Tarn

I'm still here!  OK so I've been insanely busy for the last few months with work and planning my wedding but now that I'm all married hopefully I can get back to posting.  I know...I say things...anyway, this time the post is about...GEOLOGY!

I'm not very good at geology so I invite you to berate me for inaccuracies in the comments.  The image above I made during my last trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire.  This is a body of water called a tarn near Mt. Lafayette.  A tarn is essentially a mountain lake.  The basin of the lake is formed by a glacier and is always found on one side of a mountain slope.  You can see said slope above the tarn in this image.  

Often a terminal moraine provides a dam that keeps water in the basin.  What's a terminal moraine you ask? Well that's one bit of geology I actually am fairly confident I understand.  So when a glacier slides across the landscape (glaciers are so huge, by the way and I've never actually seen one in real life...I have to imagine an ice sheet of this size) it picks up a lot detritus including rocks and boulders.  Here in New England if you've ever spied a huge boulder just sitting all by its lonesome in a field with no other boulders around you can be pretty sure a glacier dropped it there.  So anyway, the glacier will pick up rocks and boulders and also drop them.  A moraine is a collection of detritus, soil, rocks, boulders, etc., dropped by a glacier.  A terminal moraine is a moraine formed at the furthest advancing edge of the glacier.  Usually the largest accumulation of debris is at the "snout" of the glacier (the advancing face/edge) and as the glacier finally stops and begins to melt it leaves a (sometimes) massive pile of rocks and such.  

So it's this kind of moraine that provides the dam for a tarn.  Now you can impress your friends by telling them about tarns and moraines.  Fun geology words!

OK I have a few other photos from the Whites I'm hoping to post.  Get ready for FUNGUS!

Farmer Ants

So this is why I love ecology.  Just looking at one organism at a time is often super interesting stuff...I mean have you seen a horseshoe crab???  But often the combinations of organisms that have evolved side by side over millions of years is just downright mind-boggling.

I already was a big fan of ants.  I always find it really interesting to watch them and think about how much of their sensory world involves chemicals, many of which are produced by other members of their species.  Ants leave chemical footprints and generally have a few different chemicals that can mean different things.  Their antennae are incredibly acute chemical sensors, able to pick up very small amounts of molecule.

I also knew that ants sometimes farm aphids but after shooting this process the other day I found that these two facts are connected.  I was unable to access the original article here from science daily but I managed to find a quotation of it here.

Scientists have just recently learned that ants that farm aphids, like the ones below, use a chemical produced by their legs to sedate the aphids they are farming.  Ants will often bite the wings off aphids to keep them from flying away and now we know they're also drugging them.  This seems cruel, from a human perspective, but keep in mind that the generally much larger and more capable ants are also defending the aphids from dangerous predators like ladybugs and other beetles.  It's actually rather like our relationship with livestock.  We mess with their genes and keep them corralled but we also protect them from wolves and mountain lions.

These ant colonies keep aphids because aphids produce a sweet liquid known as honeydew as waste when they feed on certain plants.  And the ants...well they consume the aphid waste.  Yum!

The methodology used to discover this is elegantly simple and ingenious.  They had ants walk on a surface and then placed aphids on both a surface that had and had not been walked on by the ants and watched and recorded speeds and such.  They found that surfaces that had been walked on by ants caused the aphids to slow down markedly.  Especially interesting was when they used a dead leaf as a surface.  Aphids should avoid dead leaves at all costs, it's going to make you more obvious to predators and there's no food there for you.  But when they had dead leaves walked on by ants the aphids kind of moseyed off.  Really cool science, I think.

Oh and here are the images.  The little gray blobs are aphids...easier to see in the web album.

Two Images of Beetles

Because I'm busy and kinda lazy but I took these decent shots today.  I've got some other new images but I also need to research and write for them so...beetles.  Enjoy.

Convergence and Confusion

I went to the Stone Zoo yesterday and had a great time checking out some interesting animals.  They have a really nice collection, skipping a lot of the usual more showy African animals but including a few black bears, a lynx and a set of Tibetan steppe animals and South American animals.  They generally seemed healthy and active which is always good to see.  The highlight of the day, by far, was their bird show.  Mostly the birds were raptors including a very nice looking bald eagle that I was able to get very close to at the end of the show.  Which...y'know is really cool to see such a big bird that close.

But maybe the coolest bird was their red-legged seriema.  This unusual bird hardly ever flies but rather runs or walks and has a very interesting hunting behavior.  They will grab small animals, usually reptiles, by the tail and then smash them into the ground.  You can find an image of this here.  I wanted to learn a little more about this bird, and couldn't quite remember the name after getting home from the zoo so I consulted a large bird book I've got.  I immediately assumed it was a crane relative due to its long legs and found it there with the other cranes.  Apparently I have an eye for sorting birds into families.

