Mola Mola! Woah baby!

Imagine for a moment you are boating out across the ocean  on a calm day with barely a ripple on the water, but from time to time you see this large black thing stick up above the surface and kinda pivoting around before disappearing under the water again  then surfacing a few minutes later. You dismiss this first sighting as just a log or other piece of debris floating in a vast ocean. Days later you see it again not once but twice in the same day near the same spot. Moving water rarely allows floating debris to stay in the same place for very long. You decide now is time to make a detour and slowly approach the "waving debris" only to find it attached to a very large floating pancake like looking creature!

Photo By Allen Hack taken in Alaska sourced from Flicker

A giant sunfish swims by just below the surface of the water. The picture that Allan Hack took up in Alaska is similar to the size and shape of those seen swimming recently in the Gulf of Maine in during the summer of 2018.

While these bizarre looking fish are common in temperate and tropical oceans they tend to spend much of their time hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean. I knew there had been quite a few giant sunfish spotted by various tour boats such as mine in and around Frenchman's Bay. So, I did some Googling and came across OceanSunfish.org which has a really cool map where people can log their sightings. Too bad I hadn't known about this sooner or I would have logged all the ones I saw over the summer. Scouring the sunfish shapes I found only one logged sighting from last summer. Coolest sighting was back in the summer of 2007 when 15 swimming in and around a tour boat in  Frenchman's Bay.

If you search through the reports of "odd" fish sightings in local papers around Maine you come across years where so many are spotted they create a newsworthy buzz and other years few reported sightings are spotted. This year one local paper quoted a local captain as saying they spotted as many as twenty sunfish per trip around the Frenchmans Bay area. So why were so many spotted this summer? Scientist have no real concrete answer to this question however, there are a number of theories swirling around. While these fish prefer to spend their time swimming the deep depths from time to time they will surface and swim around gathering heat at the ocean's surface. To maximize the amount of collected heat they will float on their sides to not only expose the a large amount of surface area to the sun. The other benefit to this sun warming is the fish can attract sea birds to it to help remove parasites attached to it's skin.

A second possibility is even after they have warmed up they maybe staying near the surface to eat jellyfish.  Mola molas eat a wide variety of things from algae to small fish and appear to have a thing for eating jellyfish. This year in the Gulf of Maine we had an abundance of jellyfish swimming around. I can say for a fact that this year I saw a number of the lion's mane jellyfish floating around especially out near the lighthouse and a few dead ones washed up on the beach. Come for the heat and stay for the all you can eat jellyfish buffet. One researcher who studies jellyfish populations noted there appear to be more mola mola sightings in the Gulf of Maine during summers when there happen to be jellyfish population booms. Cool huh! While no one knows just how many mola molas there maybe swimming below the surface of Maine waters they are quite the sight to behold and by some accounts maybe just as interested in us as we are in them. Hope to get lucky enough to see one in the future.




Want to know more?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/o/ocean-sunfish/
https://news.mongabay.com/2017/07/new-species-of-giant-sunfish-discovered/
https://mlcalliance.org/2014/09/13/strange-sunfish-seen-in-maine-waters/
https://bangordailynews.com/2018/09/03/environment/mainers-marvel-over-sightings-of-odd-looking-alien-fish/
http://oceansunfish.org/
https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/local/massive-lions-mane-jellyfish-gives-acadia-tourists-a-roaring-sight/97-575129403

Maggots are running all over the lab!!!!

Caveat: The names of others involved in this story to protect the innocent.

In every job that I have ever had there is this little line which always makes me cringe a bit "Other duties as assigned." When you work as an environmental education instructor that can mean a HUGE variety of things from getting up at the crack of dawn to drive to practically the other side of the state to man a booth at a local job fair to mucking out animal cages. Some of these "other duties" can get pretty interesting.


Background for this story.

In the summer of 2003 I took a job working as a research technician working as part of a multidisciplinary research project to look at the biodiversity and other factors at a local national guard training base. My boss was a well known entomologist and one of only a hand full of forensic entomologists at the time.

