Breaking News: Collembola Plunges 300 Feet To Death!

I have been reading The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston about a group of scientists and who have been mapping and cataloging the plants and animals living in the tops of northern California’s coastal redwoods.   I was shocked to read they found  collembolans in the soil of the fern “forest” growing at the top of a trees over 300 feet tall.  Collembolans at the top of a 300 foot tall tree it blows my mind!  Sadly for me they offer no explanation as to how they got there.

A collembolan or more commonly known as a springtail is a small, really small arthropod which lives in the soil and helps to decompose poop, leaves, fungus, and decaying plant matter.  Bug Guide has some really cool pictures of different collembolans. There are tons of these everywhere in the forest, your backyard, on a soccer or football field, and they can even be seen moving across the water and snow. One scientist estimated there were 300 million per acre in some grassland habitats.   No, way you say there can’t be that many! Take it from me there can be. I spent three years assisting with an invertebrate research study project where my heart sank every time I opened a sample bottle and poured it out to see thousands of dead collembolans floating on the top. By the time the project ended we counted 652,013 from thirteen 100 meter square research plots.  (My record for one sample bottle is 30,000 from one cottage cheese sized container placed in the grass.)  

But, what makes them really cool is how they move when scared, they use a furcula.  Furcula look like either a long or short forked arm that hangs down from the “belly” of the collembola.  When the collembola hits this furcula onto the ground the collembola is sent somersaulting into the air about seven inches off the ground for a distance of about 50-100 times their body length.  So, the largest collembolan at 0.39 inches (10mm) would land almost four inches away from where it leapt from the ground. Downside to furcula propulsion is no steering!  Collembolans have no way to direct where they will land, so if you are living in the top of a redwood tree and are suddenly scared by an invading scientist you might just fling yourself right out of your tree to plunge 300 feet or more to your death!

 

Want to know more:

http://www.collembola.org/

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/course/ent425/library/compendium/collembola.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Sq2gjsysG0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh0ERos22qQ

 

 

IT’S ALMOST HERE!!! THE RISE OF THE AMPHIBIANS!!!!

This time of year I really miss living in New England for a number of reasons.  There is an electricity in the air, days are beginning to get warmers, maple sap is running, and people start taking bets on when the ice on the river is going to break.  This time of year also starts the RISE OF THE AMPHIBIANS!!! Kinda like a zombie apocalypse only they are not after your brains they are looking for love.

It all starts with the wood frogs often the first amphibians to unfreeze and make their way to a vernal pool looking for love. Vernal pools are pools of water formed by snow melt and are not fed by a stream and they completely dry up by July or August. Even before the ice has completely left the vernal pools wood frogs are crawling out from under the forest leaves using age old mental maps to make their way back the very same vernal pool they were born in. Once the males have reached the vernal pool they start their “duck”like call looking for a mate.  If you drove by a very large vernal pool you might think there is a large flock of ducks nearby, but it is really a congregation of wood frogs.  After mating, female wood frogs will lay about 1,000 eggs in a big jelly like mass next to hundreds of other egg masses often laid by her sisters.  These eggs will hatch in 10-30 days depending on the water temperature. Warmer water will help to speed the eggs hatching.  About the same time you start to hear wood frogs you will hear tiny peeping noises which are the spring peepers, a species of tree frog, also gathering in the same vernal pools to mate.  Depending on where you live you either hear the spring peepers calling before the wood frogs or just after the wood frogs start.

This all leads up to the BIG NIGHT!  The mass migration of salamanders to vernal pools where they gather to mate. It will be a dark and rainy night the first one where the temperature is just a little over 45 degrees Fahrenheit.  Imagine hundreds or even thousands of salamanders headed to vernal pools all on the SAME night.  This mass migration can cause roads to beclosed in order to protect the migrating masses. Scientist scramble on a minutes notice to stake out their research areas to collect data. I once joined a group of researchers to help collect data and I was NOT prepared for the number of salamanders we saw that night! Dedicated volunteers gather to help carry salamanders from one side of the road to the other. By early morning it is all over and the salamanders are headed to their summer spots.

Watch the weather scan the headlines THE BIG NIGHT IS ALMOST HERE!

Want to know more:
Check out this website for a cool picture of egg masses. Scroll down toward the bottom of the page.  http://www.uri.edu/cels/nrs/paton/LH_wood_frog.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/costanzo-cryobiology.html
http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/wood_frog.htm
http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/spring_peeper.htm
http://www.massaudubon.org/Nature_Connection/wildlife/index.php?id=58
http://www.vtfishandwildlife.com/vtcritters/factsheets/other/salamanders/Salamanders%20of%20Vermont122004.pdf
http://www.nwf.org/news-and-magazines/national-wildlife/animals/archives/2003/salamanders.aspx

Hey, Doc Your Killing me!.........No, Really you are!

