Weathers cloudy this afternoon, but earlier today during lunch break, sat outside in the sunshine - reading. Was so nice.
Visiting with coworkers was fun also. Missed seeing all thier faces.
Late clicks for the rest of the workweek...
No, we aren't visiting ehBeth, we are invading her.
The following is wonderful, and I hope that most of you stop to read it, although I am fully aware that some just post and don't read. This reminds me of an early chapter in James Mitchner's "Chesapeake".
March 18, 2008, 10:28 pm
Pineapple Dreams
(Eros Hoagland for The New York Times)
The other day, I went to the supermarket to buy a pineapple. I didn't select the one that smelled the ripest, but the one with the most impressive leaves: tall, bushy and uncrushed by the journey from Costa Rica. When I got it home, I put it in the kitchen sink, turned on the tap, and watched how the water gathered and formed pools in the spaces between the leaves. And I began to imagine that I was not a human in an apartment in London, but a small frog in a tropical forest, climbing up the leaves of a plant like a pineapple, looking for a pool where I could deposit the tadpole I'm carrying on my back.
As I tried to envision the pineapple's leaves soaring above my tiny frog self, like the shells of the Sydney Opera House, a passage from the wonderful though admittedly specialized book "Mites of Moths and Butterflies" ran through my head:
The magic of the microscope is not that it makes little creatures larger, but that it makes a large one smaller. We are too big for our world. The microscope takes us down from our proud and lonely immensity and makes us, for a time, fellow citizens with the great majority of living things. It lets us share with them the strange and beautiful world where a meter amounts to a mile and yesterday was years ago.
I would love, for a few days, to be shrunk down ?- perhaps not so small as to be microscopic but, say, about the size of my thumbnail ?- and splash around in the pineapple pools. I might not come back alive, though: when you're that small, enemies are everywhere. Even the plants might attack you.
Pineapples are members of a large and diverse group of plants called bromeliads, which are native to Central and South America and the Caribbean (one species is native to west Africa). Some bromeliads live, like regular plants, rooted to the ground. Others are epiphytes: they live on the branches of trees. This isn't usually a parasitic relationship ?- they don't take nutrients from the trees, just support.
But whether they live on the ground or high in the air, the typical bromeliad has, as a pineapple does, a central cone of leaves that collects rain water. At the base of the cone, other leaves open outward; the leaf stems are deep, and rain collects there, too, giving each plant cascading tiers of pools. The biggest bromeliads hold as much as two liters (just over two quarts) of water.
And so it is that the forests of the American tropics are studded with miniature lakes, at a variety of elevations above the forest floor. The density can be prodigious. A study in one forest found 175,000 bromeliads per hectare (2.5 acres); at this density, they may sequester as much as 50,000 liters (more than 13,000 gallons) of water per hectare of land.
Islands and lakes (which are islands of water surrounded by land) are famous for being evolutionary laboratories. Isolation allows the evolution of unique and specialized flora and fauna. Island chains like Hawaii and the Galápagos, and lake systems like the Great Lakes of Africa, are famous for the unusual species that have evolved there. The leaf pools of the bromeliads are islands made tiny.
Like more familiar, large-scale lakes, the number of species in a bromeliad is related to its size. But despite being around 20 quadrillion times smaller in volume than Lake Tanganyika, a bromeliad leaf pool can be home to quite a menagerie.
One study of 209 plants from the lowlands of Ecuador found 11,219 animals from more than 300 species. Of these, some were tourists ?- just passing through. But many of the others are found only on bromeliads. There are bacteria and flatworms, mosquito larvae, jumping spiders and tadpoles, as well as an array of organisms entirely alien to most of us. Among the most charismatic aliens are ostracods, which have minute hinged shells (perhaps just one millimeter ?- 1/25th of an inch) that resemble clam shells; but unlike clams, ostracods have two pairs of legs and two pairs of antennae. And just as the finches on different islands of the Galápagos have evolved into closely related, but distinct, species, so have bromeliad ostracods.