Except really I don't.  This is the really interesting thing about living in a time that we have access to molecular data in regards to phylogeny.  For hundreds, really thousands, of years scientists and natural historians have been sorting animals based on how they look.  It makes sense, of course, that animals that look very similar should be closely related.  And much of the time this is correct.  All insects with a set of wings and a set of hard, protective wing coverings are all coleoptera, everything with a soft, shell-secreting body is a mollusk.  However we forget that birds are tiny subgroup of an already small subphylum and so when you get that specific weird things begin to happen.

Over the course of talking about several of the animals we saw I found myself examining a mammal and bird phylogeny really closely.  I'll talk about the bird phylogeny but you can check out the mammal one here.  So a few things to notice on the bird phylogeny here.  (If you're not familiar with how to read cladograms, basically each fork represents a common ancestor and the lengths of the lines represent time so the longer the line, the longer that group has existed and the closer one group is to the fork of another, the more closely they are related).  So first find the seriemas.  They are actually not cranes at all.  They are what we call a sister group (i.e. the group on the other side of a fork) with a group containing parrots, falcons and the group called passerines, which are all perching birds (basically all yard birds...mainly small birds with gripping, perching feet).  Something else to point out here, falcons are not the same thing as hawks or owls, each of these three bird families are spread fairly far out on the tree.  The falcons being placed with parrots and passerines is something very new, I found an article from Tetrapod Zoology written just last month describing the new molecular data and the reorganization of the clades.

The fact that falcons look just like small hawks and owls really resemble hawks, at least in terms of beak shape and talon shape, is what we call "convergence."  When organisms fall into a similar niche in the ecology (i.e. they are getting their food and living their lives in similar ways) more often than not then evolve to look very similar.  It makes sense.  If you have two families of birds that are hunting other vertebrates they are both going to want to be fast and they are going to want to have very sharp beaks and talons.  And that's exactly what you find.  Even though hawks and falcons are NOT sister groups they look the same because they have both evolved to utilize other vertebrates as energy sources.

So I've rambled pretty long about phylogeny here (it's probably my most nerdy passion) but a few more really interesting things to point out on the bird tree.  Herons, storks and cranes...all different things.  More convergence.  And the most surprising thing (to me)?  Find loons, grebes, and ducks.  All different things.  A grebe's most close relative is a flamingo!  Ducks are also found all the way across the phylogeny from most other shore birds, found in blue.  They are actually most closely related to things like pheasants and quails.

One final note.  I'm now a huge fan of the seriema.  I think they're really cool, very dinosaur-like birds.  One thing I found in my research: scientists now believe their closest relatives where the terror birds.  Which, if you're not familiar with, you should be.  You can start here.

OK, I'm finally done ranting about convergence.  Enjoy learning about terror birds!

Branta bernicla

Most of us are familiar with the ubiquitous Canada goose but this is another species we find in New England for at least part of the year.  The Brant's (or Brent) goose is, like most New England avian reptiles, migratory between the Arctic where it summers and breeds and the North American coast.  During its stay here it inhabits inter-tidal regions of either sandy shore or marsh flats.  This bird is not entirely marine, however, and spends its summers in the tundra or on grassy islands where its diet consists primarily of lichen and terrestrial plants.

The Brant's goose is primarily herbivorous but will take some animal food as well especially eggs but also worms, snails and amphipods.  (What are amphipods?  The next time you're at the beach find the wrack-line, the line of seaweeds and marine detritus left at the high-tide line, and turn some of it over.  You'll likely see little pale crustaceans start crawling and flipping themselves around.  Those are amphipods.)  Because breeding takes place near freshwater the young Brant's also will feed on insects and aquatic inverts.

There are several subspecies with varying color patterns across the range of the Brant's goose.  As a species it is considered an IUCN species of least concern.

As usual, I reference eol.org.

Vulpes vulpes

I've been marveling lately on an illustration I saw recently of an extinct species of crocodile lunging out of the water, reaching to grab a Tyrannosaurus Rex.  The event itself, that it occurred on the planet we now inhabit, is a marvel in itself but what I've really been marveling at is the sheer amount of energy involved in that event and how systems involving that much energy all begin their story in the form of single cells (both evolutionary and developmentally speaking).   From just two little cells comes a massive, 30 or 40 foot crocodile death-rolling a T. Rex.  Just so cool.