Let the hilarity begin.

One afternoon I got a call from my boss asking me to pick up a box from his office and take it over and put it in the fume hood in the lab. "People are complaining about the smell" he added before hanging up the phone.  I ran across the street hopped into the elevator and pushed 5 to take me up to his office.  Bing! Doors open and immediately I am hit with a smell I cannot quite describe and it seems to get worse the closer I get to his office. With a little bit of trepidation I knock on his office door. Bam! the full force of the unknown stench hits me in the nose as he ushers me into his very small office, at best this office was five feet by seven feet, trying not to breathe he points to the box. "Those are insect samples from an investigation. Just raise them to adults and then kill off the rest."  I nodded headed back to the elevator trying my best not to breathe. Now, I have smelled my fair share of garbage, roadkill, and large amounts of animal poop and never once could I be called squeamish, but the smell coming from this box was like the worst versions of all of those smells rolled into one mega stink. I nervously smiled as people got on the elevator trying to pretend that I was not the cause of the stomach turning stench in the elevator. Back at the lab I put the whole box in the fume hood and turned it on and waited a few minutes before opening the box. I opened the box and quickly slammed the lid back on. Great, crime scene photos....close up......large format.....too soon after lunch for that. I grabbed a legal sized folder stuffed all the photos and copies of the police report and dropped them off in my bosses research office.  I carefully transferred some egg cases, larva, "food", and sawdust from each evidence containers to specimen containers following the instructions given to me.  Now to wait for them to do their metamorphosis thing. Everything went fine for the first five days, but on the sixth day things started to go horribly wrong. I keyed open the door flipped on the light and saw maggots running allover the place. Maggots were racing across the countertop, falling out from under the fume hood and racing across the floor. I raced to the hood and stood there and watched the maggots squeezing their way out through the tiny holes in the lid of the specimen container. I replaced the lid to the container and disposed of the escapees. For the next three days I arrived to the same scenario. 

Day three I raced to one of the graduate student's office for help. Since he was assisting with the forensic conference happening on campus I figured he would be a good source of help.

Short version of what happened next
Me: "The maggots are running everywhere!"
Brian: Laughter.
Me: "They are escaping through the holes in the top of the  one container."
Brian: "Try making the air holes smaller."
Me: "Tried that three times. They just keep squeezing through."

After a few minutes of watch the Houdini maggots squeeze through the newly replaced lid again.

Brian: "We need Rob."
We waited for a break in conference and approached Rob, noted forensic entomologist, for help.
After explaining the the problem he agreed to have a look and offer some suggestions. The three of use stood there watching them slither out of the container.
Rob: "They aren't happy."
Me: "Pardon?"
Rob: "There is something about their environment in that container they don't like so they are fleeing to find a better habitat."
Me: "All four containers of maggots have the same stuff and the others are not escaping."
Rob: "That's because their happy."
Me: I stood there silently staring at him. "So, how does one make a happy maggot? "
Rob: He shrugged before suggesting. "Change their food, give them different bedding, push the container further back in the hood. Just keep changing things and eventually their will stay put." 
Me: "What food would you suggest?"
Rob: "Raw hamburger or liver is what I use."
Rob returned to the conference leaving Brian and I to ponder things. After a few minutes of discussion we headed to a local mom and pop shop which sold everything you could ever need and more. We tackled getting a bucket of sawdust first from the lumber yard out back before looking for hamburger. We stood in front of the counter looking at an array of hamburger; lean, extra lean, fatty trying to decide what type of hamburger to buy. The cheerful counter clerk after watching us whisper back and forth for a few minutes decided to offer her assistance.
Clerk: "If you tell me what your making I can help you decide on which hamburger. " she said with a smile.
I looked at Brian who was shaking is head back and forth. I decided to go all in.
Me: "We have a problem with some maggots we are raising in the lab and it has been suggested that we buy them hamburger to feed them since they don't seem to like what we are feeding them right now."
The clerk stood there mouth slightly open stunned into silence for a few minutes.
Clerk: "What are they eating now?" asked with trepidation.
Me: "Chicken liver."
The three of us stood there looking back and forth shrugging before we all started to giggle. We eventually settled on getting some lean hamburger for our legless friends. Their habitat was rebuilt new sawdust, layer of newspaper at the bottom to absorb more moisture, larger container, and the lean hamburger. The good news was they stopped escaping got nice and fat, but NEVER pupated. All the other containers pupated and developed into adults, but not these little maggots. They stayed that way for months. My boss would come to the lab ever so often to see if any adults had emerged or if they began to pupate, but after two months of waiting the decision was made to save a few of the larva and kill everyone else off.

