So, my recent long blog silence has actually been a pretty productive time for me, working on various projects. I’ve managed to get quite a bit done on my dissertation project, submit two conference proposals, and get ready for teaching this upcoming semester.
The weather in Orlando lately has just been hot and humid, though it’s hard to say it’s more hot and humid than it is for essentially half of the year. We haven’t dong as much outdoorsy stuff as we’d like, but it’s a bit hard to get motivated in this weather… But one of the hikes we did do (cut short by an incipient thunderstorm) was in early July in the Little Big Econ State Forest, located NE of Orlando.
We took a short hike from the Barr St. trailhead through the forest and along the river. It was intensely green, and the water very still.
The old oak trees all had some serious epiphyte growth. Vireos, titmice, and blue-gray gnatcatchers were flitting around in the canopy, looking for food.
There were quite a few tiny young bromeliads on the mossy trunks.
A bend in the river, where an alligator suddenly churned the water to catch a fish. We also heard a bald eagle calling from this spot.
We headed back earlier than planned, because of the approaching thunderstorm. Still, it was a good short outing.
One of the things that’s a bummer about living in an apartment building is not being able to garden. Sure, we have some things growing on the porch, but we’ve had little success with that route. The two big challenges are the rabbit (who eats any plant not elevated above jumping level) and the sheer number of pests we have in Florida (our screened-in porch seems perfect for letting aphids and whiteflies in, while keeping their natural predators out). We’ve had success with chives, onions, oregano, and marjoram, but it’s hard to make a meal out of those.
At any rate, one of the things we did while visiting my father this spring was admire the gardens, and help out a bit. I use the plural because he has plants both growing around the yard and in the neighborhood community garden a few blocks away.
Right before we visited, Minnesota was named the “Most hipster state” in the US, in part because of the number of community gardens, farmer’s markets, food co-ops, and bike trails in the Twin Cities. Debate ensued, centered on whether these things were indicative of hipsters or hippies. Whatever the reason, there is plenty of fresh locally-grown food (other than during winter).
Some summer, we’ll have to time our visit to when the raspberries are ready to harvest. This year, we admired the raspberry patch, but it was way too early to sample the berries. Dad has this annoying habit of calling me in mid-summer and sighing about how he has so many raspberries that he has to bake with them or freeze them- there are just too many to eat fresh:
I'm sure they will be yummy!
A surprise- while we were in the back yard, planting a tree, a flock of wild turkeys came cruising by. These were big birds: two toms and a hen. They walked buy us, about 10 feet away, and obviously weren’t too fazed by our presence. They probably roost in the big cottonwood trees near the railroad track nearby.
They may have been hipster turkeys, because they were too cool to acknowledge us.
There was very little rain while we were there, so one order of business was to water the community garden plot. This garden is located on the property of a local church which is using most of its lot for a prairie restoration project. The prairie area is always swarming with butterflies during the summer. As you can see, most of the garden plots are still in the early stages of spring planting.
Dad, watering the garden.
One of the big questions while we were there seemed to be when the beans would sprout. We probably went to check on them every day:
The onions are doing fine, but where are the beans?
There were apparently at least two varieties planted, but I must confess that I don’t recall which, since I will not actually get to taste them. Oh well.
This week, we had to cut Noe’s nails. They were getting really long, as seen in the photo below.
The only time Noe willingly sits on a lap is when she's lured up there with a snack.
Nail-trimming time is highly traumatic for all involved. While we have a procedure, Noe starts hyperventilating as soon as she is being held in the nail-trimming position. She will also randomly kick and squirm during the experience. It’s hard not to stress her our further when she’s doing that. While I’ve only ever nicked her quick twice and drawn blood in ~9 years, it’s stressful for us, too.
We’ve settled on doing her front paws one day, and her back paws the next. While this drags out the drama, it lets her calm down between (apparently) torture sessions. It’s hard to say which set is easier- she only has 8 nails in back (10 in front), but the back nails are much thicker and darker.
We’ve seen a rabbit nail-trimming demonstration in which one person held the rabbit in their lap, said something like “If you lean them back slightly they will just relax and rest gently against you,” and proceeded to gently snip at the nails with little reaction from the rabbit. Our speculation used to be that that rabbit was drugged or something. But I’ve helped my aunt cut her rabbit’s nails, and he actually did relax and lean against her! So the issue seems to be that Noe has a bad attitude. Oh yes, she also behaves when the vet trims her nails- so it is apparently a bad attitude toward us.