There are tiny salamanders, perhaps just 2.5 centimeters (an inch) from the ends of their snouts to the base of their tails: it's surprising to think that an animal with a backbone can get that small. And though they have simple brains, they are astonishing in other respects. Their tongues, with which they catch insects, can extend almost the length of their bodies, and zoom out with extraordinary speed and power: they can project their tongues 1.5 centimeters (3/5ths of an inch) in 7 milliseconds. Calculations on the ballistics of salamander tongues show that the muscular power of the launch is ten times higher than the instantaneous power output of any other known vertebrate muscle.
And if that's not wacky enough, how about this: among the inhabitants of bromeliad pools are other species of bromeliad. Sometimes, these bromeliads-within-bromeliads are carnivorous, digesting any insects that get trapped inside. See what I mean about the dangers of being small?
But of all the creatures that make their homes on these plants, here's the one that particularly captures my imagination: Metopaulias depressus, a reddish-brown crab from the bromeliads of Jamaica.
This is an animal I wouldn't want to meet if I were tiny. Though they are small ?- a fully-grown adult has a shell just 2 centimeters (three quarters of an inch) across ?- they can see off a lizard that intrudes on their plant, and they can kill large centipedes, so they'd make mincemeat of little me.
All the same, I like them because they are unusual in two ways. First: their habitat. Most crabs live in the ocean or, if they're really adventurous, in burrows they dig on a beach; a few live in (or near) streams and lakes. But M. depressus has evolved to exploit the bromeliad pools, and as far as anyone knows, they do so exclusively.
And here's the other oddity: in this species, mothers look after their young.
Crabs aren't famous for paying attention to their offspring. In most species, the female carries her eggs until they are ready to hatch, then releases the larvae into the ocean, where they fend for themselves. The numbers can be enormous ?- female blue crabs (Callinectes sapidus), for instance, can release two million larvae in one go. (After fertilizing all those eggs, the male needs 15 days to replenish his sperm supplies, poor fellow.)
M. depressus is different. The female lavishes attention on her young. She chooses her plant carefully ?- she prefers plants with larger volumes of water ?- and then prepares the pool that will be the nursery. She fishes out any dead leaves that may have fallen in, and drops them onto the ground. (If a sneaky experimenter puts leaves back in, she'll remove them.) And she drops empty snail shells into the water, often after capturing and feasting on the owners.
These behaviors have two effects. Removing the leaves increases the amount of oxygen in the water; crab larvae need high levels of oxygen in order to breathe. The added snail shells increase the levels of calcium, a mineral without which baby crabs can't make shells of their own. Unimproved pools can't sustain baby crabs.
And the hard work doesn't stop there. For several weeks, the mother feeds her young ?- perhaps as many as 90 of them (which sounds a lot ?- but is a lot less than two million) ?- on cockroaches and millipedes that she catches. And she protects them from being eaten by predators, especially hungry damselfly larvae.
Damselfly larvae generally live in streams, ponds, and lakes; but some have evolved to inhabit bromeliad pools. Among them: Diceratobasis macrogaster. Given a chance, one of these larvae will eat as many as five baby crabs a day. The mother crab does not give them that chance; but an orphaned brood will perish quickly.
Even more unusual, the young crabs don't disperse immediately, but remain with mom; sometimes you'll find a couple of generations living together. This is probably because small crabs are more vulnerable to attack as they search for plants of their own, and so it makes sense to grow up before leaving. But whatever the reason, living in family groups is the first evolutionary step towards complicated social arrangements, such as those common among termites and the ants, bees and wasps, but rare for other insects or crustaceans. Perhaps one day, if the evolutionary pressures are right, crabs might join the list of highly social creatures.
Next time you buy a pineapple, therefore, pick one with good leaves, pour on some water, shut your eyes, imagine yourself in a bromeliad pool dodging a mother crab or a salamander's tongue, and marvel at the richness of island life.
