critters
jstemwedel | April 17, 2009This morning, over breakfast, the Free-Ride offspring and I discussed the environment. You can hear the conversation (that crunching is from English muffins). The transcript is below.
Dr. Free-Ride: So I was going to ask you guys this morning to talk a little bit about the environment, and I guess my first question is, what's the environment?
Elder offspring: It's the area around an organism.
Dr. Free-Ride: What do you think, younger offspring?
Younger offspring: I think that the environment is the resources that you can use.
Dr. Free-Ride: OK, so that could be something that's in the area…
jstemwedel | April 9, 2009Frequent commenter, sibling, and bon vivant Uncle Fishy recently set up a backyard beehive, but lately he's been worried about the bees. This came up in a recent online chat:
Dr. Free-Ride: So, what's worrisome about your bees?
Uncle Fishy: i dont know if they'll make it
Dr. Free-Ride: :-(
Uncle Fishy: there were fewer coming out to sting me last night
Uncle Fishy: maybe it was just past their bedtime
Dr. Free-Ride: Maybe they had better things to do than sting you again
Uncle Fishy: well, I may be attriting more of them that I need
Uncle Fishy: I may not yet have a queen
Dr. Free-Ride: Uh…
jstemwedel | March 30, 2009As promised, a picture from the elder Free-Ride offspring:
There's a sale on Chinese dragons and hypogryffs! I don't know if it's related to the economic downturn, though.
jstemwedel | March 29, 2009And sometimes it happens right across the street from my favorite aquarium. With a smack that's slightly squishy.
Sea Notes provides the details:
Suddenly, out of the blue, you're whacked on the head -- hard. You reach up to touch the tender spot and your hair is wet, but not with blood.
You look around. There's no one nearby. What gives?
Turns out that Nanci Hubby, whose company CAD Carmel assists us with exhibit design projects, was starstruck. Literally.
In her case, the star was an ochre sea star (Pisaster ochraceus) that fell from the sky, dropped by a passing seagull that bit off more…
jstemwedel | March 20, 2009This Friday marks the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Accordingly, in SprogCast #5, the elder Free-Ride offspring marks the change of season by describing a local release of trout-fry.
You can download the sound file and pretend that the bathtub sounds are the gentle tides of the lake. The discussion is transcribed below.
Dr. Free-Ride: So, can you tell me what you did on Saturday?
Elder offspring: Well, I went to the lake and I released fry.
Dr. Free-Ride: Fry?
Elder offspring: Yeah, Rainbow Trout-fry.
Dr. Free-Ride: I see. How old is a Rainbow Trout-fry? Like, how do I…
jstemwedel | March 15, 2009One of the jellies we saw during our February visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium is especially important to biologists. The crystal jelly (Aequorea victoria) is not only an interesting critter in its own right, but also serves as a source of green fluorescent protein (GFP), used to mark genes.
Like the cross jellies, the crystal jellies are fairly transparent and tend towards the small, with bells around 3 inches in diameter (although occasionally they get as big as 10 inches). Proportionately, their tentacles are a little bit longer.
Their preferred food, copepods, comb jellies, and…
jstemwedel | March 14, 2009We've been watching some episodes of Blue Planet here, marveling at the beautiful cinematography, as well as at how emotionally gripping they can be.
Especially in the Frozen Seas episode, I found myself feeling almost wrung out by the dramatic roller-coaster. This is definitely nature red in tooth and claw (and blood-soaked maw), although as my better half points out, there's actually rather less on-camera carnage than you might expect from the narration.*
I think part of the dramatic tension comes from the fact that most of the animals featured in this episode are fairly charismatic mid-…
jstemwedel | March 7, 2009Back in February when we visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, my communing-with-jellies time included an interval gazing at the cross jelly (Mitrocoma cellularia).
The common name doesn't refer to this jelly's mood (although how you'd assess a jelly's mood is a question you might ponder while watching these critters float by). Rather, it comes from the set of four white canals that you can see under the bell of the jelly. You can see the canals so well because this jelly is fairly transparent. One assumes this is to make it less visible to predators. I'm guessing, however, that animals…
jstemwedel | March 1, 2009During our second day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium last weekend, I finally got my much needed jelly time. I also had occasion to notice that their jelly exhibits have shrunk significantly since their height a few years ago, and that some of my favorite varieties are no longer on display. Booo! MOAR JELLEES PLEEZ!
Ahem. Where was I?
Anyway, there are still some pleasing jellies on display. One of these is the purple-striped jelly (Chrysaora colorata).
The common name for these jellies comes from the deep colored bands on its bell. To me, the coloration doesn't look purple, exactly.…
jstemwedel | February 22, 2009We're back at the Monterey Bay Aquarium today. Shortly after our arrival, the kids are up to their elbow in touch-tank water. Then, the younger Free-Ride offspring gets critical.
"The decorator crabs here aren't very decorated."
"It's true," says the volunteer working the touch-tank. "These decorator crabs can't smell any predators in their environment, so they figure they don't need to try to hard."