Recently I was scanning old family photographs and came across on which showed a very attractive girl somewhere between 18-25 years of age and on the back was written “Lyman’s daughter died young.” Somehow this got me thinking about what may have caused her untimely death. Maybe it was just a trip to the doctor.

Back in Lyman’s daughter’s day, the mid to late 1800s, the popular cure for whatever ailed you from a toothache to fatigue was Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills or more commonly known as Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts.  This amazing cure all pill contained two powerful herbal laxatives and mercury.  Thunderbolts worked on the simple property of clearing out your entire system at the first signs of illness which would restore the humors to a natural balance.  If that did not work you could always go to Dr. Rush next favorite cure of bloodletting.  High levels of mercury and bloodletting sounds like more of a way to do away with someone not cure them.  

I guess it could have been worse she could have lived in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when people use astronomy and something known as the Doctrine of Signatures to cure your ailments.  Now I will admit I not sure how astronomy fit into the use of the Doctrine of Signatures, but the herbal part I find interesting and quite scary.  It dates back all the way to the middle ages when folk medicine doctors would look at plants’ characteristics, i.e. leaf shape, root color, which would tell them what types of things those plants would cure.  For example if you happened to have kidney or gall stones you would have been prescribed a tea steeped from the leaves of the saxifrage plant. Saxifrage plants commonly grow in rock cracks, so they were thought to have the power to break up stones. While plants with heart shaped leaves were thought to be good for curing heart ailments.  Many of the plants listed in Nicholas Culpeper’s book on herbal medicine really do have medical benefits, but following some of rules of the Doctrine of Signatures could have killed you.  

A Native American medicine man I once spent some time with was asked, as a person pointed to a common plant with heart shaped leaves, if it cured anything and with a glint in his eye he said “yeah, your enemies.”  This particular plant has chemical which are known to cause heart failure and respiratory arrest. When this Native American tribe knew that their enemies were nearby they would leave their camp with a pot of meat boiling in water with the leaves of the plant in question on the campfire. Their enemies would sneak in and steal the unguarded meat which later on after eating it would cause certain death.

So how did we weed out all those potentially lethal plants? If you died while being treated you were considered to have suffered from a failure to thrive. How many people failed to thrive before we realized it was the “cure” that killed them?       

Sir David Attenborough You Just Made My Day!

Normally when I am working on developing an educational program or an exhibit I keep detailed bibliographies on all my sources, since the end product has to go through some serious critiques. But the one time I slip and find something truly cool I forget to write down the source and then spend the next 13 years trying to find it. 

The whole problem started when I set out to write a plant fact sheet about the Nepenthes gracilis.  This is an extremely large species of carnivorous pitcher plant which lives in tropical jungles of Southeast Asia. Unlike the pitcher plants most of us are used to seeing in swampy areas of North America these pitchers grow to close to twelve inches long and hang from a creeping vine.  Now a pitcher that large has to be catching and digesting something really cool, so to the literature I went.  A researcher went through a forest dumping out pitchers into a pan to inventory what the plant was digesting. In one pitcher he found half of a large dead rat.  Cool plants which can ever so slowly EAT A RAT!!!  What could be cooler than that?  For months I stuck to my guns telling everyone I hadn’t made it up while trying in vain to find the copy of the research paper.  No luck.

Fast forward 13 years and I am watching PBS’ Attenborough's Life Stories and who but Sir David Attenborough himself should say, while taking about Nepenthes gracilis, “they have even been found to be able to digest things as large as a rat.”  I backed up the DVR about three times just to make sure I had heard him right.  So for all you people who had doubted that I was right take it from Sir David Attenborough.

Scientists have discovered even more cool things about the Nepenthes sp. over the years, such as there are more than 150 different species of animals which will live inside the plants pitchers. Also the shape of the pitcher’s cover helps to drop insects into the digestive liquid when it rains.  The underside of the pitcher’s cover is coated in a flaky waxy like substance and when rain hits the top side it causes the insects to lose their grip and fall.  Also scientists have found a whole new species of Nepenthes which appears to be much larger than all the other known species. Also during this trip scientists found a species of Nepenthes which had been thought to be extinct.

Want to know more:

http://www.botany.org/carnivorous_plants/nepenthes.php
http://www.sarracenia.com/faq/faq5400.html
http://www.sccarnivorousplants.com/troppitch.html
http://www.kew.org/plants-fungi/Nepenthes-rajah.htm

Sergei Winogradsky Made Me Want To Puke!

