Earlier this week, just where all the web pages say they should be, I found two black swallowtail caterpillars right there on the parsley.
Since then they’ve been merrily munching away in a jar, producing prodigious quantities of frass and awaiting show-and-tell with the course I’m teaching at U Maryland this Fall.
As announced last week on the Ebiquity blog, RDF123 (http://rdf123.umbc.edu/) is a highly flexible open-source tool for transforming spreadsheet data to RDF. It is intended for use with ontologies in any content area.
We tested RDF123 using spreadsheet data from the first annual Blogger BioBlitz in 2007. This biodiversity survey involved sightings of a broad range of taxa in 17 localities in April 2007. We mapped spreadsheet columns to concepts in SPIRE’s ETHAN and observation ontologies so that RDF123 could generate OWL representations. The resulting OWL data was posted on the web where it was indexed by Swoogle, the semantic web search engine. We found that of 1200 Blogger BioBlitz observations, 47 of them were of species defined as “of concern†by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Feel free to read more if you want the technical details.
We saw lots of holes in the muddy bank of our local stream a few weeks ago. Perhaps they were caused by erosion, but in one we saw a cozy little American toad, Bufo americanus.
This morning’s stream-of-consciousness web surfing brings this tidbit, from the Berkeley Daily Planet:
So Balda, on an April morning three years ago, is in his office outside which is a meter-square feeding platform. A crow is on the platform eating sunflower seeds. Two jays - maybe a pair; it’s hard to tell with jays - land in a nearby mountain mahogany bush. The jays seem annoyed by the crow’s presence. One flies to the platform and scolds the larger bird, which fails to react. The jay feints toward the crow with its bill; the crow feints back. The jay flies up to the roof of the building, then divebombs the crow. The crow keeps eating. End of Round One.
Then the jay does something remarkable. It goes back to the mountain mahogany and breaks off a twig from a dead branch. Holding the twig in its beak, pointed end forward, it returns to the feeding platform and lunges at the crow. It’s a near miss. The crow lunges in its turn, startling the jay, which flies up and drops the twig onto the platform.
And the crow picks it up, again pointed end forward, and thrusts it at the jay. Whereupon the jay on the platform and its partner in the bush both fly off, pursued by the twig-carrying crow.
This was observed by Russ Balda, an eminent avian behavioral biologist. I’ve visited his lab in Northern Arizona back in 1989. They fed me peanuts so I wouldn’t pass out, but that’s another story.
Because I’ve known of multiple beavers (Castor canadensis) in Maryland and DC, I was not aware that sightings are rare in my old stomping grounds of Washtenaw County, Michigan. This year an acquaintance of mine, via Bruce Bowman, provides definitive evidence in the form of photographed road kill:
On the morning of August 8, 2007, Susan Falcone found a roadkill beaver in Superior Township, Washtenaw County, Michigan. It was just east of the intersection of Plymouth Rd. and the entrance to M14. Susan says she has seen many beavers (up north) fairly close up and that this was a very large one. Her photos are below.
This is believed to be the first documented sighting of beaver in Washtenaw County in quite a few years although strong evidence of their presence in the Zeeb Road/Huron River Drive area was reported in December 2005. Anyone with knowledge of the occurrence of beaver in Washtenaw County in the last 40 years is asked to post to birders(AT)umich.edu. Alternatively, you can write to bbowman99(AT)comcast.net.
Kudos to Animal Diversity Web for having the top Google result for Castor canadensis!
So far this summer, Apocrita (wasps and their kin) have stung us 5 times. (The 3 year old got it twice). On our side, we have annihilated 3 colonies, and have a fourth in our sight.
First, we removed these bald-faced hornets (Dolichovespula maculata), put them in a jar, and watched them rot.
Of the (at least) 5 species besieging us, these guys were the most transparent in their behaviour. Their queen was, amongst other things, a pulp-and-paper mill. (I believe this is true of all female bald-faced hornets.) She chewed up wood and spat out paper, which she used to build the arial nest shown above. By the time we removed the nest, her first generation of half a dozen or so had matured, and were helping with the care of a new generation of larvae. If we had let it, the nest would have grown outwards, in a series of self-containing shells.
More recently, we filled two outside cracks with poison. This often forces survivors to look for ways into the house. Here’s the corpse of a wasp with very long back legs that we killed inside the day after we foamed his home.
(The other crack was a gateway into the home of a family of generic, yellow striped, medium-sized wasps.)
Despite these efforts, the stinging continued.
On Monday, we killed representatives of two new species.
UPDATE: Thank you to Jenn, who points out that this is not ragweed, but goldenrod. So that’s why we’re not sneezing.
Two weeks ago, there was none. Now, there are fields of it, 4 feet high.
We were checking out the vernal pond near our favorite local stream today. The pond is of course now gone — video on the top is before (March 11), photo below is after (today)
Much of it is all grassed over but some of it is just a bit of wet mud in the center.
A few days ago I discovered an interesting brown, big-headed caterpillar lethargically exploring the frame of my garage door. In about an hour he’d reoriented to be head down, but hadn’t moved much. After I took this photo, I brought him inside and gave him a couple of twigs in jar. He immediately lashed onto one with a little silk, and within 24 hours had transformed into a motionless pupa.
I had recognized the general shape as a Papilio caterpillar, but recalled that they were green. Turns out that just before pupation Papilio glaucus turns brown. This guy is looking forward to looking like this after metamorphosis in a few weeks. It is possible, I guess that he might be planning to overwinter with us. Will wait and see.
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