Look who's out of the water!

Trapped! In a glass prison!
I was changing his tank yesterday and recreated his beach but this time added a cushy bed of sphagnum moss on top of the pebbles. It holds a lot of moisture and is definitely more comfortable to move around in than the pebbles.

Phaeton completely out of the water now! He lost a lot of weight during the 'Time of Great Change'. I would like to find more varying food sources for him now, though the worms have been great and very nutritious.

Phaeton Update - Hooray for lungs!

One of my favorite pictures of Phaeton. His eyes were so sparkly!

Balancing on his decorative jars.

Learning to breathe!!

I collected this shedding. It was a nice big continuous piece too.

Mar 12 - What welcomed me as I came in this morning! He was trying so hard to get up there! I have to collect some moss and dirt now and fix him up a new tank soon!

"Of the House"

This House Sparrow is a resident of Montmartre! What a life it must lead! The best pastry leftovers to feast on!
My uncle took me here last March (wow a year already!) and these are the most fearless sparrows I have met. I could not have been standing more than 4 ft when I took this shot!

I was originally going to start this piece off by discussing the House Sparrow, Passer domesticus, perhaps the most pedestrian of winged creatures. But I think the bigger story here is how we choose to look at the world and value critters like the "lowly" P. domesticus. So here we go:

I think many of you who know me know that I can easily find most anything interesting and thus worthy of a few minutes of contemplation. But I realize that trait is not present for everyone out there. There have been some posts where I thought readers would lose interest for sure due to the seemingly dull subject matter discussed. You know I can't hold giant birds every week :) So sometimes I do think to myself: "Is anyone going to care about this slug I found on my walk?" or "Will anyone be interested in corn tiling and field drainage?"

Eh. But I start writing anyways because sometimes it's a slow week. And you know what, no matter what it is, there is always a story to be told. Dig deeper and suddenly everything has a fascinating narrative.

There are many people in science who seek out those narratives, who see something overlooked and throw it under a microscope (I can think of a few right now as I type)! Chief among them, in my mind at least, is Rob Dunn of NC State. He is a lover of all creatures, especially ones that are oft under appreciated and/or looked upon scornfully. Thanks to him, Passer domesticus is enjoying a little bit of the lime light this past week due to a great article written by him on Smithsonian.com! It really is awesome so refill your cup, sit back and enjoy :)

He is a proponent of urban ecology which simply seeks to investigate the ecology of urban spaces. Pretty straight forward right? Why hasn't anyone done this before?? Well, what's the first image you have when you think of an ECOLOGIST? Charles Darwin chasing finches on the Galapagos Islands? Jane Goodall hanging with primates? Perhaps Jacques Cousteau descending into the murky depths?

Surely it is not some dude or chick rummaging around the train tracks for bugs! Well, make room at table because there is some new blood up in here! OK, so it's not so new but the field is still very small. The predominate thought, that nature is what happens when people are not around, is simply not true. But as kids (and adults) we grow up on books and media showcasing the lands and organisms of the far-removed African savannah, boreal forests, and colorful reef systems and yet, know extremely little about the very system we are a part of.

I attended an entomology lecture at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum one afternoon long, long ago and though the memory is very blurry, I do recall that a group of scientists did a bug survey in a local marsh-type area near someone's house in Virginia and ended up finding an array of species and abundances they were not expecting. The speaker happily exclaimed that you need not always travel to exotic locales to make fun discoveries. That's not to say everyone should stop doing that research, but just that we ought to take care to not overlook our own backyards, even though the view may not make much of a postcard.

It's obvious that urban systems are their own unique ecosystem. No one planned on building a home for anything else but humans when they made the first cities/settlements. But adapt nature did! There are pigeons, rats, bedbugs, ants, mice, roaches, sparrows and a plenty more! All pests you say? Well, yes - to us. But they are just creatures making the best of it; and how can they resist when we've made it so easy? We give them food, space, shelter and to some, a warm body to snuggle up to at night! Sure, there are things like exterminators and house cats, but somehow I think the bedbug and pigeon populations are managing all right. One interesting note, many of those creatures probably stood out as disease carriers right? It makes sense that many wildlife-to-human diseases are transmitted to us via these hardy critters because those are the guys we live around and thus most commonly come into contact with. *Note to self: discuss this aspect more in detail in a later post.*

Anyways, it is almost midnight now so I leave you with some urban species, mainly of the avian form:

Another Montmartre House sparrow

Paroaria coronata, introduced to Hawaii

Spotted dove, Spilopelia chinensis, introduced all around the Pacific, it is fast replacing native doves in Australia. This one I found on Oahu.
European starling, Sturnus vulgaris. Christ, it's species name is vulgaris! Hahahaha. Ok really, the Latin word vulgaris means 'of the common people' or something to that effect. There are many near my apartment. I actually like the sound these birds make; they are known to be great mimics and are capable of a range of weird quirky noises. They usually have a very mechanical sound which I find infinitely amusing. Is that a machine or bird outside my window??

Evolution...with Crayons!

This video is amazing! I wish I had these animation skills!

This article over at Scientific American explains how it was made.

New Field Guide...for Microbes??

A crazy microbiologist from UC Davis wants to make a field guide for microbes!

Although it probably won't be as popular as the long standing field guides for birds and flowers it will definitely be just as beautiful:

People love knowing the nature around them. You see it in your wild-haired neighbor who plans his trips around bird migrations. OK so not everyone is like this but many are to varying degrees. It feels good to know what lives around you, that's why field guides are so popular. There are whole subcultures of folks who are devoted to a taxa. I remember as a kid my sister and me would check out books about dog, cat and horse breeds from the library and try to learn as many as we could. My brother had his sharks book. And we weren't the only ones, many children are like this! I can distinctly remember a desire to catalog/collect things in my head and put them into some order so I could wrap my mind around it.

When you get older you start doing it with easily 'collectible' things like birds and flowers or shells. There is a satisfying sense of mastery associated with 'collecting.' I often see it in people I meet birding, everyone feeling like like they understand all the ins and outs of their chosen domain. And this is a great thing! (Though it can sometimes come across as conceit). But this is where a lot of natural science people come from!

Ugh, if I had more time we can discuss citizen science and hobbyist vs. professional routes...but alas, such is the fleeting presence of Time in grad school. So this idea of a field guide for microbes is interesting to me. Even as I am getting more and more entrenched in the microbial world I am finding it hard to locate easily digestible pieces written on them. One thing that popular writing in field guides does is make nature more accessible to for everyone. I wonder if it will be hard for people to care though if they don't own a microscope or something to see the critters with but their presence will be appreciated. Most people are aware microbes are everywhere and have a huge impact on our world (even if most don't understand what that impact is).

Anyways before I rush off to my Friday routine here is a quote I'm sure I've posted before from one of my favorite movies, it certainly doesn't wholly apply to everyone but I think the basic sentiment is true:

"There are too may ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, was that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size." -Adaptation

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!