Let me just start out by saying I have TONS of respect for all the cool things Sergei Winogradsky did for science. He was a Russian scientist born in 1856 and is the founder of modern microbiology.  Sergei used a columns, later called the Winogradsky Columns, to watch the interactions of different groups of bacteria over time and under different environmental conditions; lots of hydrogen sulfide gas, lots of nitrogen, extra carbon. He also looked at how bacteria colonies changed over time as organic and inorganic compounds were used up.

You have probably seen a Winogradsky column in some nature center or science museum sitting in a sunlit area unlabeled and probably walked right past it thinking “well that’s weird”. 

 

That is just what happened to me for almost a whole year. I worked at the Museum of Science, in Boston, MA, in the greenhouse exhibit and as I watered the plants would walk past these two large plastic tubes with white caps.  They made great plant stands, but they bugged me. I had seen things just like this on other museums in the United States, France, and Germany with no labels explaining what they were.  So, on a slow day I asked my boss Bob what they were. “Oh, they are old Winogradsky columns.”  he replied. 

Curious I searched books in the library and the internet trying to find out more about them. I found out the different colors, of bacteria, and where they were in the column tell you about the bacteria’s environment; is there oxygen, is there carbon, is there sulfur, and much more. Each type of bacteria was a different color, so it would be easy to look at the colors to pick out sulfur rich areas by looking for the red bacteria. Excited I looked at ours. They were green from top to bottom. Where were all the other colors I wondered?   On Monday I peppered Bob with all my new information and admitted I was confused because ours were all green.  They need to be recharged he explained. Once the bacteria have used up all the sulfur, oxygen, carbon and other compounds all the other bacteria die and you are left with just the green bacteria.  If I wanted to he would help me recharge them only I had to get two dozen eggs from the cafeteria.  Smiling I entered the kitchen explaining to the chef I needed two dozen eggs for a science experiment and with much fear on the chef’s part he handed over the eggs. Bob and I popped off the five foot columns’ lids and started scooping mud into large buckets.  As I was explaining to a group of visitors what we were doing swish, plop, slash right into my mouth lands a huge clump of foul smelling mud. Immediately the gag reflex kicks in as I try to spit out all the mud, but I can still taste it. I run across the second floor as fast as I can trying not to puke to the restroom.  A few minutes of dry heaving and a few gallons of water to rinse out my mouth later I return to the exhibit.  We shred newspaper, crush up eggs and stir it into our mud buckets before dumping it back into the columns topping them off with pond water.   

A few days later we had all sorts of colonies of bacteria red, purplish, rust colored, black, darker green, and white. Pockets of red where there was more egg (sulfur) than other areas. A black layer formed near the bottom where the bacteria which thrive with no oxygen lived. Three shades of green some of which used oxygen, found near the top of the column and the ones that didn’t use oxygen in the middle of the column.   As the months went by the colonies changed the black layer grew as the mud settled and the trapped pockets of air got forced to the surface. Slowly the red disappeared as the eggs were eaten up by the sulfur loving bacteria.

So, if you happen to see a Winogradsky column in a museum look to see what colors you can find and if it is all green nudge then and tell them to recharge their mud for the sake of Sergei.

 

Want to know more:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/e/jel5/biofilms/winogradsky.html

http://www.smccd.edu/accounts/case/envmic/winogradsky.pdf

http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/bi/2000/Winogradsky_Column/winogradsky_column_p2.html

Zombies Do Exist!

I recently saw my MSN scrolling news headlines stating that zombies are not real. Oh come on, does the author of that article know nothing. Zombies do exist they just aren’t the decomposing, foul smelling, brain eating former humans that we all know and love from the movies. They are hornworm caterpillars, aphids, sawfly larvae and many more insects!  

My two favorite insects, the Ichneumonid and Braconid wasps, are responsible for many the zombies running around.   If you have ever been fortunate to come across the largest Ichneumonid wasp (Megarhyssa atrata) you probably thought to yourself “Holy crikey! What is that!” Female wasps, like the one below, have a huge ovipositor (an organ for laying eggs) which can be up to three inches long!

 

Scientists aren’t quite sure how the female finds her zombie victim, a horntail wasp larva, it maybe through chemical smells given off by the larvae or she may be able to sense its vibrations as it moves under the bark of the tree. Once she has located her victim she sticks her giant ovipositor into the tree piercing the horntail wasp larvae and laying an egg on the larvae.   

The female Braconid wasp is not as cool looking, but anyone who has planted tomatoes in their garden has probably seen some future zombie crawling around.