**********
NOTES:
For frogs carrying tadpoles to bromeliad pools, see Weygoldt, P. 1980. "Complex brood care and reproductive behavior in captive poison-arrow frogs, Dendrobates pumilio O. Schmidt." Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 7: 329-332 and Summers, K. 1992. "Mating strategies in two species of dart-poison frogs: a comparative study." Animal Behaviour 43: 907-919.
The quotation about the wonders of the microscope can be found on p. 141 of Treat, A. E. 1975. "Mites of Moths and Butterflies." Cornell University Press.
The density of bromeliads, and the volume of water they sequester is cited in Richardson, R. A. 1999. "The bromeliad microcosm and the assessment of faunal diversity in a Neotropical forest." Biotropica 31: 321-336; this paper also considers bromeliads as islands, and shows that the number of species a bromeliad contains depends on its size. For 11,219 animals in the bromeliads of lowland Ecuador, see Armbruster, P., Hutchinson, R. A., and Cotgreave, P. 2002. "Factors influencing community structure in a South American tank bromeliad fauna." Oikos 96: 225-234. For a radiation of bromeliad ostracods, see Little, T. J. and Hebert, P. D. N. 1996. "Endemism and ecological islands: the ostracods from Jamaican bromeliads." Freshwater Biology 36:327-338.
For salamanders living in bromeliads, see Wake, D. B. 1987. "Adaptive radiation of salamanders in middle American cloud forests." Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 74: 242-264. For the ballistics of salamander tongues, see Deban, S. M., O'Reilly, J. C., Dicke, U., and van Leeuwen, J. L. 2007. "Extremely high-power tongue projection in plethodontid salamanders." Journal of Experimental Biology 210: 655-667; I have given the projection distances and lengths for the Bolitoglossa salamanders (see table 1). For carnivorous bromeliads-within-bromeliads, see p. 261 of Juniper, B. E., Robins, R. J., and Joel, D. M. 1989. "The Carnivorous Plants." Academic Press.
For egg numbers in the blue crab, see Churchill, E. P. J. 1917-1918. "Life history of the blue crab." Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Fisheries 36:95-128; for males needing 15 days to recover from sex, see Jivoff, P. 1997 "Sexual competition among male blue crab, Callinectes sapidus." Biological Bulletin 193:368-380.
For a general account of the biology of Metopaulias depressus, including the existence of family groups and overlapping generations, see Diesel, R. 1989. "Parental care in an unusual environment: Metopaulias depressus (Decapoda: Grapsidae), a crab that lives in epiphytic bromeliads." Animal Behaviour 38: 561-575. For leaf removal and snail shell additions, see Diesel, R. and Schuh, M. 1993. "Maternal care in the bromeliad crab Metopaulias depressus (Decapoda): maintaining oxygen, pH and calcium levels optimal for the larvae." Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 32: 11-15. For protection from damselfly larvae, and the size of damselfly appetites, see Diesel, R. 1992. "Maternal care in the bromeliad crab, Metopaulias depressus: protection of larvae from predation by damselfly nymphs." Animal Behaviour 43: 803-812.
Perennial Arctic Ice Cover Diminishing, Officials Say
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 19, 2008; A03
The amount of long-lasting sea ice in the Arctic -- thick enough to survive for as much as a decade -- declined sharply in the past year, even though the region had a cold winter and the thinner one-year ice cover grew substantially, federal officials said yesterday.
Using new data from NASA's ICESat satellite, researchers over the past year detected the steepest yearly decline in "perennial" ice on record. As a result of melting and the southward movement of the thicker ice, the percentage of the Arctic Ocean with this stable ice cover has decreased from more than 50 percent in the mid-1980s to less than 30 percent as of last month.
"Because we had a cold winter, the public might think things have gotten better," said Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "In fact, the loss of the perennial ice makes clear that they're not getting better at all."
