A Huge—and all-important—Side Trip

The term “creation” involves more than the usually limited scope of this blog and its focus on “natural theology” or how created things, such as bugs and posies reflect the Creator’s design. So to start off November (what happened to October?) I will plunge into dangerous waters—waters so important that the very future of the United States of America is at stake.

The first and second chapters of Genesis describe the creation of all things and especially the creation of Man and Woman in the image of God. All of creation was pronounced “very good.” But things didn’t stay very good for very long. Genesis 3 relates Man’s fall into sin and the resultant curses on the creation. Suffering, disease, death, environmental degradation ensued and have ordered the creation ever since (held in check by God’s sustaining power, grace and mercy).

So that fallen Man would not destroy himself and the creation, God instituted human government. Throughout history, various forms of governance have been tried: tribal leadership, kingdoms, dictatorships, communes. Some have held societies together for a time, but most eventually have failed.

Our founding fathers, rebelling against tyranny, cobbled together an experiment, partly based on English law, but, more importantly, founded on Holy Scripture, with which colonial culture was infused. In the formation of our experimental government, a form of representative republican democracy, this bunch of adventurous young men incorporated (either consciously or by way of the culture of the time) two Biblical principles: the imago dei (man created in the image of God) and the fallen nature of that image. The combination, worked into the Constitution, was intended to ensure God-given inalienable rights and some limits on those rights to hold society together in light of fallen human nature and its tendency toward sin and discord.

The experiment has worked, through many trials and near failures, for more than two hundred years. It has been, by any measure, the form of government that has produced more blessing for its citizens—and for people throughout the world—than any other in history.

On November 4th, the work of the founding fathers will be put to what may be its biggest test, the most crucial presidential election in the history of this young republic. Its citizens (hopefully most of the voters will be citizens) will make a selection between two men as Commander in Chief:

A man whose entire life, from childhood on, has been infused with duty, honor and country, and who has given his life to service and leadership.
or--
A man whose entire life, from childhood on, has been infused and saturated with Muslim schooling, liberal education, and close associations, over much of his adult life, with radical socialists, Marxists, black liberation theologians, a crooked Chicago slum lord, dirty Chicago politics, as well as with an organization that is creating havoc with the registration and election processes. And this man has brushed aside, obfuscated and outright lied about these associations throughout his presidential campaign. He also broke his promise to use public financing for his campaign, thus allowing him to collect obscene amounts of (largely untraceable) cash to spend on big productions, advertising and infomercials. An important bit of reading can be seen here .

In addition (and directly related to the subject of the inalienable right to life) this man is a radical supporter of abortion (all nine months and beyond). Click here for absolutely essential reading in this regard.

Most of the talk of late has focused on the economy. That is certainly an important topic. Peoples’ lives are being affected. But the economy will get fixed, sooner or later, with or without bungling government interference. Money is useful but temporary--Character lasts forever.

What won’t get fixed, or perhaps even survive, if we make the wrong choice, is the very character of the republic. And since our nation has largely abandoned the biblical base upon which it was founded and has abandoned itself to economic and sensual “blessings” rather than true blessings from the Creator and Savior, I have real doubts that Tuesday’s decision will be a sound one. In the last analysis however, the decision is in God’s hand. He, the Potter, uses us, the clay (Romans 9:21-23) to the ultimate end of His glory and honor. Will His decision be one of much deserved judgment or totally undeserved mercy?

Perhaps, after November 4, one way or the other, this blog will get back to picturing some of God’s creative wonders. After all, there is still beauty in this world, but only by His incredible grace and all enduring mercy.

A Little Side Trip

I thought it would be good for a change to take a side trip away from the usual photo essay format of this blog and share a few items I’ve found particularly interesting or relevant. Be sure to click on the links to go to the related articles.

The most dangerous place to send your child:
My freshman orientation week at what was then called Montclair State Teachers College a half-century ago consisted of silly things like wearing a red beanie called a dink, learning the Alma Mater and maybe some non-memorable ice-breaking activities. It was somewhat intimidating to a shy eighteen-year-old—but non-life threatening. For several years now, after hearing horror stories about campus life today, I have often reflected on the thought that college might be the most dangerous place to send your child. College campuses have become in many cases dangerous physically, emotionally, philosophically and most of all, spiritually. Click here to read an article that makes the case. The author’s book might be a good investment if you have a child near college age.

Dino Classification Chaos:
In this blog I often poke some fun at over-zealous plant and animal taxonomists and even nature lovers who care more about picky species identifications than just enjoying plants and animals for what they are—fantastically complex and beautiful creations. I did it in the last post about goldenrods. Last year I lambasted botanists for messing around with one of my favorite plant genera, Eupatorium . If biologists can get into trouble with presently existing species, imagine what paleontologists can do with extinct ones. A recent post in Creation-Evolution Headlines has many important implications, especially about what science can and can’t and shouldn't try to do.