I still don't understand why exactly they didn't complete their life cycle. Never had that happen to any other maggots or any other insects we were raising in the museum. We tried at one point to see if there was a way we could keep the cockroaches from growing up and creating more cockroaches thinking if we could manage to pull that off we could become millionaires and sell our technique to the Orkin guy who came by every so often to train the new pest control people.  

What the great big ball of snot is this?

I try my best when creating new programs to try to anticipate questions I might get, problems I might run into while doing the program, but every now and then all my years of school and every ounce of research fails to help answer the question; "What's that?" Sometimes I just have to snap a quick picture with my cellphone and then research it later.

So quick snap number one:

What I knew at the time: it moved like a leach, lives in saltwater, and fell out of a lobsters mouth.

So what is it? Our slimy friend here is the termite of the ocean known as a shipworm. Now just which of the many species of shipworm this might be I have not the first clue. Unlike what their name implies they are not actually worms they are in fact clams. If you were to zoom in on the top of the shipworms head, towards the top of this photo, you would find some hard calcareous structures which act as rasps and allows it to bore its way into a piece of wood where those wood bits are digested by a symbiotic bacteria which live inside the shipworm. These little critters helped the British defeat the Spanish Armada because the shipworms had so riddled the wood of the ships they damaged more easily when struck by cannon fire. Since shipworms could cripple a naval fleet when ships such as the USS Constitution were commissioned they were required to be built with overlapping copper panels to keep the shipwoms from destroying the hull. Even in modern days shipworms are estimated to cause about a billion dollars in damage to wooden structured around the world! Oh, whatever you don't Google videos of Giant Shipworms!


Quick snap number two:   

What I knew at the time: it was covered in mucus, appeared to have a large hole in the "top" of the creature, had a large suction cup like foot similar to a snail, it was in a lobster trap with a bunch of crabs, about the size of a wiffle ball. 

So what is it? Well I still have no idea. I posted this picture along with the above description a number of different places looking for help sadly to no avail. What it might be is a moon snail which has been pulled out of its shell or there is also a possibility it was a sea slug. Now I have seen lots of moon snail shells on beaches from time to time especially after a large storm, but I have never seen a shell with a snail still in it. Some snail shells have other occupants in them like this one.

Hermit crab hides out in a moon snail shell.

After having looked at a number of photographs of moon snail meat I feel somewhat confident that the big ball of slimy brown stuff may in fact be a moon snail. If anyone out there reading this has a better idea of what this is please feel free to let me know!  

Hello Lumpy!

Wow, it has been a really long time since I had a chance to update this blog. Work has been running at a breakneck speed for a while and now that the season is beginning to slow down I have a little more time to get back to this.

Over the the summer many new strange things have swum, crawled, slithered, or suctioned their way into the lobster traps. One such wondrous creature was this strange looking fish.

 

 "What is it?" our boat captain looked at me as be both debated if it was safe to touch. Racking my brain I quickly tried to mentally picture every poisonous fish in the North Atlantic that I knew of  before looking at him and shrugging. Throwing caution and better judgment out the window I grabbed a fisherman's glove and extracted our fun looking trap invader.   

