Masting Aftermath—Part 2

Another remarkable facet of the masting process is that oak trees somehow communicate with each other, so they all mast simultaneously. If instead, a tree created an abundance of acorns solely on its own schedule, the widespread acorn abundance would never occur. It is not known exactly how the trees cooperate, but it seems likely that they do so by floating chemical signals on the wind. Oak trees for thousands of acres around get in sync with each other and mast together, collectively outwitting the local critters.

The animals that are enjoying the masting feast around here are those mentioned earlier (squirrels, mice, deer, and blue jays), as well as pigeons, ducks, woodpeckers, and bears. In fact, long ago, farmers would release their domestic pigs in the forest in masting years, to fatten them up for free. The acorn nut is packed with nutrients: proteins, fats, carbohydrates; and minerals like calcium, phosphorus, and potassium.

The rub for the animal diners is that that the oak tree also imbues the acorn with tannins; they taste bitter and mess up an animal’s gut, preventing most of these nutrients from being absorbed. Clever animals have evolved a counter tactic by burying the acorns or placing them in an exposed location where rain can slowly leach some of the tannins out. American Indians—a very clever animal—used to soak cracked acorns for days in water, to make them more edible.

So, what will be the aftermath of a masting year around here? Obviously, the oak trees “hope” that come spring we will see many small oak saplings popping up—some to become mighty trees one day and keep the oak forest in perpetuity. As to the acorn-eating critters, they will eat well this winter and probably produce a prodigious amount of offspring next year. Come next fall, they will encounter harder times, however, when no masting happens, and some of them will perish. That’s the way of nature. There’s no cruelty or design to the process. Some critters must die for other to live. It’s part of the great recycling program.

There is one more interesting aftermath of a masting year that I recently discovered, while talking to a neighbor. He is an excellent hunter and keeps his family’s freezer well stocked with venison. He’s found that deer hunting this year is a little different. He says that normally he can perch in his tree stand and in time, deer will wander by, as they browse for food. This year, however, the deer aren’t moving around much, since they can stay in one location and chow down on an abundance of acorns. He has to go find them. Next year, when acorns are back to normal, he may once again be able to hunker down in his tree stand and have them come to him.

Masting Aftermath—Part 1

This fall was a huge masting year for local oak trees around here. The number of acorns they put out must be more than 20 times the normal crop! I have to be careful walking in the woods, lest I step on a cluster of acorns and watch my feet slide out from under me—as if I had stepped on a banana peel or a bunch of ball bearings on a concrete floor. The local acorn-munching animals—squirrels, mice, deer, and blue jays—will be fat and happy all winter. Their larders will be overflowing and the forest floor will still remain peppered with jillions of leftover acorns.

And that, of course, is exactly why nature evolved the masting process: to create such an overabundance of acorns every few years that the voracious animals can’t possibly eat them all. It’s a way that the oak trees ensure the future of the oak forest—all those leftover acorns will result in an abundance of oak saplings next spring.

There is no intent involved in this process, no plan; no design to seek out a desirable spot. It’s more a case of creating an abundance of seed… most of which will die or get eaten; a tiny fraction will survive and grow. Similarly, fish and other species generate a huge amount of eggs, with the expectation that a tiny fraction will survive and carry the species on.

People have known about this oak masting process and have tried to predict when a such a year will come along. But the oaks even outsmart humans. Europeans have attempted for a few hundred years to forecast the coming of a masting year, without success. Nature’s intelligence remains unchallenged.

Some tree species—such as maples, sycamores, and poplars—distribute their seeds with the help of the wind. It does a tree no good if its seeds drop close to the parent. That’s competition that the parent doesn’t need (as well as the necessity to avoid inbreeding), and the offspring will lose the struggle for survival to the parent. So nature’s wisdom has evolved various methods to disperse the seed some distance away—to a more nurturing location or even to transport the species to an entirely new location.

A maple seed is a beautifully designed helicopter-like wing that spins as it falls to the ground—slowing its descent, so as to allow any wind gusts that may come along to float the seed off at a distance. The fat acorn, however, drops straight down, so nature has evolved another way to disperse them: various animals do the job of transporting the acorns away from the parent. Many acorns don’t even get a chance to drop: blue jays will remove them directly from the tree and spirit them off to some distant lair.

Squirrels cache most of their acorns in widely scattered hiding places. Although they have an excellent memory for their secret spots, not every acorn will be retrieved later and eaten. What’s more, the squirrel usually buries the seed, so if an acorn gets forgotten, it’s in the perfect underground location to sprout and grow.