21st Century Reading:
I finally yielded to temptation and bought an Amazon Kindle . It’s a reading device about the size and weight of a paperback book. With it you can buy, download wirelessly and read over 170,000 books from Amazon at prices much lower than the paper versions. The screen is different than a computer screen (it’s called “e-paper”) and much more comfortable to read. I can read for much longer periods without eyestrain than I can a paper book. I have begun to load the Kindle with theology, biology and some lighter material. I think the thing will eventually pay for itself, but I’ll have to maintain some budgetary discipline. To paraphrase old Senator Everett Dirksen, “$9.99 here and $9.99 there—and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

One of the fun books I’m reading now is The Book of Animal Ignorance with strange facts about everything from aardvarks to worms. Maybe I like it for its writing style, which is about as quirky as mine.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that the 2.4 billion ants in a square mile of rain forest weigh more than four times as much as all the local mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians put together. Or that an eagle’s feathers weigh more than twice as much as its bones.

You learn something new every day!

Solidago sp.

Having recently completely blown a pretty easy plant identification based on seeing photographs, I have taken a solemn vow never to go there again—and that plant wasn’t even a goldenrod.

Adding “sp.” after a genus name may be a cop-out, or it may mean that differentiating between and among species of a particular genus is difficult, impossible—or maybe just not worth the effort. When it comes to the 60+ species of goldenrods indigenous to the northeast, I’ll go for Solidago sp. almost every time. Life is too short. Yes, there are many fairly easily distinguishable species—but life is still too short.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t enjoy the goldenrods. They are 18K treasures in God’s jewelry armoire and we appreciate them far too little. After all, their foliage throughout the summer may appear somewhat weedy and may be easily confused for other really weedy plants. And since most species wait until late summer or fall to show off their floral finery, they have by then damaged their reputation as genuine “wildflowers.”

Another problem for our admiration of the Solidago group is that when they finally bloom, we tend to see them as mere bunches of yellow stuff, especially when we encounter massed displays in the middle of a meadow or field. That’s like looking at the ocean from a hotel window or like bird watching through the wrong end of your bins!

So dare to get cozy with the Solidagos—real cozy. Take a hand lens with you. Go ahead. Stick your nose right in there. OK, there might be a bee or a wasp doing the same; but that’s what flowers are for, after all. The bees won’t bother you—they’re too busy lapping nectar and packing pollen. Most wasps are friendly, too.

If I haven’t convinced you to go up-close goldenrod gawking in vivo, the included photos should offer a somewhat satisfying substitute. Wow! They are actually really flowers! They look like miniature daisies! Well, that’s what they are—members of the Composite family, with ray flowers and disk flowers. Each bunch or spray is like a delivery from www.proflowers.com --but you don’t have to pay extra for the vase—and it lasts longer!

Never be satisfied with seeing “bunches of yellow stuff”—with leaving God’s gold shut up in the armoire.

Now that’s a bug—Really!

Yes, really. Whoever first nicknamed the VW beetle a bug was obviously not an entomologist. Beetles are beetles; bugs are bugs; never the twain shall meet. Actually, the car looks more like a beetle, like a ladybug, which is a beetle. So who were the better entomologists, the namers or the nicknamers? Is this getting confusing? Maybe we should ask the Beatles, who were clever enough not to spell their name like insects but after their rhythmical musical genre, which changed popular music for all time--probably for the worse.

I think we had better get back to the bug.

The pictured handsome guy is a bug, an Hemipteran. He’s flat across the back and has that shield shape, due to the fact that his forewings are half leathery and half membranous. That’s what makes him a bug. Of course, there are other differences as well. This guy has piercing-sucking mouthparts; beetles usually chew.

In my curious youth, I carried a relative of the pictured specimen, a big Hemipteran called a Wheel Bug, in the car on a family trip. I put a couple of moths in the jar with it and watched as its piercing-sucking mouthparts reduced the moths to powder in a matter of minutes. Mom and Dad were thrilled.

The photograph pictures one of the “leaf-footed" bugs, for reasons that may be obvious. Its genus is Acanthocephala—why do insects usually have names longer than their bodies?

Now that I’ve driven you buggy with this buggy drivel, I’ll just say so long for now. Don’t let the bedbugs bite—and yes, bedbugs are real bugs, although they are not as buggy in appearance as our typical pictured specimen.

Now I’ve gotcha itchin’!

Theological lesson? If it weren’t for sin and its consequences, maybe we would have only friendly vegetarian insects. Just a thought.

Plants are simply amazing—but not simple!