The surprising drop in perennial ice makes the fast-changing region more unstable, because the thinner seasonal ice melts readily in summer.
The Arctic lost an unprecedented amount of ice during last summer's unusual warmth, and Meier said conditions are right for a similarly large melt if the temperatures are at all above normal this year. The area of thick Arctic ice lost over the past two decades equals 1 1/2 times the size of Alaska.
While normal weather variation plays a role in yearly ice fluctuations, officials said the dramatic decline in perennial ice -- which can range from 6 feet thick to more than 15 feet thick -- appears to be consistent with the effects of global warming.
Officials said the loss of long-lasting ice was less the result of warming of the atmosphere than of a long-term rise in ocean temperatures and the effects of the "Arctic oscillation," a variable wind pattern that can either keep icebergs in the Arctic (when the wind pattern is "negative") or push them south (when it is "positive"). Climate experts believe that both the rising water temperature and increasingly frequent "positive" oscillations are a function of global warming.
Josefino Comiso of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the lead author of a related 2007 study, said Arctic Ocean temperatures appear to be rising quickly because less of the water is covered by ice, which reflects sunlight and keeps water temperatures lower. After last summer's very warm weather, the amount of ice cover shrank dramatically, and the water became warmer.
He said climate experts have concluded that the Arctic oscillation, which is a natural climate phenomenon, is also being modified by global warming. The dynamics are not yet understood, but it appears that higher temperatures in the tropics and elsewhere make it more likely that the oscillation will push icebergs down past Greenland and into the Atlantic.
Arctic sea ice always grows and shrinks, ranging from an average minimum in September of 2.5 million square miles to an average winter maximum in March of 5.9 million square miles. Instruments on NASA's Aqua satellite, as well as Defense Department satellites, showed that the maximum sea ice extent in March increased by 3.9 percent over that of the previous three years because of the winter.
Nonetheless, the total ice coverage was still 2.2 percent below the long-term average. And the very old ice, which remains in the Arctic for at least six years, made up more than 20 percent of the Arctic in the mid- to late 1980s, but by this winter it had decreased to 6 percent.
Flying over the Arctic, one might perceive the sea ice cover as broad, Meier said, but that apparent breadth hides the fact that the ice is so thin. "It's a facade, like a Hollywood set," he said. "There's no building behind it."
While the Arctic sea ice is changing fast, the same is not true in Antarctica. Comiso said the amount of ice surrounding the continent is little changed over recent decades, although some ice loss has been occurring around the continent's peninsula and on some glaciers. Antarctica is significantly less tied to the world's weather patterns and is considered to be less subject to the effects of global warming so far.
The report drew concern from Rafe Pomerance, president of the environmental group Clean Air-Cool Planet.
"This is another startling and serious indicator of massive changes in the Arctic due to climate change," he said in a statement. "It is one more reminder that we must address the global warming with a level of commitment and resources equal to the problem."
With the behavior of Arctic sea ice becoming an increasingly important issue, NASA is planning to launch a follow-on satellite mission, ICESat II, in 2015.
First we read about a way to count bears. Now here is a way to count wolves.
March 19, 2008
A Bid to Lure Wolves With a Digital Call of the Wild
By KIRK JOHNSON
BOZEMAN, Mont. ?- The long, lonely howl of a wolf shatters the early morning stillness. But is it real? Beginning this June, it might be hard to tell, even for the wolves.
One of the most famous sounds in nature is going digital. Under a research project at the University of Montana in Missoula, scientists are betting that the famous call-and-response among wolves can be used to count and keep track of the animals.
Tricked by technology, scientists say, wolves will answer what amounts to a roll call triggered by a remotely placed speaker-recorder system called Howlbox. Howlbox howls, and the wolves howl back. Spectrogram technology then allows analysis that the human ear could never achieve ?- how many wolves have responded, and which wolves they are.