 

 

Braconid wasps will lay eggs on tomato hornworms, the larval form of the hawk and sphinx moths. You’ll often see big cubby green caterpillars on tomato plants with little white ovals sticking out of their backs, those are the wasp eggs.  

 

Once both wasps eggs hatch they go to work eating their victims alive. The wasp larvae start by eating their victim’s fat deposits then their guts.  If you see one of these zombies crawling around, which they can as long as the wasp larvae has not eaten their nervous system or their heart, you can see the wasp larvae crawling around under the skin of the caterpillar. This rather gross process goes on until the wasp larvae are just about to pupate. Just before the wasp pupates is kills its victim consumes what’s left of the caterpillar’s gooey insides and then chews its way out and creates a cocoon somewhere nearby.   

So yes zombies do exist and they may be living in your backyard!    

 

Want to know more:

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/identify/ichneu.htm

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVebxrfHfZQ

http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/galveston/beneficials/beneficial-04_braconid_wasp_on_hornworm.htm

http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/organic/downloads/Braconid%20Wasps%20FINAL.pdf

Trying to think of things to write on this blog I asked for help from my friend’s son Ben. He wants to know: “Why does a platypus lay eggs?”  Well, here goes nothing and I will try to make this as painless as possible.

The simplest answer to that question is because there were once many egg laying mammals around which have all gone extinct.

Scientists break mammals into three large groups:

Prototherians - which lay eggs (eg. platypuses and echidnas)

Metatherians - young develop in pouches (marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas)

Eutherians – ‘modern mammals’ which give birth to well-developed offspring (rabbits, elephants, horses, and humans, ect.)

All three of these groups of animals share  three of the characteristics which are unique to all mammals; hair, three inner ear bones, and modified sweat glands which produce milk (mammary glands). 

Members of the Prototherians (platypus and spiny anteater) represent a very primitive form of mammals and still have some of the characteristics of their ancestors, for example the ability to lay eggs. If we look at Date-A-Clade, which shows how organisms are grouped together based on common characteristics, we see that the line for the platypus branches off from that of other mammals 166 million years ago.  All of the other primitive mammals below where the platypus and other mammals branch off were egg layers too. All of the egg laying mammals above the split evolved over millions and millions and millions giving us marsupials (kangaroos) and placental mammals (cats, dogs, and humans).

Want to know more about the Protherians check out these pages:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=extreme-monotremes
http://www.mammalsrus.com/prototheria/prototheria.html

 

A Sea Cucumber Made Me Do It!

Working as a naturalist/environmental educator one question I get asked a lot is “How did you get into doing this?” Well, the truthful answer is: a sea cucumber made me do it.

Picture if you will a small child sitting on a bunch of rocks in Acadia National Park watching a Park Ranger talk about tide pool animals.  As she talks she hands around a bunch of critters she collected for us to look at. Here comes the sea cucumber in all it slimy fun.  She warned us not to squeeze it too hard, easier said than done for something wet and kinda slimy. Into my five year old hands it is passed, and I squeeze it scared I will drop it.  Suddenly a jet of water spurts out and hits the back of the guy sitting in front of me, and now it feels like a shrinking limp piece of spaghetti. A few second latter and maybe one squeeze too many from me out fly something that looks like guts. Terrified I look at the park ranger where she smiles and tells me it is ok, ‘he’ll just regrow those later.”  WHAT! My little 5 year old mind is thinking how do you regrow your guts? What my five yearold self had just discovered was two ways a sea cucumber will protect itself against attackers.  And thus begain a lifetime of wanting to know if there were other really cool things out there in the wild.

So here is the scoop. Sea cucumbers are an invertebrate which means they have no bony skeleton like you and I. Their “skeleton” is made up of water or as scientists like to call it a hydrostatic skeleton. If you were to pick up a sea cucumber and threaten it, ie sqeeze, it will jet out this water to make itself smaller in size. A great defense against a predator that has just seen its meal shrink in size by almost half.  If you were to keep squeezing, like I did, a few things might happen the grossest being the getting rid of some of their internal organs. Now if you see this happen your first response will be to drop it and run away screaming, which if you were a predator would be a good thing for the sea cucumber which gets to live another day.  Scientist are still discovering how and why sea cucumber can regrow their organs and hope that this might be able to help humans in the future.  One scientist’s research shows that being able to get rid of some organs may help the sea cucumber get rid of parasites living in their guts.

Want to know more? Check out these resources. http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/sea-cucumber/

http://suite101.com/article/amazing-sea-cucumber-facts-a228929
http://www.sheddaquarium.org/seacucumbers.html
http://www.spc.int/DigitalLibrary/Doc/FAME/InfoBull/BDM/17/BDM17_22_Frankboner.pdf