Click here to read an article about just one of countless examples of plant biochemistry and how plants use other creatures to do their bidding. It will also introduce you to one of the most amazing websites I have found. David Coppedge and his staff (I have never been able to figure out how many he has helping him with his site) do an amazing (there, I used that word again) job of cutting through the baloney and logical fallacies in scientific articles whose authors take Darwinian theory as proven fact. Dr. Coppedge works for JPL (Jet Propulsion Labs)

For future reference, a link to Creation/Evolution Headlines is included in the “Links to Good Stuff” over to your right. Check it often. I think you will find it....ing!

May I use your phone? —my car broke down…

The pictured duo may look like refugees from an Orkin® commercial. (If you haven’t seen a recent Orkin commercial, the title of this post undoubtedly has you baffled.) But these chitin-clad beauties will probably not be ringing your door bell or eating your house. They could be building their own papier-mache houses under an eave, in your mailbox or in any other semi-concealed cranny. Polistes is the name—paper nest making is their game.

If I have them taxonomically pegged, the top photo is of Polistes dominulus, while the bottom bunk is occupied by P. annularis. They are two of the twenty or more species of paper wasps found in the U.S. While P. annularis is a native species, P. dominulus found its way to Massachusetts from Europe, in some modern version of the Mayflower, somewhere around 1980. In less than thirty years, it has colonized most of the continent. It’s just one more of those unfortunate alien species stories with which we have become so familiar. P. dominulus, while mostly harmless, has probably displaced some native wasps. By the way, although it resembles a Yellow-jacket, it is larger, and it doesn't particularly enjoy picnics like that pesky little hornet does.

Paper wasps are voracious predators, attacking leaf-munching caterpillars, making them beneficial to gardeners—except when it involves the larvae of our favorite butterflies. Of course, the adults don’t eat the caterpillars; they sting them to paralyze them, then take them back to the hive, chew them up and spit them out for the benefit of their babies. Adult wasps are limited to a liquid diet of nectar, honeydew (secreted by aphids) and even liquid food upchucked on cue by their babies. That is the downside of having a wasp waist (the envy of every human female) and digestive organs located in the abdomen—nothing but liquid gets past the constriction.

There must be a lesson or two in here somewhere, at least for the Christian reader. Maybe it’s “don’t be a wasp-waist Bible reader”. Yes, meditate on the Word. Chew on it—but be sure you digest it for yourself before trying to share it with others. That works. Soli Deo Gloria.

Swamped by the Mallows

Jim & Patty's Swamp Mallow (Jim's photo):
Researching the Mallows:

Swamp Rose Mallow at Phair's:

Swamp Rose (Rosa palustris):

Fellow blogger Jim Wright recently posted a photo of a “swamp mallow” that his wife planted a couple of years ago by a stream near his back yard. It is producing brilliant red blooms this year. It got me thinking--is this the same species as the “swamp rose mallow” growing at Phair’s Pond? That clump of plants, growing almost in the water, is producing pale pink blossoms—and its leaves are different from Jim’s plant, which seems to be the Halberd-leaved Rose Mallow.

Well, that little mystery sent me rifling through three books and a passel of websites before I came to a few tentative conclusions about the matter:

1. Common names are often confusing (a pretty well known fact).
2. Even Latin names can be confusing!
3. Color means almost nothing in these Hibiscus species (Look at the computer screen shot—all pictures of the same species!)
4. Botanists are often in disagreement about classifying closely related species.
5. I might be completely (in the words of General Honore) “stuck on stupid” when it comes to trying to identify any of these plants.

Now let’s see if we sort out these plants. First, it’s all about the Genus Hibiscus—or maybe not. Some of the plants called “Mallows” belong to this Genus, but not all of them. Both the Wright plant and the Phair’s plant do. But they are obviously of two different species. I say this because of the leaves—two entirely different shapes.

Jim’s name, “swamp mallow” is probably a safer (and acceptable) choice for his wife’s persistent plant than anything including the word “rose”, because roses these Hibiscuses ain’t. That’s where common names can become particularly misleading. I suppose the Hibiscuses reminded someone of the Swamp Rose, Rosa palustris, a fine specimen of which we had blooming near the Pena Bench earlier in the summer. Well, its flowers are big and pink; but that is pretty much where the resemblance ends. So whoever named those mallows after a rose should be ashamed.

To add another layer of confusion, there are other “mallows” that don’t belong to the Genus Hibiscus, the most famous of which is the Marsh Mallow—and I haven’t had one of those roasted over a campfire in a long time! No, seriously, there is a real plant called the Marsh Mallow. In fact, the campfire treats originally were made with a gummy substance from that plant. Oh, I never knew that!

Marsh Mallow, Althaea officinalis, is an alien plant, native of Africa and Europe, pink-flowered and furry of leaf. And for economic reasons, cheaper substances, like galatin, are now used to make marshmallows.