"With audio software, we'll be able to identify each wolf on a different frequency, so we can count wolves individually, kind of like a fingerprint," said David Ausband, a research associate at the University of Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, where Howlbox was developed.
The devices, using off-the-shelf technology, cost about $1,300, including $300 for a solar panel. Audio recordings in the wild are nothing new, of course. Bird and amphibian researchers, in particular, have long used recordings to find or flush out critters. Howlbox's innovations are the tools of digital analysis and programmed instructions that tell Howlbox when to howl, when to sleep because the wolves are sleeping, and how to store each day's file on a disk.
The experiment will begin with a pilot project in which four Howlboxes will be placed in remote areas of Idaho in June. That month was chosen because it is when the packs gather with their spring-born pups in what is called a rendezvous.
Wolf pups will howl at almost anything, scientists say. But a test here in Montana in January also showed that adult wolves can also be fooled by a good sound system.
Money is a driving force behind the research, much of which is being paid for by the Nez Perce Indian tribe in Idaho, which has deep cultural links to the western gray wolf.
Traditional tracking tools like radio collars and aerial surveillance were used extensively after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s under the Federal Endangered Species Act. But federal protections will end later this month, and so too will the deep pockets needed for flyovers and catching and collaring.
A spokesman for the Nez Perce tribe, Curt Mack, said Howlbox might be a cost-efficient answer.
"We're at a transition moment from wolf recovery to long-term management," said Mr. Mack, the tribe's gray wolf recovery coordinator. "We need new tools."
Another issue for Howlbox is the human response. To the uninitiated, a Howlbox-enhanced forest could sound as if wolves were everywhere ?- a scary proposition. Montana wildlife officials are braced for a public relations campaign if the project moves forward.
"That is something we would not do without touching base with local folks," said Carolyn Sime, the wolf program coordinator at the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks "They need to know that just because you hear the sound, it doesn't necessarily mean that wild wolves are howling at their back door."
The earth is getting crowded. I think all the trees we are saving will eventually wind up being in the backyard of people.
Happy First Official Day of Spring !!
Snow just in time for the first day of spring!
Easter Bunny will need boots and a sleigh. :wink:
Pretty. Takes a lot of patience and a steady hand.
Found these on the Easter Market near Freyung.
You and your 300 friends have supported 2,874,489.6 square feet!
~~~
What lovely eggs! I've never seen anything like that.
The Ukrainian painted eggs are quite common here. There's even a giant statue of one out on the Prairies.
~~~
Oddly enough, care2 tells me that today is also Alien Abduction Day.
Hmmmmmmmm
sue, quite amazing really the micro world - and i'll probably never look at a pineapple in quite the same way again.
Research has shown and proven that wolves left to thier own devices flourish. Cattleman have a real problem with wolves, bison, and any animal that shares grazing land with domestic cattle and sheep - on Federal lands no less, where the 'rent' is minimul and the cost to wildlife, devastating. Wild horses went the same way as the American Indian - pushed to barren and forbidding lands where water and food was scarce.
The administration has no business manageing anything.
Tis the first day of Spring, yep - it is!
I luv those eggs, ul!
Care2 has a real pulse on the workings of the rainforest thread - it seems.
What a georgous day! Blooms, sunshine ~
SPRING
Beautiful photo, Stradee. Spring chores coming along and enjoyable to do them even.
March 20, 2008
The Rural Life
Officially Spring
For some reason, the look of the woods and pastures now ?- just at the turning point of spring ?- make me think of the Civil War. Perhaps it's the matted leaves and the flattened grass or the hoof-torn earth where the horses make a habit of standing. Perhaps it's simply that the woods look winter-beaten, skeletal, though they're really no more so than they were in November. The snow withdraws and leaves behind the feeling of something that shouldn't be seen, not yet. I don't know why I imagine a ghostly landscape ?- the fields overhung with the smoke of campfires and the weary presence of Union and Confederate soldiers ?- but I do.