More on masting next time…

Remains of a Squirrel Lunch

Hickory nut husks left on a stump

Forget to Forgive?

An Oxford University professor of internet studies had an article in the Washington Post on 11/25/12 titled “Can We Forgive if We Can’t Forget?” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger makes the point that we tend to forgive each other for our transgressions when we—over time—gradually forget what the other person said or did to us. Our memories fade away in time, unless we specifically and repeatedly bring them back up and lock them in, or if some kind of external record exists, such as a written account.

It’s necessary for us to forget many things that happen to us, otherwise our minds would become overloaded with details that get in the way of our dealing effectively with the present. So the loss of some things from memory is important for a healthy life.

Mayer-Schönberger is concerned that our digital social tools—emails, Facebook, tweets—can be a problem, because they do not allow us to forget transgressions that occur between us and friends or loved ones. They become part of the cloud’s permanent record.

For example, a snide comment that Fred made to you in an email—something you’d otherwise let go of in time—gets indefinitely preserved and reminds you of it, every time you open Fred’s email (when you may simply be looking for his address). These hurts do not fade away, as they could if Fred had said that directly to you, with nothing permanently recording his unkind comment. As another example, you fired off a smart-ass tweet to Sally last year. You wish you’d not been so quick to do that. You’d just as soon she forget it, but both you and she know that the nasty comment is frozen in time in the digital world.

I feel that Mayer-Schönberger has some good points. He recommends that we find a way to let old emails and Facebook comments slowly fade away over time. That could help. But I also think that he’s focusing on dealing with what to do, after you’ve opened the barn door and the transgressive horse has already escaped. It strikes me that we could better deal with the problem by keeping the damned door shut in the first place. That is, keep our mouth shut… or more appropriately to the subject, keep our vengeful fingers off the keyboard until we cool down.

Where we once talked to each other face-to-face or over the phone, we now hastily fire off emails and tweets. It only takes a few seconds and, hey, aren’t we all too busy to pause and allow ourselves a moment in which to reconsider our actions? Aren’t we all in a rush to complete three other things we’re also attempting to do simultaneously? So we dump down a fast rejoinder and hit the “Send” button.

At the least, the one who opens our message may be confused at what we meant, or more likely, hurt. Our sloppiness, our transgression, is now history. It’s permanently stored in the ether. The problem is not the inability to forget the offense—it’s our lack of control, consideration, and attention in the first place. Our uncouth, shoot-from-the-hip, rash response is now a permanent part of the cloud… waiting to keep reminding the other person, every time she opens that page on her computer.

Two Pix of Venus and the Moon This Morning

Earth's Climate Swings

This precious planet of ours has gone through numerous changes in its climate, over its lifespan (4.5 billion years). For most of that time, the climate was not one that we humans (or most other existing plants and critters) could even have survived in. More often than not, the atmosphere was composed of gases that would have choked us: carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane, and other suffocating gases.

 

The temperature swings in Earth’s past are another factor that made our type of life impossible. At times the entire planet was covered with ice and on other occasions it was so hot that we would have turned into grilled meat in short order.

In fact, only in the last 500 million years have climate conditions allowed any form of life larger than single-celled microorganisms to survive. And for most of that time period, our species could not have endured. As recent as a few million years ago the climate swung wildly from icy cold to blazing hot, every few thousand years.

In stark contrast to that history of nasty environmental swings, the last 10-15 thousand years on Earth have been unusually stable, mild, and gentle. Since our written history extends only a few thousand years back, we have no comprehension of the tough conditions that our deep ancestors had to contend with.

We barely have an understanding, for example, that a super volcano exploded in Toba, Indonesia some 75 thousand years ago, and came close to wiping out the human species by creating massive climate change. It led to an extended volcanic winter, wherein the worldwide temperature dropped some 5-9^oF. Most humans died. Only a few thousand of our ancestors managed to squeeze through, hunkered down in Africa. It was the largest super volcano in the last 25 million years.

In a similar fashion, we are not really able to appreciate the kind and gentle climate that Earth has given us in the last few thousand years, that has allowed our population to swell to seven billion people.

Maybe that’s partly why so many people seem blissfully ignorant of the fact that the current benevolent climate period is drawing to a close. Modern Homo sapiens has enjoyed a friendly world and has come to take it for granted. We expect the good times to keep rolling on, but it ain’t necessarily so.

