there will come one May night
of every year that she’s alive
when the whole world smells of lilacs
— Al Purdy, “May 23, 1980″.
May 19, 2009
The prophecy is fulfilled.
September 30, 2008
Homo sapiens!
Not much is easier than bioblitzing a hospital room (provided you restrict yourself to macroscopic life). Jordan Charles came into this world at 7 lb 12 ounces, and covered in fur. The fur, of course, is lanugo, an interesting mystery of evolution in its own right, and also a possible piece of the larger puzzle of human hairlessness.
September 24, 2008
Beach bugs.
Despite spending some time with What’s that bug, I can’t identify the millipede, spider, or bees above. The flower, of course, is Goldenrod. A reddish centipede, 3 cm long, shared a pit trap with the spider, but the photo is kind of blurry.
September 21, 2008
Ottawa River
Here for the weekend, I’ll try to see who lives on the beach. Here are my over/unders:
Plants: 24
Birds: 5
Bugs and other crunchy things (phylum arthropoda): 24
Rodents: 2
Bivalves: ?
September 19, 2008
Blogger Bioblitz portal and crowdsourcing tool.
September 9, 2008
2008 Blogger Bioblitz Announced.
The 2008 blogger bioblitz is on for the week of Sept. 20 - Sept. 28. (Two weekends to work with!) Blindingly soon, yes, but what the heck.
A portal will be up next week with a data spreadsheet for download; instructions on conducting a blitz; and some basic browsing and querying capabilities.
Keen to put our semantic eco-blogging tools to use, the Spire project has volunteered to do this year’s data integration and analysis. If you want to share your observations, you will be able to contribute data any of 3 ways: by uploading your data spreadsheet; by maintaining an on-line spreadsheet (via, e.g., Google Docs); or by using Spotter to automatically generate an RDF record for each taxon observed. If you do one of the first two options, you’re data will be converted to RDF by rdf123. (Note: Spotter is currently broken on Firefox 3 - we hope to fix this shortly. UPDATE : Fixed.)
Our goal (beyond encouraging people to explore their natural environment) is to integrate data we receive with background and contextual data (e.g. invasive species lists, food webs, etc.), put it on a map, and make it browsable. Our broader goal is to develop technology that transforms bioblitz and eco-blog data into a global human sensor-net.
If you plan on participating, please either leave a comment on this site or send me email, so that we can link to your blog from the portal.
Many thanks to all who get involved!
August 30, 2008
Bats!
My wife has developed a methodology for catching bats that find their way into the house. It’s sound and efficient, though not as elegant as this guy’s approach. Despite their name in so many languages (letuchaya mysh, fledermaus, etc.), bats are not rodents. In fact, order Chiroptera appears to be more closely related to primates than to mice. By process of elimination, I believe that the recently released critter below is a little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus. I also believe (though I can’t find the reference) that bats are the only known reservoir of rabies in the Laurentians.
What smells with it’s tongue, gives live birth, and loves a sun bath?
My 4-year old kept an eye on this guy while I went into the house for my camera. It’s flicking its tongue to get a smell of the surroundings; it’s tongue is forked to enable it to smell in stereo. It is Thamnophis sirtalis, the common garter snake, one of only a handful of species of reptile that give live birth.
What!? I thought live birth (and lactation) was the very definition of being a mammal. But, according to Wikipedia, the current definition of mammals is “sweat glands, including sweat glands modified for milk production, hair, three middle ear bones used in hearing, and a neocortex region in the brain.”
What a tangled web we weave when we try to classify life on earth!
June 18, 2008
Nanodot indigestion
Here’s a food web study I never imagined:
Research Highlights
Nature 453, 960-961 (19 June 2008) | doi:10.1038/453960f; Published online 18 June 2008
Ecology: Dotty diets
Nature Nanotech. doi:10.1038/nnano.2008.110 (2008)
Those who worry about nanotechnology do so partly because of its potential environmental impact. So David Holbrook and a team from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, have tested whether quantum dots (tiny blobs of semiconducting material) accumulate in a simple invertebrate food web.
Over a series of experiments, they put bacteria (Escherichia coli), rotifers (Brachionus calyciflorus) and ciliates (Tetrahymena pyriformis) in flasks with carboxylated and biotinylated quantum dots, which may find a use in computing and solar cells.
The nanomaterials could only stick to clumps of bacterial cells — aggregates too large for ciliates to gobble. However, ciliates took up quantum dots directly from the media, retaining the biotinylated dots for more than twice as long as the carboxylated ones. Rotifers, which eat ciliates, thus consumed quantum dots, but emptied the dots from their guts fast enough to avoid accumulating them.
June 7, 2008
yellow-crowned night-heron
Last weekend we saw this handsome night-heron while kayaking. Not a bird I often see, as I don’t get out birding much. A friend of mine in University Park reported two in her suburban yard the same weekend — so now it is officially a trend.
Last post I pointed out that tagging was going to be most useful for helping novices with identification. The message for today is that it might not be worth logging every individual observation, but if someone notices an unusual trend maybe THAT should be flagged, and we can use blog sentiment analysis to detect it and let scientists know.