After a few minutes of holding our fish friend I knew just a little bit more about it: the white belly of the fish was flat and sort of concave, and the large lateral black spots were hard lumps. Clueless I sent the picture to a friends who use to work at an aquarium who told me it was a lumpfish. 

To Google I went to find out more about our new found friend. These are some seriously cool fish. 

Cool Fact #1: The belly of the lumpfish acts as a giant suction cup allowing it to stick itself fast to a rock and lay in wait for food to go swimming by.

Cool Fact #2: An 18 inch female lumpfish can lay 136,000 eggs at once. These eggs glue together to form one large mass which sinks to the bottom of the ocean where the male will stand guard over them fanning them with his fins to make sure no silt or debris settles onto them. The male will continue to fan them stopping only to drive off interloping predators. The male will not eat until after the eggs hatch. Some norther European counties sell lumpfish eggs as a cheap caviar.

Cool Fact #3: They can get really big!! They have been found in the wild to be about 2 feet in length and weighing about 21 pounds.

Cool Fact #4: Some tracked lumpfish have migrated 187-364 miles.

Cool Fact #5: They are being used in commercial fish farming operations as a predator for salmon lice! 





Want to know more
 http://www.gma.org/fogm/Cyclopterus_lumpus.htm
 http://waves-vagues.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/Library/365981.pdf
 http://sciencenordic.com/breeding-gluttons-battle-against-salmon-lice
 https://www.hatcheryinternational.com/research/breeding-super-lice-eater-lumpsuckers-1468?jjj=1536960262896

Would a wolf eat a cabbage?

One day while out for a walk I was listening to one of my favorite science podcasts The Infinite Monkey Cage. If you have never listen to an episode of this particular podcast I highly recommend giving it a listen. If you are anything like me then you will be confused, inspired, and laughing so hard you might pee your pants. In one particular episode one of the following brain teaser was posed:
                                   

A farmer is returning from market, where he bought a goat, a wolf and cabbage. On the way home he must cross a river. His boat is little, allowing him to take only one of the three things. He can’t keep the goat and the cabbage together (because the goat would eat it), nor the goat with the wolf (because the goat would be eaten). How shall the farmer get everything on the other side (without any harm)?

If you need the answer to this riddle click here. There was much questioning about if a wolf would ever eat a cabbage, most said no while one panelist stuck to his guns and said wolves practice selective vegetarianism. If you're screaming "wolves are carnivores!" at your screen right at the moment take a deep breath and let's ponder somethings.  

Let's begin by thinking about domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) a close relative to wolves (Canis lupus). Ask anyone if a dog is a carnivore, herbivore, or omnivore and they will enthusiastically shout "Carnivore! After all they have those large sharp pointy teeth and are related to wolves." Not so fast there friends. Dogs are classified into the Order Carnivora, but not all members of the Order are carnivorous (getting the nutrient and energy strictly from a diet of meat.)

 
Penny and Diesel

Meet Penny (left) and Diesel (right) they belong to friends of mine and can be the funniest two characters around. Favorite things to eat ANYTHING food flavored. Along with the standard dry dog food these two love BACON! (Is there a dog alive that will not eat bacon.) They also have a huge love for green beans, broccoli, and OMG! ARE YOU EATING AN APPLE!! GIME SOME PLEASE! This picture was taken while my friend was trying to enjoy an afternoon snack of apples. From the minute an apple appears from the fridge Diesel turns into a drool monster. Drips of drool drop from his lips as he watches someone eat an apple. These two genuinely love their fruits and veggies! 

If you are thinking they only want it because someone else is eating it then ponder this. Over the past summer a beautiful garden full of fresh veggies was planted in the yard and in the minds of these two fur babies it was all for them. One afternoon while my friend was picking veggies Penny grabbed an entire stalk of broccoli and was caught red pawed as she tried to sneak away. These two are not isolated cases of dogs eating fruits and veggies more than willingly a casual glance at many of my friends Facebook posts, about the family dog's eating habits, shows fruit and veggie thievery to be common second only thievery of  bacon. 

