Bald Hill

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Busy week. Had some time to explore Bald Hill...Will look up that hawk later. Probably a red-tailed hawk. Ahh I don't want to do homework!

Rain

Recent trip to the coast yielded some stragglers! These 3 sea lions were perfectly content chilling on the dock. Except maybe that old one. He was really peeved he had to make room for the 3rd one.
Barnacles! Imagine you are a tiny crab and how treacherous this landscape would seem!


It has been raining heavily here. Just last week the rivers crested and much of the town was interrupted by newly formed waterways. I have gotten used to the heavy fog, the ever-present clouds, but rain has actually been pretty hard to come by until last week. We had shortened days and the school had to close on Friday although me and some people still came in to work on other things. Screwed up my whole week!
Anyways, I hope it stops soon. It would be nice to walk between classes and not get wet!
Oh here is a cool blog post by someone about "patient zero." You know, the ONE person authorities try and pin an outbreak on. It's not nice to the person but it is useful to narrow down the Where and How.
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2012/01/19/the-problem-with-patient-zero/

Well now, don't I feel silly!

Turns out my little muskrat neighbor is actually a Nutria! Myocastor coypus are invasive and considered pests most everywhere. It is definitely is more beaver-like than a muskrat. I saw one yesterday while riding my bike through the woods and now that I know the difference, I wonder how was it I EVER mistook it for a muskrat in the first place! They are so obviously different!
Well, in other exciting news it snowed in Corvallis!! This is a very exciting thing because usually they just get straight up rain until June! I have been told the weather this Winter has been particularly odd though. We've gotten a great deal more sun than last year.
However a large storm system is approaching but will mostly give us tons of rain Tuesday and Friday. People up in Washington state are getting feet of snow! I think if that ever happened to little Corvallis people would flip out. My lab-mate told me the town sold their only snowplow last year. That's how little it snows here! Rain, just cold rain.
You know I never really paid attention to the weather until I started doing field work. Especially work that required appropriate weather in order to be carried out. When I worked at the migratory banding station in Louisiana we were constantly looking up the rain and wind report to see if we should close or open the nets. Woe is the bird that get's caught in a mist-net on a windy day! A few times I would come upon nets and there would be a gust of wind and the poor things would just be swaying in the breeze, terrified no doubt! Last summer was an unusually windy summer with strong southern winds.
When I was an undergrad I helped this guy catch salamanders in the Jefferson National Forest once. We had to wait for the right night with rain and then we could go out! I was not good at catching them although now I really want to try again. I am learning about salamanders in my Amphibians and Reptiles class and they are so interesting and adorable! I like the little chunky ones. They are spectacularly colorful (like birds!) so they are easy to find appealing.This is a Macedonian Crested Newt, Triturus macedonicus, from Greece. An interesting factoid I learned was that among the 3 groups of amphibians (frogs, caecilians and salamanders) only in salamanders can you see paedomorphic forms. This type of growth means you have retained juvenile/larval traits as a sexually mature adult. They reach sexual maturity without metamorphosis! Hence the name paedo+morph=child+form.
There are 2 types: neoteny and progenesis but this is more than we care to know now.Look at that big ol' paedomorph! Some salamander species retain the larval form due to a number of reasons (i.e. environment, chemical cues, hybridization, etc).

Perhaps the most well-known paedomorphic salamander is the Mexican axolotl, Ambystoma mexicanum:
This cheery-looking bugger is actually very sad because Axolotls are critically endangered in the wild. You see, they are only found in two lakes outside Mexico City, Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco. Lake Chalco was drained a long time ago and Lake Xochimilco is very altered due to draining, pollution, canals, etc.
Ok well it is snowing heavily again so I think I will go home for the day...I hope you had fun reading about weather and paedomorphic salamanders!

Guten Tag

African goose. Ornamental goose. I had no idea there was such a thing as an ornamental goose but there you go. It is crazy big and hard to miss lumbering towards you as you approach the pond far ahead of the other small ducks...
Red-breasted sapsucker! I saw this while talking on the phone outside my office!!!
Turkey vulture and fox me and my brother saw while driving through the suburbs.

Mystery wetland inhabitant...SOLVED!

I went out for a quick walk to see what birds I could find and thought I would check back in the wetland where I saw 'the brown things' foraging a while ago. And lo! A lovely face!
Tis a muskrat, Ondrata zibethicus. These rodents, and thus related to rats, are quite large and the only species in its genus. The 'musk' part of its name is thought to come from the Algonquin muscascus meaning 'it is red.' The rat is well, because it is related to rats though not of the Rattus genus.
It doesn't look to terribly like a rat though. Its face is capybara-like and the coloring around the ears is nice. At first I did think it was a beaver until it flipped around and I saw its thinner tail. This one in my neighborhood is a lady and she had two babies with her this morning. They did not seem to perturbed by my presence like last time. They have really glossy fur.
Anyways I saw: the usual scrub jays, robins, downy woodpecker, juncos (Oregon variety), a slew of sparrows, some kind of thrush, some hawk, warblers (a few), house finch, and a vireo I could not get a picture of! Looking in my book probably Hutton's, the only one out here this time of year! It was good to get out again but didn't stay long because it was so cold!

