Cattails fed Ice Age Europeans and kept Second World War sailors afloat
Starch grains left on grinding stones show Europeans eating cattail rhizomes 30,000 years ago. Much later the United States Navy stuffed life vests with cattail down in place of kapok, and it still floated after 100 hours underwater. Few wetland plants have been put to so many jobs.
Typha holds about 30 species, known as bulrush or reedmace in Britain, cattail in America, cumbungi in Australia and raupō in New Zealand. The plants stand 0.8 to 2.4 metres tall on jointless stems. A slim spike of male flowers sits on top and withers after shedding pollen, while below it a sausage-shaped female spike up to 30 centimetres long eventually bursts into fluff carrying seeds a fifth of a millimetre long. Fossil fruits from Central Europe date back 69 million years.
Wind-borne seeds let cattails colonise fresh mud quickly, and creeping rhizomes knit them into huge connected stands. Air channels in their tissue carry oxygen to the roots, even through dead stalks, so flooding rarely troubles them. That toughness makes them aggressive competitors: from the Great Lakes to the Everglades they crowd out sedges and shrink wet meadows, especially where water levels no longer rise and fall naturally and nutrients have built up. Muskrats eat them and build dens from them, creating resting spots for waterfowl.
Nearly every part can be eaten in some season. Rhizome flour carries about 266 kilocalories per 100 grams, peeled young stems were eaten in Ukraine as Cossack asparagus, green flower spikes are boiled like corn, and Māori bakers made a pollen bread. Plants from polluted water can concentrate lead and pesticides, though, and are unsafe to eat.
Around Lake Titicaca, local peoples built rafts from cattails. Indigenous peoples of the Americas lit fires with the seed hairs and lined moccasins and cradleboards with the down. New York mills made cattail paper in 1853 during a shortage of raw material. The leaves are woven into chair seats and baskets, stem fibres up to 4 metres long resemble jute, and the plant is being studied as a bioenergy crop.
Source: Typha