Through the process of domestication a series of genes became favored which allow domesticated dogs to be able to breakdown starch and glucose found in plant material. Dogs tend to be much more omnivores than true carnivores eating a variety of fruits and veggies and often eating grasses even when they are not ill. Dogs as omnivores is not without its controversy though. Click here to read an argument for dogs as carnivores.

If you do a quick YouTube search of dogs eating cabbages you can watch dogs eat and fight over who gets to eat the cabbage. Don't worry I checked cabbage is safe for dogs.  

Great case closed....not so fast. Wolves are much older, in an evolutionary scale, than domesticated dogs are. Looking at the vast amount of research available on wolf diets plant material makes up such a small part of their total diet and since they can go at times weeks without eating, I think the selective vegetarian argument might be too big of a stretch. Berries and grasses on occasion sure, pine needles and flowers ok, but a wolf looking at a cabbage and thinking "I'll eat that" might be going a little too far.With so many sources of meat available to wolves and their adaptations to a feast or famine environment I think there might be a whole lot of things wolves would eat before becoming a vegetarian. Also, after searching numerous phrases I could not come up with any research on selective vegetarianism in wolves. 

Searching as best I could to come up with a 100% conclusive answer I am still at a loss. I guess to put this question to rest we need a large field of cabbages some motion sensor cameras, and a couple of packs of wolves to see if at any time even one genetically verified wolf eats a cabbage, until then everyone keep searching for answers.  

Want to know more:

 HART, B. L. (2009). Why do dogs and cats EAT GRASS?. Firstline, 5(12), 22. 

 https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201412/why-dogs-eat-grass-myth

 http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Canis_lupus_familiaris/

 http://vetnutrition.tufts.edu/2016/07/vegan-dogs-a-healthy-lifestyle-or-going-against-nature/

 http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/03/10/vegan.dog.diet/index.html

 http://www.vetstreet.com/our-pet-experts/are-dogs-carnivores-heres-what-new-research-says

 https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/6698A301900EEDF10E49B062A2BD9ED8/S0007114514002311a.pdf/dietary_nutrient_profiles_of_wild_wolves_insights_for_optimal_dog_nutrition.pdf

 http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Carnivora/

 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1376015?seq=6#page_scan_tab_contents

 https://www.slu.se/globalassets/ew/org/inst/ekol/forskning/projekt/skandulv/publikationer/studentarbeten/muller-2006-diet-composition-of-wolves-on-the-scandinavian-peninsula-determined-by-scat-analysis.pdf?si=C5298030A14DC3A8FC481AABCA982AEF&rid=488385901&sn=sluEPi6-prodSearchIndex

 http://www.askabiologist.org.uk/answers/viewtopic.php?id=4674

Butterflies and Moths Yummy or Terrifying?

After this post you may never look a butterflies and moths the same way again. This investigation began like so many others with a question which caught my attention on a reality show this past week where a child asked; "Can you eat a butterfly?" Huh interesting idea, I thought to myself. The short answer is yes, but it is probably easier and more nutritious to eat them as larva. 

There are some famously huge butterflies out there such as the Queen Alexandra's Birdwing

Photo By Bruno Ramos from Creative Commons

This butterfly has over a nine inch wingspan! They live in the Australasia / Indomalaya (Australia) ecozone. There is also an impressive relation of the butterfly the Atlas Moth which also boasts an impressive 9.8 inch wingspan. (This is the spot that I would love to put the picture of my friend Jon with an Atlas moth sitting on his face but sadly my computer ate it.) 

Photo by Nevit Dilmen From Creative Commons

Now while the wings of these two insects are rather large the bodies are rather small. And those bodies are covered in small scales which slough off rather easily. Eating that to me would be like eating a lint covered jellybean. Now after doing some searching I stumbled across an interesting paper published in 2013 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations about edible insects and food security in it they have a small section on butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera). They point out that most of the butterflies and moths consumed around the world are done so when they are in the larval form as squishy caterpillars.