Strange things are afoot

Xenopus laevis=Strange foot smooth
As I was doing some research for a infectious disease presentation I had to deliver, I read up on the African Clawed Frog. The earliest case of chytridiomycosis (remember that amphibian skin disease I'm studying?) was found in a specimen from 1938.
This frog is very odd looking:

It's very flat and the way its eyes are laid it reminds me of a Planarian (a common flatworm; we just looked at some in the Bio lab I lead!).
Anyways, they are powerful swimmers (just look at those gams!) and use the claws on their back legs to tear up food.
But more importantly for humans, they keep well. They are common pets and lab animals. They've been used for developmental research because they and their embryos are very easily maintained in the lab. They were also extensively used in human pregnancy tests!! This article in Slate gives a good overview of the practice. Apparently it was found that a pregnant women's urine induces these frogs to produce their own eggs! So, they were quickly shipped all over the world. Of course whenever this happens you know there are escapees and thus grew a theory of how chytridiomycosis became widespread.
Due to their invasive status it is illegal to own any of these without a legal permit in many U.S. states including Oregon and Virginia. So don't think about it.
Salt Lake City soon! Am very grateful PDX has free wifi to pass the time :)

Pathogen

Pathogen

Greek

Pathos + ginomai (-gen)

Suffering, passion + to arise, to come into existence, to cause to be

Not a word with positive connotations but I was thinking about it and look what it is made of.
The construction is succinct. That is exquisite, no?

I present to you: The Western Gray Squirrel

Sciurus griseus as they are known within KINGDOM ANIMALIA! Turns out a few of my students want to spell it "Anamalia". Yeesh.

I think I mentioned them before on this blog. Or maybe it was in Tombololo...but anyways, these creatures and the ever present pine forests are one of the most obvious reminders I am not on the east coast anymore.
Their genus name, Sciurus, comes from the Greek skiouros meaning shadow-tailed because they seem to sit in the shadow of their tail. A little ominous no?

They scamper around campus all the time and today I finally had my camera ready for a picture. The first thing you notice is that these are much larger (~ one foot excluding the tail!) than their cousins the eastern gray squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis. They have bigger ears and darker gray coloring throughout the body. The western squirrel, on the left of the image, has a darker and bushier tail than the eastern.
Online it says western squirrels are very nervous and skittish but I guess the ones on campus are quite habituated to sharing the grounds with lots of people. Also, know these squirrels can bark?

In other news I am really glad there is going to be Thanksgiving Break soon! I am getting really excited for next term! I am going to dive headfirst into disease! I am so looking forward to it!!

Did I ever tell you about that time I saw a WHALE?!

Me and my friend departed Depoe Bay (~12 mi north of Newport, OR) one fateful morning in search of whales. This is the smallest harbor (of the world?) the U.S. for sure. We saw some harbor seals in Whale Cove (no whales though):

Look at that face :) That looks like Sophie!

Anyways, here is a really nice shot of a tail! When you see them dive like this, when they orient their body vertically in the water, this means they are starting a very deep dive so don't expect it to come up for a while!
All the whales we ended up seeing this day were gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. It was first described by Lilljeborg in 1861 from a Swedish fossil. The funny looking genus name "Eschrichtius" is name in honor of a colleague, zoologist Daniel Eschricht, of the author. The Atlantic population became extinct in the 18th century, most likely due to whaling but no one can say for certain... There were reports (mid-late 1600s) up and down the east coast of the US even (NY to FL) of whales having similar description to gray whales. Curious indeed. Their gray and white coloration sure does make them distinct.
And just last year there were sightings of a gray whale off the coast of Israel! This might be more common if the Arctic ice cap continues to melt at this current rate...
So what we have today are Pacific populations! Namely, the ones I saw were a part of the larger eastern Pacific group, they stay up and down the west coast of the US and Canada. There are about 20,000+ of them.
A really small separate population lives off the coast of Korea. It seems no one knows too much about this group but they are probably in trouble and there is very little if any mixing between the too groups...

We got pretty close to some individuals! Much closer than I thought we were going to get. To bad didn't have a closer shot though. Maybe we could see some barnacles!

And my favorite shot because you can see its face:
There was one whale (I think this one) that stayed on the surface of the water for a good while. Everyone was able to get good shots! So you see how white the head is? The whale is actually a nice dark slate color with some natural blotches but gray whales are also one of the most parasitized cetaceans out there! They not only serve as a free ride for barnacles and whale lice but many many other ectoparasites (parasites that live on the surface of the skin). These parasites drop off when they migrate up north and the scarring left behind creates the mottled white patterns we see. Encounters with predators like sharks and orcas can also result in white marks. Scientists can used these distinct markings to ID individuals.
Anyways wow I really got into Googling gray whales didn't I?


Lingcod! I have 1/2 of the fillet in my freezer! The deckhand whipped out his fishing pole every time we stopped to see whales. We ended up seeing 5! Not a bad day at all :)

Slug Pneumostome

I had to pick up a package one day and along the way came upon 2 neat things:

1. This is a slug. A European red slug, Arion rufus, to be more precise (aren't I always precise?). I've seen many of these around my neighborhood, they come in this reddish-brown body with a striped burnt orange foot (at first I thought they were dog turds on the ground). Anyways I never examined them closely before and never noticed that circular depression on the right side of its body. That is its pneumostome. It's breathing pore! This one is very easy to see, I wish I could've seen it breathe, I've never seen a slug breathe before. It never opened, maybe it was scared? It didn't seem scared as it did not hesitate coming towards the camera all curious and bold.














2. There is some kind of muskrat/beaver/rat thing living in the neighborhood! There is a small island in the complex that is connected to the larger wetland preservation area behind it via some aqueduct. Anyways I don't know if the creatures live in the small island or commutes in from the larger wetland but I saw 2 foraging in the small island on my way to pick up a package.
The pictures don't get any better unfortunately and there was lots of brush in the way but here you see most of its body. They must've known I was there but seemed unperturbed by my picture taking. And my camera is not quiet. Anyways I dog came by and that commotion scared them away.







Anyways, little happenings all around :)