This is a deeply contentious time of year. The rains have torn out the road without fully melting the soil. What the calendar promises, the day itself retracts. Unless you knew better, you'd hardly believe there was the readiness of spring to be found anywhere. The witch hazel is blossoming, but undemonstratively, not in a way that really means anything. The only sign of spring I trust is the sound of the birds singing. It's too early to call it ebullience, but it's pointed in that direction. They are gathering to court and breed.
That sense of contention belongs only to a human witness. The robins mob across the half-frozen pasture in the sleet, and yet they appear as dry, almost dusty, as they always do. For all its disarray, nothing in nature looks discomfited. I pretend to see patience in the sugar maples and the hickories, but any patience I find is mine, and there is little enough of that. I am ready for a headlong season.
There will be time to fix the fence-rails that winter knocked down, time to scrape out the barnyard and make a truly gratifying mound of muck. This will have to be the year the old chicken yard is seeded to grass and all its occupants moved to new quarters. There is nothing like mud season ?- another name for early spring, of course ?- to persuade you that a fixed habitation is a bad idea. This would be a good year to let the land recover, except the recovery I have in mind, like the wear we put on the land, isn't the work of a single year.
What cheers me, though, is the thought that spring isn't a human season, not like the seasons we create for ourselves. It comes without caring what you make of it. It may find you unprepared, ill at ease, in a state of erosion. It makes no difference. It will stir your blood anyway, once the freezing rain goes away at last. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/19/AR2008031903859.html?wpisrc=newsletter
"World consumption of coal has grown 30 percent in the past six years, twice as much as any other energy source. About two-thirds of the fuel supplies electricity plants, and just under a third heads to industrial users, mostly steel and concrete makers."
The US has become a major exporter of coal, helping in driving up the price, and in lowering trade deficit.
Yes, and because of our diversity and our expansion of technology during the last century - according to the national news this morning - I have realized that the USA has almost a monoply of coal. This disturbes me, because with all the advertisements about hybred cars - there is one thing we must consider - the electricity to refuel the batterys. That is made from carbon dispensing things like - COAL for instance. People are so gullable.
The gas industry is still manipulating us.
And, our pollution is still increasing. Maybe at a decreasing rate, but, still increasing.
How dumb can we be.??
Totally, totally ignorant; as long as it doesn't become a national dialog, as Obama has made race. But standard politicans and large corporations don't want to discuss the facts out in the public domain, they want to make real-world decisions in privacy.
PLANT SCIENCE: At Root of the Matter
Laura M. Zahn
Many plant roots establish a symbiotic relationship with either bacteria or fungi in order to gain access to nutrients, such as fixed nitrogen or phosphate, respectively. Markmann et al. and Gherbi et al. have investigated the evolution of symbiotic relationships between plants and their symbionts and suggest that, on the basis of its nearly universal presence, a single signal transduction component, the leucine-rich-repeat, receptor-like kinase SYMRK, is essential for a host of angiosperms. Genetic knockdown in a member of the cucumber family (Datisca glomerata, a close legume relative) and in the tree Casuarina glauca showed that this protein was essential for bacterial nodulation; furthermore, it also affected fungal symbiosis. Additional investigation revealed that the protein is highly conserved in its ability to mediate these interactions and that this protein does not mediate the exclusive host/symbiont interactions found among species. In addition, three structural SYMRK versions exist among plants with different functional capabilities in the development of root/symbiont interactions, providing an evolutionary hypothesis for the origin of the highly derived nodules in legumes and their close relatives. -- LMZ
PLoS Biol. 6, e68; Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 10.1073/pnas.0710618105 (2008).
You and your 300 friends have supported 2,874,653.4 square feet!
~~~
Dibs on a new thread - anyone?
3/21
Purim
Newroz (Iran)
Holi (India)
Tsechus ( Bhutan)
Birthday of a nice person
and the beginning of Easter.
Lots to celebrate.
Viva Spring!
