species. Every once in a while someone asks why CNPS doesn’t get into protecting kelp forests. The simple reason is that kelp aren’t plants. To unpack this a bit, modern genomic biology has demonstrated conclusively that multicellularity arose multiple times in eukaryotic life, and that a bunch of those independent evolutions occurred in what we call algae. One lineage only (green algae) led to land plants, and kelps are on a very different branch of the tree of life. Indeed, they’re closer to the Phytophthoras, those notorious plant “fungi,” than they are to land plants. Phytophthoras aren’t fungi any more than kelp are plants, and convergent evolution sure is fun. However, there are marine vascular plants: the seagrasses, which are perfectly good monocots, sometimes nicknamed “vegetable whales” (family Zosteraceae). None of the four species are particularly rare in San Diego, but seagrass beds are a fairly rare plant community that is protected.