Bioman goes green

...maybe a bit TOO green! Do you miss the orange? I don't. I thought it was time to take advantage of Blogger's new templates and get rid of that ugly orange. Most likely, I will be making some changes as I learn how to use all the new tools, but for now, enjoy all the old stuff as well as new posts in a more soothing pastoral hue, more in line with the Creator's green theme.

Bioman (maybe that old appellation, as well, will fade into this sea of green. Time will tell.)

Voracious Aliens Plunder the Oxeyes

OK, they’re not from outer space, even though they look like they could be. In fact, they’re not even aliens in the biogeographical sense, since they are native to North America--870+ species of them. They are the Syrphid flies.

These members of the Family Syrphidae are called flower flies for obvious reasons. They are also called yellow jacket mimics, bee mimics or wasp mimics, depending on which group of Hymenopterans they are trying to imitate. Another common name for them is "hover flies", because they—hover.

Looking like a vicious stinging insect when in fact you are a harmless lapping insect should, in theory, protect you from predation. But being too small (less than ½ inch) to really look dangerous probably makes you look like Mickey Rooney trying to mimic Sylvester Stallone. Only macro photography has any chance of making these tiny Dipterans look treacherous.

The pictured Lilliputians are filling their tiny tanks from the nectaries of one of my favorite meadow flowers, the Oxeye or False Sunflower, Heliopsis helianthoides. Shall I attempt here an explanation of the “false” in their name? Nah! Maybe next time.

(Click on the pictures to make the Rooney's look more Stallone-ish.)

Rambling about the Brambles

The crumpled-paper petals of the bramble blossoms are gone now, having been replaced by lumpy, multi-hued aggregate fruits in various stages of ripening.

The fruits are called aggregate because each surface lump grew from a separate ovary in the base of the flower. Each ovary had its own style and stigma, each one of which received a separate pollen grain to fertilize an individual ovule—or maybe not (more about that later). The result is a lumpy, fused bunch of “drupelets” that we call a blackberry (or raspberry). So the bad news is that a blackberry is not really a berry, according to the botanists’ persnickety terminology. A true berry contains many seeds in a single ovary. (A tomato--with or without Salmonella--is technically a berry. But calling it that in public will surely start an argument.)

Another bit of bad news, at least for those who care about identifying wild plants, is that there are at least 205 species of these prickly plants called brambles (Genus Rubus). All that taxonomic splitting is based on such picayune details that none but the most (resist inserting that rather crude Freudian term) botanist would even bother. It gets messier. As suggested earlier, some populations of brambles reproduce asexually, with seeds developing from unfertilized ovules. That can produce little local, cloned microspecies—and who knows how many of those there might be--perhaps thousands!

Don’t let this inane Linnaean rambling inhibit your taste for the wild bramble aggregate fruits—or from your brazenly calling them berries! If you can beat the birds and other wildlife to them, they are not only tasty, but are full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants like lutein and zeaxanthin for your eyes.

And what about that other BlackBerry ™, the wireless, thumb-operated e-mail phone device of Canadian origin? It took the people at Lexicon Branding, Inc. several weeks of haggling to come up with the BlackBerry name. That means that corporate committees may be even more anal—there, I said it—than botanical taxonomists.

This Essay Stinks!

Fellow blogger Jim Wright recently posted a photo of a strange, brightly colored fungus and asked for help in identifying it. After glancing at a couple of books and web sites, I mistakenly called it “Columned Stinkhorn”. A day later I looked at one more field guide and changed my mind. It turned out to be “Stinky Squid,” a related species.

Its name is certainly appropriate. Its horns somewhat resemble a squid’s tentacles. And it, along with the other stinkhorns, uses flies to spread its spores. Smelling like rotting meat or dead bodies is a good idea for attracting flies. In fact, when I gently nudged these specimens to position them for their portraits, then took a whiff of my hand—Whew!

The chemical compounds that impart the odor certainly have appropriate names: putrescene and cadaverine. They are so powerful that their presence in only 5 to 10 parts per million is enough to create a stink. Some flowers use the same tactics to draw flies to carry their pollen grains, which after all, are also technically spores (microspores).

Plants and fungi (now classified in separate kingdoms) are incredibly complex chemical factories, capable of producing thousands of organic compounds, not just to stink up the place but as sources of our food, supplements, drugs and a whole lot more. Be sure to thank their Creator for them every day!

When I got home from photographing the Stinky Squids, I washed my hands (of the whole matter?) so I would be just a little less likely to draw flies.

Tweaking Nature

I’m not a great fan of making alterations to God’s creatures—or images thereof. I generally limit processing of my photos to cropping for composition and minor adjustments of brightness and contrast where necessary. A sharpening tool comes in handy as well when things are a little fuzzy.

Some subjects, however, just seem to produce bland images, no matter how carefully I compose or expose (and I am not a foreigner to careless composing and exposing). Yarrow, a plant plentiful in the meadow, presents one of those challenges. Even to bring out the delicate detail and color, especially of the central disk, requires some drastic measures.