Now I don't live in the tropics (neither did the child who sparked this post) so, I am going to consider just a few of the lovable squishy nuggets you can find in my back yard. There are about 118 butterfly species which call the entire state of Maine home. I am immediately ruling out eating anything that has little tiny hairs/spines. There are some caterpillars out there which have chemicals on or in those hairs which cause something known as lepidopterism which is a skin condition caused by coming in contact which these tiny hairs. You can also get a number of injuries caused by moth larva which are collectively referred to in the medical community as erucism. PLEASE DO NOT FREAK OUT AND SMASH EVERY CATERPILLAR WITH SPINES! JUST LEAVE THEM ALONE AND DO NOT PET THEM!

        
                          

I am also ruling out anything that tastes bad to a bird, frog, toad, other insects, or reptiles if it doesn't taste good to them it more than likely will not taste good to me either. You know what this suddenly seems way too complicated, because after I sort through all 118 butterfly species here in Maine and  rule out all exclusions I then still have to test them a little at a time to make sure that I am not allergic to them. So, while yes you can eat them by the time you narrow any list down to those you personally can eat you more than likely could have rounded up a whole bunch of crickets or even a few tasty other critters out there which we already know are edible. 





Want more information
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4028003/
http://www.vapaguide.info/catalogue/MIS-76
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190962206017117
https://www.quora.com/Are-moths-dangerous-to-humans-Why
https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/772949-overview
http://mbs.umf.maine.edu/maine-species-list/

Also Just for fun I recommend watching this: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/beetle-survives-toad-vomit-animals/

What the Itch!

                                       
Now is the time of year where people start dreaming of spring and strolling down the street after work reveling in the fact that it is still light enough to do just that. Others are sick of dealing with what my mom always referred to as "winter itch" the truly annoying itch associated with dry skin. Which got me to thinking about itching which then sent me down a Google rabbit hole which I am still stuck in.

Recently there have been some great scientific breakthroughs in understanding the neurological  pathways which cause the itch sensation and some of the chemicals associated with itching. (If you want to read some of these articles listed at the bottom of this post. That's great soon hopefully there will be treatments for people with severe itches caused by medications or skin conditions.

One thing with still baffles, at least this mind, is what purpose does itching serve? So, I Googled and Googled and Googled different combination of search terms to see if there was any information about the evolution of itching. Most of what I found were a lot of chatroom discussions on itching where people said things like; "well, duh it tells you when something is crawling across your skin." or "it's a way to tell you to stay away from things." Ok, so I can accept some of the logic here histamines are a group of neurotransmitters which trigger various parts of your immune system letting it know you are under attack. I myself have a severe allergic reaction to any member of the rose family. If I eat a raspberry, blackberry, or try to make rose hip jam I find myself dealing with either annoyingly bad case of hives or full on anaphylactic shock symptoms. So maybe it was just a way to warn us to be more vigilant about the world around us.  

                   

But where did itching begin? What was the first organism which experienced itching and how come after generations upon generations of evolution we still have not lost the itch? Is there a way to trace the genes which code for these neurotransmitters to give us an idea of what the environment was like when itching first began and what was the first unfortunate organism to experience itching. I will keep up my Google rabbit hole search and let you know if it spits out any interesting conclusions, until then think and wonder.




Want to know more?
http://www.medicaldaily.com/scratching-itchy-skin-causes-brain-release-hormone-serotonin-intensifies-itchy-sensation-308458
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-do-we-itch-emma-bryce
http://discovermagazine.com/2014/jan-feb/94-itching-for-answers
http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/why-do-we-itch-the-science-behind-the-scratch/news-story/3ae28d06a0bf2425a0fd8fa3463bd2f3
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/experts-why-we-itch-and-scratch/

The Fish Did It!

