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What is an animated oat?

By Chelsie Vandaveer

April 8, 2004

The wild red or animated oat (Avena sterilis Linnaeus) is the probable ancestor of the modern cultivated red oat (A. byzantina C. Koch). The wild red, like modern cultivated oats, is a hexaploid with 42 chromosomes. Sometime in its history, the plant tripled its normal diploid complement of fourteen chromosomes.

The plant may have originated in the Mediterranean area or Asia Minor, but it has come a long way. The wild red oat is considered a noxious weed in most grain producing areas of the world.

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Even as a noxious weed, the wild red oat is vital to continued hybridization of oats. The plant is resistant to rusts (fungi in the genus Puccinia) and it has a high yield--traits necessary to cultivated varieties. But the wild red's panicle "shatters". As soon as the seeds are ripe, they separate from the parent making it almost impossible to harvest the grain. Because of the high yield and the disease resistance, wild red oats persist in farm fields season after season.

Oats, in general, have an awn, a long bristle-like appendage at the tip of the lemma, the lowest bract below the flower. But the wild red oat's awn is different than other oats. The awn helps the seed plant itself. The awn twists with changing conditions of humidity or moisture, pushing the seed so it anchors in the soil.

This twisting of the awn is reversible--moist conditions, it twists one way; dry conditions, it untwists. This unique ability was not lost on fishermen, especially those who tie their own flies. One or two of the awns, tied into the fly, made it seem animated like a real insect landing on the water.

(Compiled from: Hortus Third, Staff L.H. Bailey Hortorium, Cornell University, 1977; "Oats", Magness et al, Purdue University, 1971; The US National Plant Germplasm System, Board of Agriculture, GRIN data, National Academies Press, 1999, 2000; and the Manual of the Grasses of the United States, A.S. Hitchcock, US Department of Agriculture, 1935)

The Faculty of the Department of Plant and Animal Sciences of Brigham Young University has posted photographs of six varieties of wild red or animated oats. To view the oat seeds with the lemmas and awns, click on the link:

http://pas.byu.edu/Faculty/enj/oatsite/sterilises.jpg