As you can see in the present gallery, I went a little crazy. Not stopping at subtle enhancement, I ventured into the bazaar and abstract.

But a little crazy creativity is fun once in a while. Enjoy. (Click on the images to enjoy them bigger.)

Preening on the Patio

(Click on the images to enlarge them.)

The tireless Celery Farm volunteers have imported tons of rocks, soil and wood chips to build an erosion-retarding platform in front of the Warden’s Watch tower. A bench provides a ground-level resting and observation place for human visitors. But of course the resident Canada geese have taken over, contributing droppings and feathers to the patio. The pictured pair were grunting and preening as if they owned the place—and indeed, they do, along with more than 200 other bird species.

Canada geese are beautiful birds, but overpopulation makes them less than popular in the eyes of many. Even getting to Warden’s Watch can be a problem at times—and the use of the boot scraper a necessity upon leaving!

The opportunity to rest for a while and peer out over peaceful Lake Appert makes the goosy nuisance a mere footnote to one’s otherwise pleasant visit. And the opportunity to photograph both the geese and a vista of the lake was made possible by using a Sigma 10mm lens.

Of Clouds and Clubtails

After I had filled my tank with barely sub-four-dollar gas in Waldwick, I looked up and saw some promising cloud formations. So I doubled back to the Celery Farm for a quick visit to Warden’s Watch. The clouds were interesting, if not spectacular (no calendar shots here).

Aside from the clouds, the platform railing was aflutter with male Common Whitetail dragonflies, as well as the pictured specimen, the only Odonate that cooperated for portraiture. I’m calling it a Unicorn Clubtail and I’m calling myself an expert, having glanced at a couple of books and websites. :-) A very nice gallery of clubtail portraits can be seen here. Tom Murray must be a very patient guy!

Whatever the species, this insect packs a load of engineering into a relatively small chitin-wrapped package (but imagine the equally sophisticated equipment crammed into a fruit fly’s miniature airframe). We shouldn’t hesitate to swat a fly or mosquito, but as we do, we should reflect on the magnificence of the creature we are deconstructing. And there is certainly no reason to flatten dragonflies, as important to their ecosystems as they are. But that’s another story.

Primitive and Advanced—a Couple of Primitive Botanical Terms

If a flower has regular floral parts and lots of them (especially stamens and pistils) botanists call it “primitive”. If it has irregularly shaped petals—or if some floral parts are missing—and few stamens and pistils, they call it “advanced”. As far as I’m concerned, that terminology is primitive. It is evolutionary jargon. Since botanists tend to be confused about the supposed evolution of the flowering plants, they ought not throw around those words, trying to snow themselves and the rest of us with evolutionary “just-so” stories.

So enjoy staring at the photos of a few “primitive”, “advanced” and really advanced flowers and flower heads—and see if you can still dare call any of these highly complex, intelligently designed beauties “primitive”.

Here the flowers appear in roughly reverse order, from "really advanced" in the case of the fleabane, to primitive in the case of the multiflora rose and buttercup. The fleabane is actually a composite flower head, with dozens of ray flowers and disc flowers. The birdfoot trefoil has the typical irregular legume form.

All were photographed at the Celery Farm Natural Area at the end of May. Click on the photos to see the flowers WAY bigger than life.

A Mist is Good for a Smile--and Flare is Fair Photographic Fare

Cool spring mornings are often misty mornings. Overnight temperatures fall below the dew point (the temperature at which relative humidity becomes 100%) and water vapor is forced to condense around microscopic dust nuclei. And voila, we can celebrate Ground Fog Day.

On the road, ground fog is a bad thing. It often concentrates in low spots. When we drive into it, the visibility becomes zero, and panic, chain collisions and other woes ensue. On the other hand, a misty sunrise at the Celery Farm offers a delightful, almost mystical (no puns, please) experience. Let the photos speak.

By the way, nobody dare say that water itself, in whatever state (solid, liquid or gas), is a bad thing. After all, without it we would be powder, and life would not be. It’s a very special little molecule with unique properties. The Creator “done a good thing” when He created H2O. He uses it in blessings as well as in judgment (See Genesis 7).

Flare, in photography, is generally not a good thing, unnatural as it is. It happens when light, especially from a bright source like the Sun, starts reflecting and refracting around in the elements of the camera lens and produces odd effects—general haziness and loss of contrast, as well as bright, colorful geometric spots and streaks in the photographic image. Flare is annoying when it spoils a picture, but it can be put to artistic use, either on purpose or by accident. Again, let the photos speak.

A Winter Break

As you can see, nothing has appeared here in quite some time. After completing two Blurb books, one of which was based on past blog posts, I found myself quite blogged out. So we will take a winter sabbatical and resume when things begin to sprout in early Spring.

In the meanwhile, take a look at the books at http://www.blurb.com/ Put "bioman" in the search box to see and preview the latest. If you are daring and feel rich, you can even buy the books from that site. I won't feel insulted if you think they are too pricey for your budget, but I would be honored to have these books in your library.

Thanks. See you, Lord willing, come Spring.