A few years ago a friend of mine bought a house with a pond and shorty after they moved in found out there were mussels living in the pond. Something under the cover of darkness was eating them and discarded broken open mussel shells all along the edges of their pond. "But how did they get their in the first place?" was the question she posed to me one evening.

The pond in question.

I thought this was going to be a bit of a challenge and that I would have to study the hydrology of the area mapping the streams which flow through the swamps nearby looking for those two tough mussel who crawled this way there and then created all the future generations. Or maybe it was a bird flying overhead who lost its lunch and dropped a pregnant mussel into the pond.

Not being a hundred percent able to remember how freshwater mussels reproduce, after all its been 26 years since I took invertebrate zoology in college,  I did a quick Google search. BAM! There is the answer; fish!

Graphic swiped from University of Vermont

If you look at the graphic you'll see something called a glochidia which forms a cyst or a little cocoon on a fish were it hangs out and goes through a metamorphosis until it falls off the fish and finishes it life cycle.  Long ago the previous owner of the pond had it stocked with bait fish, so when the bait fish were introduced into the pond somewhere on one of those fish was a glochidia or two. Once they completed their use of the host fish they fell off and reproduced over and over again.

So, is there anything cool about freshwater mussels you ask? Oh, heck yeah!

 1) They produce freshwater pearls.
 2) The United States contains over three hundred different species of freshwater mussels which inhabit all 50 states. The United States contains 1/3 of the estimated 1,000 species of freshwater mussels known worldwide. Some states have conservation programs to help the mussels avoid becoming locally extinct. 
3) They range in size from a tiny pebble to as big as a dinner plate.
4) If you happen to be a racoon, river otter, or muskrat they are one of your favorite foods.
5) Freshwater mussels can live up to 100 years and if you want to know how old the mussel is all you have to do is count the rings. Each year mussels much like trees add new growth ring.



Want to know more check out some of these websites.
http://www.uvm.edu/~pass/tignor/mussels/
https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/7360/546179
https://www.dgif.virginia.gov/wildlife/freshwater-mussels/

Just how many cat littler boxes would that be?

Twenty-three years ago I was living in a very unique place in the United States, Mosca, Colorado, home to the largest pile of sand.

Great Sand Dunes National Park photo by NPS

Back when I worked there as an intern it was just a National Monument which after the addition of land which use to be a working ranch it is not Great Sand Dunes National Park and Wilderness Preserve and it should be on your bucket list of places to visit before you die. It is about 8 hours south east of Denver, Colorado and approximately half and hour north of Taos, New Mexico. Why visit you might ask well, there is tons of wildlife to see, cool looking insects which only climb around on the dunes at night, and the highest point of the dune field stands a staggering 755 feet tall. Also if you hit the park at just the right time of the year you can body surf along Medano Creek. Trust me it's a fun time.

Kids surfing Medano Creek photo by NPS

Ok, by now you are probably wondering where the cat litter boxes come in. One afternoon I had just gotten done giving the afternoon terrace talk and was standing there answering questions; one of the most common being what can you use this sand for? the answer to that question from a commercial perspective is nothing. The sand after tumbling across the dry river valley for years and years has become very rounded making it useless for concrete and there is something about it but I can't remember what that makes it unfit for glass production.  This guy walks up to me and says "how many cat littler boxes could you fill with that? I turned to him thought for a second and replied I have no idea. I meant to sit down and figure out this answer before the season ended, but sadly between writing papers for college and doing everything needed for my internship something had to give. Also I HATE math. Really, I do with a passion of 10,000 fiery suns. There are those occasions where I will sit down and do math to figure out something. For example, in 2013 I figured out how many years it would take for all the of the water in Lake McDonald to completely change. Answer 2.5 years on average. (If you want to know how to figure that out send me an email and I'll let you know.)
I am pretty sure that kids in the United States would be much better at math if we gave them math problems like the cat litter box and how long does it take for all the water in Lake McDonald to completely change instead of asking if train A is traveling 25mph headed towards train B which is traveling 65mph how long would it take before they collide.