After a few moments with a deeply furrowed brow, the younger offspring asks, "How can I smell like a decorator crab predator and get the crabs to decorate themselves better?"
The volunteer…
jstemwedel | February 22, 2009
We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium yesterday but, owing to the whims of the kids we were with (our own plus some friends), I didn't get to spend the hours I usually like to spend staring at jellies.
In fact, I was able to park myself in front of a single tank of jellies for maybe 15 minutes.
However, the tank contained sea nettles (Chrysaora fuscescens), jellies which are fairly gorgeous and hypnotic. It didn't quite make up for the oppressively loud background music piped into too many of the exhibits, but it gave me a brief interval of awe.
Of course, the folks at the aquarium are…
jstemwedel | January 30, 2009The 12th annual Great Backyard Bird Count, sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, will be taking place February 13-16, 2009. This is a lovely (and long-running) bit of citizen science that aims to compile a continent-wide snapshot of bird populations during a few days in February before the spring migrations have started.
Participation is easy:
Plan to spend at least 15 minutes on at least one of the days of the count (Feb. 13, Feb. 14, Feb. 15, or Feb. 16) outdoors counting birds. You can do a count on more than one of the days if you want, and you…
jstemwedel | January 16, 2009
One less fish
by Kim Michelle Toft and Allan Sheather
Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge Publishing
1998
Within the past week, each of the two Free-Ride offspring picked up this book, read it all the way through, and said to me, "You should write about this for the Friday Sprog Blog."
Instead of replying, "No, you should write about it," I said, "OK, I'll try." Not just because I'm the mature one here, but because this is a really good book.
On the surface, this is one of those picture books with rhyming text counting down from twelve to zero:
Twelve gracious angelfish
thinking they're in…
jstemwedel | December 25, 2008The elder Free-Ride offspring drew this picture (on two sides of the same piece of paper).
I think I detect some M.C. Escher influence here.
It is left to the reader to provide the hypothetical evolutionary pathways that connect each of these critters.
jstemwedel | September 21, 2008
In browsing through my photo library, I stumbled on pictures from my last trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium of a jellyfish I haven't blogged yet, the Mediterranean jelly (Cotylorhiza tuberculata). I consulted the Monterey Bay Aquarium Online Field Guide and discovered that it isn't listed.
That hardly seems fair!
Luckily, Wikipedia comes through in the clutch.
Cotylorhiza tuberculata is sometimes called the fried egg jelly, a name that didn't make a lot of sense to me.
Do you eat many fried eggs with dangly purple bits? Me neither.
If anything, these jellies put me in mind of bubbles…
jstemwedel | September 20, 2008Stories about the honeybee crisis and colony collapse disorder (CCD) keep turning up in the news (at least here in California, where we grow so many big cash crops like almonds that rely on honeybees to pollinate them). But it turns out that getting to the bottom of CCD is made more difficult by the the gaps in biologists' knowledge about the wild bee populations. (A lot of the bees pollinating food crops are commercially kept rather than wild.)
But, as reported in an article in the September-October 2008 issue of American Scientist [1], the Great Sunflower Project is enlisting the efforts…
jstemwedel | September 19, 2008
The elder Free-Ride offspring drew this lovely rat in a thought-bubble. The critter who is dreaming of an encounter with this rat is revealed below.
Technical note:
I'm sure some eagle-eyed (owl-eyed?) readers will have noticed that I uploaded this drawing from a digital photograph. For some reason, I could not get the scanner to import the drawing without losing much of the delicate lines of the feathers. If anyone has good advice on how to get a scanner (and Photoshop) to upload a pencil drawing without losing the fine details, I'd be much obliged.
jstemwedel | September 8, 2008After a longer than anticipated delay, here are the answers to the circus animal poop identification challenge from back in August.
While there are some handy flowcharts and poop identification picture on the web, I haven't yet found such a guide for African or Asian wildlife. Since many, if not most, of the high traffic circus animals are from those two continents, that leaves me with rationales for the pictured poop that are a little more hand-wave-y than I'd like. Animal poop experts who would like to give us more information about why these particular animals poop the way they do are…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2008The Free-Ride offspring are currently engrossed in a "creative dramatics" workshop, wherein they are learning all sorts of things about acting, characterization, costuming, and related matters in order to write, rehearse, stage, and perform a play. My kids are show people! Except that somehow, even when they're being show people, the science wheels in their heads are still turning ...
Younger offspring: We did an exercise where each group came up with a scene about one of the four food groups.
Elder offspring: My group did "dairy". I was a brown cow who needed milking.
Younger offspring: My…
jstemwedel | April 11, 2008Sometimes a kid grabs the colored pencils and ends up with a picture of an octopus.
Judging by its color, the octopus is not angry.
This unsolicited picture may be foreshadowing. Younger offspring recently got a chapter book about giant squids and may be working up to dictating a review of it. Maybe next Friday.