So, it’s been long enough since our visit to Minnesota that a post on “spring flowers” is really delayed. Especially given the insane weather they had in the upper Midwest this week! But maybe a trip back in time to look at some nice springy plants will help with the heat.
While in the Twin Cities, we stayed with my father, who has a rather enlightened attitude about landscaping. Not for him the artificial monoculture lawn that’s been fertilized within an inch of its life and which requires massive amounts of water. No, Dad does not buy into the fertilizer-industrial complex. His lawn is a mix of at least two types of grass, ivy, moss, a tiny fern, oregano and thyme which have escaped the bounds of the herb garden, and wildflowers. It also seems to gather short, spiky spruce needles, which makes it less than fun to walk on barefoot in places, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a result of his lawn care methods… At any rate, the rest of his landscaping choices more or less mirror the lawn.
Prepping the herb garden for more plants. The errant oregano-as-lawn is on the left, under the evil spruce tree.
Although a lot of Dad’s plants have something to do with food (the aforementioned herb garden, raspberries, etc.), he also has some cute flowers. Near the driveway, there’s a big patch of native columbine:
Red columbine, Aquilegia canadensis.
We were lucky to visit while the lilacs were still blooming, perfuming the yard with their scent:
Lilacs, Syringa sp.
Finally, there’s this flower- I have no idea what it is, but it was quite pretty, and fuzzy when seen up close:
On our Great Lakes trip, we did some birding at the Minnesota River National Wildlife Refuge near Bloomington. This spring’s flooding put a bit of a damper on it, in that several trails at the refuge were flooded out. But we saw some cool things anyway. Warblers, flycatchers, and woodpeckers at the visitor center, and more warblers, geese, and swallows elsewhere. There were also a fair number of mammals- including white-tailed deer and muskrats.
The muskrats were just concentrating on eating, and pretty much tolerated our presence.
After visiting the visitor center, we took a trail near the Old Cedar Avenue Bridge, unsurprisingly called that because it has been replaced by the new Cedar Avenue Bridge.
The Old Cedar Avenue Bridge, with the new bridge in tha background (Y. Fernandez)
There’s a boardwalk on this path with a viewing platform in the river. The high water level made this a really interesting experience. I’m assuming that the water level is usually lower, and the area seems more marshy. There was no way to escape the feeling that we were actually walking through the river.
Cliff swallow resting on the boardwalk (Y. Fernandez)
There were quite a few swallows flying around, as well as the ubiquitous red-winged blackbirds.
Blackbird staking out his claim on some pretty soggy territory (Y. Fernendez)
At the end of the boardwalk, the river had covered the path, making the observation deck seem very much like an island in all the water.
Floating in the river.
We were surrounded by slowly-moving water, with swallows and damselflies swooping around us constantly. The experience really reminded me of the sequence in Ponyo in which the sea floods a coastal village and everyone gets around by boating along over the roadways. However, we didn’t see any Devonian fish or trilobites coming up underneath us, like in the movie. Which admittedly was a good thing!
The platform had obviously been used as a goose resting area recently...
On the way out, Yan stopped to take some photos of damselflies, while I was trying to identify a duck seen really far off. I’m not sure what species they are:
Female damselfly? (Y. Fernandez)
I do think they’re a male and female of the same species, though. Any suggestions?
Male damselfly? (Y. Fernandez)
Unfortunately, we had to cut our time there short because we had dinner plans (which turned out to be excellent, so we really didn’t complain). I will say that I had one of my weirder birding bathroom experiences on this excursion. Because the NWR visitor’s center closed while we were there, we stopped at a Nordstrom’s in the Mall of America to use their facilities. The juxtaposition of the muddy river and the biggest mall in the U.S. was a bit of a strange experience, but certainly more pleasant than the alternative.
I never managed to identify that duck, though... (Y. Fernandez)
While at Interstate State Park, we witnessed a dramatic rescue of a gosling, swimming through the rapids of the St. Croix River. We were taking photos of the river when we started to hear agitated honking by what sounded like a flock of goslings. The water was pretty choppy, and we had trouble spotting them at first.
High water on the St. Croix (Y. Fernandez)
Eventually, we saw two adult geese, on a shallow ledge just upstream of a fenced-off boat ramp at the water’s edge. There seemed to be one gosling with them, looking exhausted. But where was the noise from the other birds coming from?