In fact, the good times are ending. The tragic irony of the situation is that the current swing towards an unpleasant climate is not being caused by a crashing meteorite, a volcano, or a shift in the planet’s magnetic axis, but by the dominant species that has most benefited by the recent idyllic situation: us. Climate change this time around is our responsibility. We’ve pumped so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the benevolent times are over. Polar ice is melting, the temperature is rising (along with the sea level), and superstorms like hurricane Sandy are becoming commonplace.

The future is very uncertain, and it’s being pushed toward the scary side by our stupidity and inaction. Hang on, folks… the ride is about to get bumpy.

Horsehair Harry—Part 2

When I first met Harry I was startled, as many other people before me have been. These critters look as if they could be a parasitic worm that recently exited the human body. Did he come from me!? Yikes!

More than one person has been shocked to spot a horsehair worm squirming in the toilet! They apparently get there after coming in the house inside a cricket and emerging when the cricket seeks toilet water. These worms have given people the creepies for ages. It looks eerie… almost malevolent. (See photo below.)

I also thought that Harry resembled the nasty guinea worm that infests people in Africa, where it enters a host as a tiny larva, after a person drinks stagnant water that is infested with these worms. About a year afterwards, the person experiences a painful, burning sensation as the worm forms a blister, usually on a leg or foot, and slowly emerges… over a foot long.

As I said, upon seeing Harry, my first shuddering thought was that he had emerged from me in the tub, the night before. Quickly and distastefully discarding that theory, I wondered if he could be some kind of eel or snake—yet he seemed impossibly thin to be either of them.

I often find critters in the tub the morning after a bath—such as frogs, toads, crickets, beetles, etc.—who need rescuing, lest they drown. I scoop them out with a sieve and deposit them gently on the ground. I did the same with Harry (although he wriggled mightily to escape me). Little did I know that he was probably exactly where he wanted to be, and resented being removed from his underwater haven.

I assume that Harry eventually found himself another watery abode for the winter. If so, he’ll go looking for group sex in the spring, tangling himself up with a few female worms. The females will later deposit their million or so eggs and then die. Later, the tiny larvae will hatch and then begin their grim lives, freeloading from another hapless cricket or other similar insect—killing it in the process. It’s just another of nature’s ways of carrying on life on our lovely little planet.

Harry the Horsehair Worm

 

What you're looking at is Harry after being scooped from the tub. That background mesh is a kitchen sieve. Harry is about 6-8 inches long. Click to enlarge.

Horsehair Harry—Part 1

I recently met Harry the horsehair worm, the morning after a hot tub. I had never known such a creature existed, until I saw him squirming about at the bottom of the tub, as I began to drain it. I took a photo of him—later to investigate and discover what he was. Here’s some of what I found.

   

A horsehair worm is related to the nematode—a type of parasitic worm. It is extremely thin (about 1/16 inch) and several inches long… up to as much as a foot long. They writhe about, twisting themselves into a tangled blob that looks like a knotted cord. In fact, a common name for them is Gordian worm. An ancient myth has the worm spontaneously come alive from a horse’s tail hair—hence the name. In the fall they are usually found in pools of water (say, a horse drinking trough, in the old days), where they hunker down over the winter.

In the spring the horsehair worms get nasty. I last wrote about how we humans sometimes tend to romance nature. Here’s an example where nature gets pretty violent and ugly.

A group of worms will coil and knot themselves into orgiastic clumps, wherein the females become inseminated. Each mom then lays about  a million eggs that soon hatch and yield larvae—100 of them lined up end-to-end would hardly extend an inch. Biologists are not sure how, but the surviving larvae soon find their way into the gut of an insect—such as a cricket or a katydid, where they begin their odious parasitic life.

They first chew their way through the insect’s stomach wall and take up residence for a few weeks to a few months in the insect’s body cavity. The larvae have no food processing system—no stomach, no intestine, no anus. They have no circulatory or respiratory system either. They simply soak up nutrients from the interior of their hosts—absorbing food through their skin as they slowly destroy the host.

The larva molts several times and eventually grows into an adult worm—tightly coiled inside the insect’s body. It exudes a chemical that goes to the cricket’s brain—causing it to seek water and then drown itself, whereupon the worm breaks out and goes its way, leaving behind a hollowed-out, dead cricket.

It is now called a free-living worm, because it no longer lives the life of a parasite—when it was fully dependent for its existence on a host. Each mature worm lives through the winter (free at last!), never eating or excreting, just living on stored fat.

More on Harry next time…

Snake Climber

 

Can a snake climb a tree? This one did.

