Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis

Yesterday morning, as I got my bike out to ride to work, I came upon this snake lounging on the stone steps coming down from our back yard. I didn’t have time to leisurely shoot this reptile because, well, I had to get to work, so the pictures aren’t amazing. But at least I documented another vertebrate. I think that’s two!

So T. sirtalis sirtalis, the Eastern Garter Snake is a subspecies of the Common Garter Snake. The term subspecies gets a little hard to define (considering species is hard to define) but it’s basically another distinction under species. There’s not a whole lot to say about them: they’re little snakes that live in most parts of the US. They are nocturnal and diurnal (not crepuscular?) and eat little amphibians, worms and slugs.

One somewhat interesting thing about these snakes is that they give live birth. This is called viviparity and when I was in grad school I found that there’s actually a whole lot of squamate reptiles (snakes and lizards) that do this. I think a lot of people assume that mammals are the only ones who give live birth but sharks and reptiles also employ this strategy. It’s evolved a good number of times over the last few hundred million years.

Name My Fungus, Please

So I guess I got lucky with the burdock. No one has been able to name any other unknowns for me. But it's always worth a try. Let's up the prize: a million science points for the genus.

The Morality of Nature and Niche Theory

This post was going to be titled “Not For the Faint of Heart” but I didn’t actually capture the image that was going to headline it. I was out for a walk yesterday looking for things to shoot (Bang! Bang!) when I cam across a dead bird full of green flies. I watched them seethe for a bit, brought my camera up, lowered it, watched a bit longer, walked away and then walked back. I had decided I wanted to shoot it but as I came back I disturbed the flies and they alighted.

Why didn’t I just shoot them? They were animals. And as I first came upon them they were undisturbed. I really could have had a fantastic image of them. But I kept thinking about reactions to an image I have of a dead bird. It’s not particularly beautiful and was unfortunately killed by my pet cat and not from something (more) natural. But most people hate it. So I decided not to capture another dead bird.

But as I was walking away the first time I thought about how similar this scene was to every other scene of organisms gathering resources, organisms getting energy from their environment. I resolved to capture that just as I would a honey bee landing on a flower. As I walked away the second time, having failed to get my image, I thought more about how we impose our own morality on nature, how we anthropomorphize even a pile of flies. There was no right or wrong in that dead bird. It was just a pack of organic compounds waiting to be reacquired by the ecosystem. The flies were merely obliging.

Niche theory, in biology, states that when there are resources, when energy is bound up somewhere in the ecosystem, eventually an organism should come along in evolutionary history to take advantage of that source of energy. We see this in the small changes of cichlid fishes’ pharyngeal jaws (jaws within jaws, see this x-ray of a moray eel), we see it in the rise of pollinating insects (once flowers appeared so did creatures that took advantage of them) and we see it in flies and other animals like burying beetles that use the cadavers of vertebrates as energy sources.

Probably something in us roots for the vertebrate and is sickened to see it crawling with arthropods (I've mentioned our innate nauseated response to creepy crawlies probably being an adaptive response to finding them in spoiled food). But there’s certainly nothing “moral” about the process. It’s just another niche to be exploited by another intrepid organism.

Mollusks of Jamaica Plain

June has been a quiet month on the Mycelial Network. My "real life" has been really busy so I haven't had enough time to take pictures or research critters. I have, however, been thinking a lot about mollusks. I know you all have too. They are amazing. I've posted about the Grove Snail but there're a couple of slug species we find around in Jamaica Plain as well. Leopard slugs are everywhere and they can get quite large, maybe five or six inches. But I've been having trouble identifying this species so I thought I would just post the picture since I took it ages ago. So here it is: a garden slug.

Yum! Dead ginkgo leaf!

Another Day in the Dark

I don't want the Mycelial Network to turn its focus too much towards sustainable living but I mentioned here that to observe Earth Day back in April I was going to go a day without electricity. I tried the same thing again yesterday and I wanted to just jot down a few reflections and things I've noticed.

First I was definitely right about the most annoying things being no music and no photos. I listen to music almost constantly, especially when I'm not at work, and not being able to do that is quite annoying. I try to see it as a good thing and just pay attention to what's around me more, though. I could hear sounds from outside all day. Sometimes this was nice, like when those sounds were bird calls. But other times it was a little awful like when all I could hear was a yard tool buzzing.

Second: I've noticed that I just plan around it in a lot of ways. I get computer use out of the way the night before and I save things that don't use electricity to do on the day I'm not using it like reading my comics for the week. It doesn't necessarily mean I haven't used slightly less electricity (I probably would have been listening to music while reading comics on an ordinary day) but it still doesn't feel like that much from a sustainability point of view. I also used more gas. I did everything with the stove instead of a microwave or electric coffee pot and I actually have no idea which is better. Usually with these things it's tough to disentangle all the factors that make both bad for ecosystems.

I also did my fair amount of cheating. I decided I wouldn't buy anything this time, to put a further restriction on my consumption. But then I decided I really needed a loaf of bread and I was going to buy that loaf of bread anyway so I was really just inconveniencing myself and not reducing any consumption by not buying it that day as opposed to any other day. So I went and bought it. I still managed not to buy anything I could really avoid: no Dunkin' Donuts coffee, for example.

Lastly, I've noticed a significant urge to start using immediately after the day is over. I don't usually flip my computer on in the morning before work but here I am, checking my email and writing a blog post because I couldn't do that yesterday. I guess it more or less evens but that's not the intention: the intention was to prevent some consumption from happening at all.

All in all I think my strategy of adopting less extreme forms of reduction and sustainability into my life that I always stick to instead of practicing a low impact "sabbath" may make myself and the planet better off. I saw yesterday's overall "impact" as more for myself than for any ecosystems. For now, though, I'll continue to try going the day with reduced consumption now and then and see how it evolves.

When Should We be Intolerant of Other's Views?

When a biologist teaches creationism: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/27/when-a-biologist-teaches-creationism/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+BadAstronomyBlog+(Bad+Astronomy)

A Very Odd Moth

And because I promised photos today:

I found this very weird looking moth in the house a few weeks ago. 79 science points for the genus.

And a little closer up: