It's Alive!

Lord Howe Island Stick Insect hatching from Zoos Victoria on Vimeo.

I found a cool NPR story on a rediscovered stick insect, Dryococelus australis, off the coast of Australia! It was thought to be extinct after a British ship ran aground and the rats onboard made the island their new home and ate all the insects! Some intrepid sleuthing turned up a small population still surviving! Here is the original story:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/02/24/147367644/six-legged-giant-finds-secret-hideaway-hides-for-80-years

I love news (and better yet stories!) of rediscovered organisms. It's got a different taste than a story of a newly discovered one, although that is always exciting too. Tales of rediscovery have a a romantic bent to them don't they? The tragic loss of something from this world...stretches of time go by and then one day the local murmurs of the creatures' sighting! A team is hastily put together and sent out! The journey is difficult, expensive, long, tedious, sometimes unfruitful. But sometimes they are not and you have a rediscovered walking stick insect! A rainbow frog back from the dead!

Lots more cool science news. Have not had time to update this blog and there are few field excursions in my life as of late but hang on! Spring and Summer are fast approaching!

Egg collecting

This past Saturday I went with my lab to collect some egg masses. It turned out to be a gorgeous day and the sites were so nice! I could get used to this :)


These are Pseudacris regilla, Pacific Tree frog, eggs. These guys are very common and they have been calling for over a week now. The eggs are smaller than Rana aurora (below) and fresh ones have a pearly yellowish iridescence to them. They remind me of tiger's eye gemstones.
This massive blob belongs to Rana aurora, the Northern Red-legged frog. They quickly became my favorite after I saw some adults for the first time! They were the easiest to see as they are pretty large. Many of the masses had little white dots sprinkled on them like parmesan cheese. That is the evil water mold genus: Saprolegnia. Saprolegnia degrades dead tissue and protein! Ew! People mainly study it as it pertains to fish stock and the aquaculture industry but it can affect amphibians too!
This is a Northwestern salamander, Ambystoma gracile, egg mass. Thus far, the squishy-ness of the red-legged and pacific tree frog masses have not bothered me. They are clear, they look like clear jello/raw egg whites and they certainly feel like that. But these eggs are so weird!!! You see how it has a defined shape in this picture? The other masses are basically a loose blob. But NW salamander eggs are clustered in an oval shaped mass around a rigid reed/stick/stem of some kind. There was one pond that had submerged tree branches and there were TONS of A. gracile masses hanging off those branches.
Here you can see a A. gracile mass out of water. Notice how the shape keeps it forms? When you squeeze one it is very dense and hard. It's soft, squishy and hard at the same time. What?! I know. It's a paradox. OK, not really but still pretty neat!

A quick search revealed the jelly is deposited around the egg in layers and that without it, the egg can't be fertilized...Interesting indeed! The goopy substance is a mix of protein, some things called hexose and hexosamine, and other compounds. I was surprised to see there was not that much stuff out there about the jelly-like substance. I will have to dig around to find out more about it.

In other news, meet my new friend Phaeton:



He is a Northwestern salamander! Yes so he came from one of those dense egg masses! He is two years old (He might be a she, I really have no idea at this point but I'm calling Phaeton a boy). They collected him and his siblings and took them back to the lab where they started eating each other! Typical. So they separated and housed them in plastic cups. They don't do anything with them so me and two other grads students from another amphibian lab took them as office pets. He was the most active of the three constantly swimming up and down in the cup and peering up at me, so I named him after the Greek mythological figure Phaeton. Sharp readers might remember this name from an old blog post about the genus name of the red-tailed tropicbird, Phaeton rubricauda! I thought it was fitting. Although I do not intend to strike him down with a thunderbolt as Zeus did!
In his new tank he has a lot more room to swim; the glass walls let him peer out at his surroundings for the first time! He likes to perch on top of the white tubes sometimes when we have one of our telepathic mind conversations. Right now his home is pretty sparse, just a tank with his 2 white hiding tubes on the bottom, but I am changing his water tomorrow and have brown gravel and a fake plant waiting for him :D

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!!