The day I took the photos below I witnessed what may have been the most wild biological energy I've seen.  The event was too far away from me so I don't have any photographs but here's what I saw: at first we noticed a group of gannets plunge diving.  You can see the group of birds circling around, looking a bit like gulls and then one will just drop out of the air and slash into the surface.  One after another was diving over and over.  That's already a lot of energy but you have to imagine the enormous school of fish that was hidden below the surface as well.

After a few minutes we walked a little further and noticed a second and third large group of gannets plunge diving.  Now I had the thought..."there's an awful lot of fish under there.  I wonder if there are whales nearby."  Sure enough, we waited and began to saw fin slapping, a behavior humpbacks and some other whales will do to signal good fishing spots to their kin.  You see the huge pectoral fin (humpbacks, even though not the largest whales, have the longest pectoral fins) rise up from the surface and then come crashing down, making a noise loud enough to hear from shore.

After watching all this energy, all these cells consume one another for a while we then noticed that there were more cells around.  I did get photographs of these and so they're the title of the post.  Here is Vulpes vulpes, the red fox:

By being quiet we were able to watch these two cubs rough and tumble play for a good 10-20 minutes.  It was really quite cool and a fairly unique experience for me. I've seen foxes in the wild before but never out in total daylight playing like this.

So V. vulpes here is the world's most widely distributed wild carnivore.  And though they mainly feed on small rodents like mice and voles they will eat just about anything they can get: other mammals, small birds, inverts like beetles and worms, decaying fruit and bits from compost piles are all on the menu.  I've even seen foxes "fishing" (for what I'm not entirely sure).

Unlike wolves foxes do not form packs but do live in smaller social groups usually consisting of a mated pair and a few of their daughters who will help to raise subsequent pups.  Like all canids and most mammals they mark their territory with urine.

V. vulpes's territory is limited by C. lupis (the grey wolf) and C. latrans (the coyote) however reduction of the former's range has increased the range of v. vulpes.  The red fox is also capable of inhabiting nearly any temperate terrestrial biome from coastal scrub/dunes (as pictured above) to alpine ridges.

V. vulpes also includes a vast number of subspecies/subpopulations that vary in coloration.  If you see a fox in the United States that is NOT the typical reddish orange of the animals depicted above it is still, in all likelihood a red fox.  Though this exchange did not involve as much energy as a T. Rex or a whale I was still glad I had the opportunity to photograph these beautiful animals and looked forward to sharing them here.  I have a few more that I may just post to the web album.  Enjoy!

One note:  I have been failing to include references for the last few posts on L. littorea and Uca genus crabs. Those along with this post have nearly entirely been based on information from eol.org.  As always this is my go-to reference.  The post on L. littorea also came from my knowledge as a marine educator....yeah, I talk about snails a lot.

Natural History Reading: Four Fish

So as I mentioned recently in my post about dolphin strandings I am finally beginning to see myself as not just a science educator but also a marine educator.  I've worked for a public aquarium for a little over two years now but until very recently I still strictly referred to myself as a "science educator."  The distinction is that my background is in neuroscience and my teeth cutting experience in the field of informal ed. happened a children's museum where I mostly designed experiences related to they physical sciences and my main interests related to animals are still evolution, classification and  the more nerdy, "sciency" topics rather than what I would consider "marine" topics.  However working at a public aquarium for two years can influence your thoughts and perspective and teaching and even though I still hold the belief that the most important way we as educators encourage stewardship, especially with young children, is by scaffolding appreciation and excitement about nature, I am coming to include the "marine" part of my work more and more into my self identity.

So why is this important?  Why the preamble?  Because the book I'm reading right now, Four Fish by Paul Greenberg, I think does a great job of showing how much fascinating natural history there is behind a modern marine stewardship problem like over-fishing.  The book is ostensibly about our (our meaning humanity) relationship with four fish, (hence the title) salmon, bass, cod and tuna.  It tells the historical story of their fisheries and why these four fish have become modern staples.  It deals with the idea of fishing being the last "wild" resource that humans consume and where we seem to be going and where, perhaps, we ought to be going (baramundi farming, spoiler alert!).

But the most interesting part of the book, for me, is the natural history (I know, huge surprise).  Greenberg writes eloquently on how the natural histories and life histories of these particular animals forged our relationships with them and are often counter to how we attempt to continue our modern relationships.  He also relates this concept to fishes he believes are indeed more suited to our continued consumption.

Overall this book is a great read and one of the reasons I'm enjoying it so thoroughly is that I see his writing as a bit of professional development, helping me remember that because I'm a marine educator I don't need to stop being a science educator.  His ability to present current policy and environmental issues through their natural history is quite inspiring and completely enjoyable.  If you eat fish, keep aquaria, love fishing or have any strong emotional ties with fish (read: if you are from New England) I highly recommend this book.