Romancing Nature—Part 2

Real nature can be scary—rather than cute and cuddly. To our deep ancestors, nature was an awesome place that called for a healthy level of fear—not what is imagined as the “Peaceable Kingdom,” where the lion reposes compliantly with the lamb. Our ancestors understood nature in its “red in tooth and claw” quality. In our attempts to enforce our dominion over the world, we have domesticated it and largely eradicated our fear and awe.

Thus we have people wandering through the wilderness, coming upon a grizzly bear and trying to get close for a photograph. So we read in the news about another person killed by a bear, and wonder if something should be done about it. Many people are unaware of the various kinds of parasites who invade a critter and slowly and painfully kill their host. This is not the kind of nature we want to hear about.

We have done our best to terminate what we perceive to be animal-to-animal cruelty in nature, while at the same time overlooking our cruelty toward it and each other. We have interfered with God’s sacred world and imposed our misplaced values on it.

If, on the other hand, we were to open ourselves to the reality of nature, we could not only see its beauty, but also what’s not cozy out there: the scary predators, the violent deaths, the scavengers who feast on dead bodies, the nasty parasites, etc. We could learn to accept these unpleasant realities, along with the enchanting antics of birds, chipmunks, and other cute critters. When we come to understand that we are a part of the natural world and that it’s a world containing both peace and killing, we can see the wholeness and realize that nature is sacred and beautiful in its own right. We don’t need to romance or idealize it. We don’t need to force it to conform to some fictitious and gentle image that we’ve created.

Our ancestors were in close touch with real nature. They dealt with threatening predators, as they simultaneously felt a sense of peace and awe. It was not a nature stripped of its threats, or of their immediacy and deep connection to it. We can reacquire our ancestors’ awe of nature, as well as thrill to its beauty and serenity. We can learn to appreciate its wholeness—by getting back in touch with it, by dropping our idealized picture and opening to the complete story. It’s both tame and wild.

Injured Nuthatch

This white-breasted nuthatch flew into the window and stunned himself. He can't close his beak. I held him, hoping he'd recover. A bird in the hand is worth two....

Click to enlarge.

A few minutes later he is recovering.

Then he flew off.

Romancing Nature—Part 1

Many people in modern society have developed a quixotic view of nature—a perspective that is both idealistic and unrealistic, because it views nature primarily as a nurturing, gentle, and innocent realm. While that can certainly be true, it’s a very limited understanding. It’s also a kind of quasi-religious or new-agey belief that can allow people to interpret nature from a secure distance, as a cuddly place of sanctuary and safety.

This perspective interestingly seems to bubble up most often in those people who regret our modern disconnect from the natural world and who lament the preponderance of society’s soulless, mechanical perspective. Yet these same individuals continue to hang onto a belief in a type of outdated spirituality that has placed us apart from and superior to all other creatures—a belief that has significantly contributed to that disconnect. It’s a viewpoint that can create a false understanding of the natural world and our place in it.

We in America have a long tradition of enjoying fine nature writers such as Thoreau, Emerson, John Muir, and Wordsworth, who compellingly described the sacredness of the wild. Their words have drawn many of us closer to nature than our urban-technological society would otherwise allow. We feel the tug of their depictions of the natural world—exacerbated by the separation that many of us have from nature and our minimal ability to experience it directly.

But this romantic perception of nature, while comforting, can blind us to seeing the reality of the world that is outside the influence of humans: a wild and raw nature. We have distanced ourselves from this true nature, so we have come to romanticizing it. We lack a tangible connection to nature and have, in the vacuum, created an imaginary connection. It is a fanciful perception that is exemplified in Disney’s cute, animated movies.

The unfortunate truth is that the only nature most of us can experience today is a human-altered nature, in which we have eliminated most of the large, predatory mammals from the wild. In so doing, we have created a subdued nature. The British Isles, for example, were once home to numerous large predators and were covered by primeval forests. One can walk the length of Britain today and never fear an attack from a threatening critter, while enjoying the fabulous gardens carefully cultivated by their accomplished horticulturists.  

We have removed the majority of those large predators—the denizens of the top of the food chain—without understanding their evolutionary role in the ecological balance. We have impoverished nature, while simultaneously remaining blind to our role in the depleted natural scene. We put attention to isolated problems in the natural world—how to deal with the plethora of deer in suburban neighborhoods, for example—ignorant of what has really been lost or unbalanced in nature by our actions. We have tamed nature and subsequently have transformed it into a place of comfort. What we see is not real nature.

More romance next time…