Ok, so what do we need to know to answer the cat litter box question?

             1) The volume of a cat litter box.
                  Wow, who knew there were so many cat litter box styles!? Using just the open top cat      

               litter boxes found on this website  I sat down and averaged the volume of seven different open topped litter boxes. Answer= 3,320 cubic inches

              2) Volume of sand contained in the sand dunes. 

        Truth be told this is the point where I thought the math was going to push me over 

                the edge and send me screaming from the apartment.  Scrolling through the frequently   asked questions page you find this: 

                  "The large, main dunefield covers approximately 30 square miles, but there are 

                   many more square miles of smaller dunes in the sand sheet surrounding the main 

                   dunefield. At the widest point, the main dunefield runs six miles and at the greatest    

                   length, eight miles."

                   Oh, sure how the heck to do calculate that? There must be an easier answer so, back to 

                   the Google! Bingo!!! Thank you once again Andrew Valdez! In his post on the park 

                   website he answers just this question: 4.8 billion cubic meters.

Now I have all the information I need. All I have to do first is determine how many cubic inches there are in a 4.8 billion cubic meters of sand. Answer if  I have converted correctly 

                                  1 cubic meter = 61,023.7 cubic inches

                                  292,913,760,000,000 cubic inches

Dividing our cat litter box average into the above giant number gives us.....drum roll........

                                             88,227,036,144.57831 Cat litter boxes that can be filled using the sand found at Great Sand Dunes. 

HOWEVER, this is not accurate I don't think. Taking a quick poll of some cat loving friends of mine on Facebook this morning I found out that most of them put between 3-5 inches of litter in the bottom of the kitty box, so the above number might be a little small. I need a new average for the cubic volume of the cat litter box because the above number assumes we are filling the box to the TOP with sand. Adjusting the height of the cat litter boxes to be between 3-5 inches I redid the math. New volume average: 1,566.3 cubic inches. This means there is 

                                               187,007,852,901.743 Cat litter boxes worth of sand.

Ok, my head hurts from all this math I'm gonna go read a book. 

If you happen to be a mathematician and determine that my answer it wrong PLEASE send the correct answer. I will not be offended after all I stink at math. 

Nature Mystery Number 2!

I was out for a walk not too long ago and came across an awesome sight; evidence of a 6 foot tall beaver!!!!

Could this be a hold over from the last ice age which has been hiding out in the deep dark wood of Maine? After all during the last ice age there were beavers which measured about eight feet long and weighed close to 220 pounds.  What are the chances? Well, about as good as me seeing Bigfoot walking through the Oregon woods, not going to happen.

So, what is going on here?  Walk a few more feet further into the woods and you will find a beaver dam and the beginning of a beaver lodge. Since beavers can cut down trees as large as two feet around the beaver strolled by and thought hey this would make an excellent log for my beaver dam and got to chomping. Now while birch trees are a rather hard wood those amazing incisors they have easily make short work of this tree.  

Now the top set of chew marks is about 3-3 1/2 above the surface of the ground and the bottom cut is about 2 1/2 feet above the surface of the ground. Why is the top one so far off the ground?  It is a little hard to tell the how I took the picture, but there is a pretty significant hill on the left side of this picture. By looking a the wind blown shape of the tops of the surrounding trees it is obvious the wind blows over this area pretty strongly from the west (left side of the photograph.) As the wind blows across the hill the snow builds up deeper and deeper until the wandering beaver scopes out the tree for chopping.  As the winter nears an end the snow slowly starts to melt more of the base of the tree becomes uncovered and the beaver came back for another section of log. However, the beaver never had a chance to completely chip through the second section of tree before the snow melted out from underneath it.

Keep and eye out for mysteries in the forest around you!


Ps: If you have never seen just how into building dams beavers are take a look at the largest beaver dam anywhere in the world. Found in 2007, it is over 2,800 feet long!