It is one of the Hibiscus species from which carcade, a healthful herbal tea (Here's an interesting article) is made. Mussolini tried to get the Italians to drink the stuff. I think his penchant for insisting that the trains run on time had some connection with carcade—a connection that completely escapes me at the moment. Let your imaginations go--imagining.

Well, enough of this marshmallow fluff for now. If I started in on the confusion in the Latin names of some of these plants, you would be tempted to put me on a stick and roast me.

Shall we gather at the Asclepias incarnata?

As August races toward its final weeks, flowers are transitioning to fruit, and seeds will soon be flying or being carried to new places to put down roots. Wind, birds and mammals are helping. The milkweed clan is no exception, but no seeds are flying just yet.

While at least two of the other milkweed species (See this earlier post) are proudly plumping their puffy pods, the Swamp Milkweed is still in florist-fresh condition and attracting pollinators and nectar slurpers. For more than a month, insects of at least four Orders have enjoyed exploring and sipping from the plant at the end of Phair’s Pond Path.

Last year, I blabbed about insect wings and how they are used to classify insects into their Orders. Now, how about looking at the antennae, which may not be as Order-definitive, but are no less fascinating. The problem with antennae is that they are generally small. But blowing them up via photography can help us enjoy them.

Skippers are strange in many ways (See a post from last year). They are generally some shade of brown, with yellow and russet highlights, less gaudily colored than some other butterflies; and they are rather hairy, more mothy than butterflyish. And their antennae are special as well. Moths generally have feathery antennae, while butterflies have matchsticks. Skipper antennae are matchstickish but with a little hook on the tip, as you can see—well, barely—insect antennae are hard to get in focus!

Obviously, the Longhorn Beetle’s antennae give it its name, while the oversized yellow feelers of the European Paper Wasp look like they would make the insect top-heavy. Nothing too special about the antennae of the Small Milkweed Bug, except for their many segments—and for the fact that all insect antennae are special both structurally and functionally.

If you want to get buried in insect antenna structural terminology, go here ; and if you want to get really buried in the details of insect antenna development, go here .

Functionally, insect antennae are not radio aerials. Beetles can’t tune into a station featuring old Beatles hits. No, insect antennae are noses, that is, olfactory organs. And as noses, they are extraordinary. They are best at detecting pheromones (sex attractants), enabling males to zero in on females, often from great distances (the most famous example is the male Luna Moth’s ability to detect pheromone concentrations in the parts-per-billion range up to five miles away from the female that has secreted the hormone.)

We have prated at considerable length here and have included more links (some just silly) than a Jimmy Dean sausage :) So you can click on them all and learn a lot, as I did, or you can just enjoy the photos.

But, as always, I remind us that insects are fantastic engineering miracles, not the product of some sort of “goo to you, by way of the zoo” blind evolutionary process! Sorry, Charlie D. Modern biology has made sausage of your theory.
Soli Deo Gloria

Seedy Free Verse (Does it have legs?)

At the seedy centipede spelunker convention,
All crowded around the mysterious sinkhole.
Staring into the inky abyss, they pondered—
How deep? How deep?

We must explore!

Or as seedy (or maybe indehiscent fruity?) haiku:
Seedy centipede spelunkers.
Mysterious deep sinkhole.

Must explore!

At the end of its bloomin’ rope

The Moth Mullein grew unusually tall and gangly this year, its single flower stalk topping out at a yard or more. But it retained its habit of distributing its unusual flower buds equidistantly and opening them only one or two at a time, starting at the bottom and working upward, day by day.

As of August 13, it’s almost the end of the line. I see only one or two flower buds above the bloom of the day. And such a flower—such a bud! As you can see, there is nothing “standard” about either—a cabochon ruby bud opening into a blossom with strange, feathery sex organs.

But it’s the fruit that takes the prize for alien mien. To the naked eye, it may look like a cute little marble, but attack it with a macro lens and—that’s just weird! (Don’t anyone light that fuse!) But it’s beautiful even in its weirdness.

To be fair, much plant material reveals strangeness under magnification. Veininess and hairiness are standard equipment in various parts of many plants, all designed to transport, protect and serve in countless ways. Those gland-tipped hairs on most parts of the mullein most likely keep chomping insects at bay.

In a way, it’s probably a blessing that the Creator hasn’t given our eyes the resolving power of macro lenses. Our relatively fuzzy vision allows us to see superficial beauty undistracted by functional weirdness. And the thought of someone turning a pair of macro lenses on us is not a pleasant one. Those magnifying vanity mirrors are bad enough.

On second thought—and a much more important one—there is a macro lens—one with omniscient resolving power—focused on us 24/7. Read Psalm 139 . Yikes! That’s why we need a Savior. In fact, for those who don't know Jesus Christ as Savior, this psalm should be absolutely terrifying! To His sheep, it is pure comfort and helps keeps us humbly in line behind the Shepherd. What a great pride killer!

Soli Deo Gloria!