Is this Poison Ivy?

28 July 2008

We went camping about a month ago and I was blessed by the loving touch of Toxicondendron radicans; the dreaded poison ivy. It took about two weeks for the rash on my legs to run its course, during which time I told myself it was preferable over two other Minnesota attractions: Lyme disease or the West Nile virus.

There’s nothing like a bout of “urushiol-induced contact dermatitis” to make you better appreciate the absence of other unwholesome conditions.

Despite my investment in the book Outwitting Poison Ivy in preparation for this camping season, I had been defeated by the plant. The book certainly has useful information, and reading it while afflicted made it even more compelling, but alas, it would have benefited greatly from more color pictures.

So, clearly, it would be advantageous for me to improve my recognition capabilities of this woodland scourge, but “leaves of three, let it be” casts a wide net and brings too many suspects into the lineup. Nor have I been able to employ the “hairy vine, no friend of mine” heuristic to any success. I’m forced to turn to my good friend, the Internet.

On our next trip, I took the pictures below. Looking at the Wikipedia article on poison ivy, I’m pretty sure some of these are of the hated vine. What do you think, Internet, in your expert opinion?

This first one had more jagged teeth than I would have expected in poison ivy, but I think it might be the vile weed.

Less jagged, #2 was in the same area as #1.

The more I look at #3, the more I think they must be poison ivy. The leaves are shiny, but part of that is because I sprayed some mosquito fogger stuff around before taking this picture. These ones are lurking right on the edge of the campsite by our fire pit.

And a couple more for your consideration.

Note! As almost always, these pictures are available freely for use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 28 July 2008 at 4:44 am
filed under minnesota, miscellany

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Comments

I wonder if it’s possible for humans to build up a natural immunity to poison ivy by repeated exposure?

If not, then I guess we weren’t meant to get quite that much in touch with nature.

You won’t be so rash next time eh?

Posted by Crosbie Fitch on 28 July 2008 at 7:48 am

Hi, Crosbie. According to the book, it doesn’t work that way. Sounds like there is something haywire with our immune systems because the oil itself isn’t harmful. It’s just our reaction to it that sucks.

Apparently, about 15% of people aren’t affected at all by the oil from the plant (urushiol). In fact, the author claims that if you make it all the way through childhood without coming in to contact with it, you’re chance of being affected drops to 50/50.

Didn’t have any problems while brushing and clearing the driveway and camp site, which goes along with what I’ve heard that it tends to show up more in cleared areas. Nature’s Revenge!

So maybe this is telling me to just sit on my chair and relax. :-)

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 28 July 2008 at 4:34 pm

Hard to tell in the pics…but I thought that red leaf stems were another sign.

Posted by Sandy on 1 August 2008 at 5:44 pm

It may be poison oak, which has leaves more like those in your photos.

Posted by Nobody on 8 August 2008 at 5:02 pm

Does anyone have any news about Architectures of Control? It used to be a great blog, but the site got defaced sometime around August 7 and is still in that state now. The entire site appears to have been deleted and replaced with a single big block of cryptic techno-geek text, probably a private joke among the malefactors responsible for this outrage.

The question is, has anyone heard anything, like whether or when Dan Lockton will have it restored again and whether anything’s being done about identifying the culprits and bringing them to justice? And in the meantime, is there anywhere where it’s mirrored? I was able to get up to date on top-level posts via Google’s cache, but not the comments. One thing sorely needed over at Google is somewhere to just put in a URL and view whatever Google’s spider last saw at that URL. Currently you have to formulate a search that returns the specific page you want as one of the first few hits, even if YOU KNOW THE PAGE’S ADDRESS, which is just silly. You CAN do this at the wayback machine, but the wayback machine is slow, unreliable, and generally takes weeks to catch up. Mind you, before long Google will catch up to the current state of the page and all its cache will show is the defacers’ message; really, Google ought to subsume the full functionality of the wayback machine. It’s a natural extension of Google’s business, and Google has the resources to do a good job of it. (So what if everything has some added Adwords? Just to be able to avoid losing things when morons deface web sites or other morons like William Patry delete their own web sites, it would be worth it…though in the longer term we really need to make the web based on an immutable, ever-growing mass of content with no single point of access, using Freenet or something like it.)

Posted by Nobody on 8 August 2008 at 5:43 pm

Architectures was apparently restored from backup some hours after the above comment was posted here. As near as I am able to determine, it’s basically intact. No major data loss is evident; they probably only lost the few comments posted in the hours immediately before the attack.

Would that all blogs and forums maintained backups as diligently, as often as one every night, as a hedge against this kind of thing.

Posted by Nobody on 11 August 2008 at 11:52 am

Hi, Nobody. I’m a big believer in backups, although I’m never as thorough as I’d like to be.

To your other comment, the transient nature of the web can be kind of disconcerting. It would be nice to know that pages you point at or bookmark will be there later when you want to return to them.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 11 August 2008 at 4:05 pm

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