You can see the geese behind the fence. (Y. Fernandez)
It turns out that the other birds were on the downstream side of the fence, paddling together in in an eddy. It looks like what happened is one of the goslings got separated from the rest, and the parents went to fetch it while the other babies stayed put. They were making a lot of noise, so clearly they weren’t happy with the situation.
The parents collect the straggler (Y. Fernandez)
After the lone gosling was collected, the parents launched into the choppy water, and the other goslings swam out to meet them. They formed a tight flotilla as they were buffeted downstream by the waves. Rescue complete!
Stay close together! (Y. Fernandez)
Be well, geese, and may you find calmer waters downstream.
Metaphors in science can be powerful things- they can provide unifying frameworks for thinking about the world, suggest exciting new insights, or at times color our interpretations so that what we see is what we expect to see. Science is communicated to non-scientists largely through metaphors. Sometimes these communication strategies work, and at other times they don’t.
One of the key metaphors used to describe the pattern of descent with modification or evolution over time is the image of a branching tree. I’ve discussed some of the limitations of the tree metaphor in a previous post; essentially, it’s difficult for us to discard the misleading aspects of the tree metaphor while using other associations to communicate about the pattern of evolution. A current PLoS Biology paper by David Penny points out the problems of conflating a branching pattern of evolution in general with cultural associations of a “tree of life” (an image found in varying forms in several cultures), and points out that the tree metaphor only gives us part of the picture.
But do we have to use a tree metaphor at all? Certainly, the tree does a good job of illustrating common descent, and an okay job of showing the formation of new species (species can form through mechanisms like hybridization that the tree isn’t good at depicting). But no metaphor is perfect. Biologists have used other visual metaphors in the past, such as complex systems of symmetry-based relationships, or maps based on ecological affinities of species, but these have their problems as well.
In my graduate work, I’m using digital tools to expand the range of metaphors we have to communicate about evolution, by creating a dynamic evolutionary map. I’m focusing on avian evolution and the pattern of diversification of bird orders over time. I’ll be writing more about this project in the upcoming months, but in this post I want to share the basic draft pattern of the visualization.
The visualization spans a time period from the Cretaceous (in which we see the hypothesized origin of birds) to the present. This series of gifs is the draft version of the evolution of bird orders over time; each dot represents an order (with some exceptions). When the project is finished, viewers will be able to animate the orders forward in time, as well as examine relationships among orders and the evidence for shared descent. I’m already planning some changes near the beginning of the sequence, based on recent molecular studies. The numbers and cross-hairs will also not be in the final version (I’ve been using them to help me keep track of all the orders as I animate it). You should be able to get a sense for how the animation progresses by clicking through this slideshow:
I know it’s a cliche to say “It seemed bigger when I was younger,” but I’ll say it anyway in this post. One of the places we visited on our recent trip to the Great Lakes was Interstate State Park, on the St. Croix River between Minnesota and Wisconsin near the town of Taylors Falls. We actually visited the MN park– there’s also a park on the WI side.
St. Croix River at Interstate State Park (Y. Fernandez)
This park was a pretty memorable spot that we visited frequently when we were younger, and it’s still pretty interesting. In this area, the St. Croix River form a deep gorge through a layer of basalt- very old basalt. The rock here was laid down during a continental rifting event around 1.1 billion years ago. Later, sandstone and siltstone were laid down by a shallow sea during the Cambrian. Much, much later, glacial meltwater during the last Ice Age carved the St. Croix River valley.
Cliffs along the St. Croix (Y. Fernandez)
While the most obvious geological feature here is the cliffs, with their irregularly-fractured angles, there are a bunch of other features. An informational kiosk at the parking lot has a map of features like glacial potholes. These formed when rocks were caught in whirlpools and eddies in the river, and eventually scoured out vertical shafts in the rocks. Some of these pothiles were big enough to walk into:
Looking up from the interior of a pothole- the hole is about a meter across.
Others were smaller in size. This one reminded me of a lava tree mold:
This pothole was in a boggy area, probably with more potholes concealed underneath (Y. Fernandez)
This is an interesting place to stop if you’re interested in geology. There were also a lot of birds. A stiff breeze when we were there meant that the paddleboat tours were closed down for the day. It would be fun to go back at some point and canoe down the river- though not during the spring thaw season…
