Spume

“There are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji, but there is only one summit”   

 Morihei Ueshiba

 

     In Japan, Mount Fuji is revered in several religions and the summit has been a pilgrimage site since the sixth century. Now, the cliched view is climbed by hundreds of thousands of tourists yearly and treated like a theme park instead of a church.

    Like Japan, the view in Corrales of the Snadia peak travels from the mountains down into the Rio Grande river. The variety of people who visit it is only dwarfed by the variety of organisms that call these slopes home. A theme park or a church can have an equal amount of care provided to it, but which one of those two institutions can travel into the future? And why?

 

 In the foothills of the East mountains, the plant life is vibrant, not because of the abundance of water, but because of the scarcity of time before the summer reduces growth. Flowers advertise their wares in vibrant colors and offer sugary snacks to an abundance of hover flies and other insects. These plants are in a hurry to get the next generation ready. Even though this cactus is not an annual, the spring blooming season is very short.

 

Corydalis aurea is a winter annual in the poppy family. Annuals are common around human environments and where heavy grazing occurs. Many are considered weeds because of their survivability. They have short roots and survive most of the year as seeds in the soil.

 

Oenothera deltoides aka Dune Evening Primrose. These blooms are supposed to open at night and are usually white to attract the varieties of moths that pollinate them.

 

The level of the river has risen rapidly as the snow melts rapidly from the distant peaks and drains into the valley. Many people are going to again try their luck in the churning, muddy water on various one dollar gaily colored inflation devices better suited to a calm beach. Theme parks have lifeguards for a reason, because the river is treacherous. A church might keep an unprotected areas such as this off limits, but the bosque doesn't have any walls. Education is probably the best way to protect everyone.

 

 As the level of the river rises, the excess water seeps into the surrounding soils, both laterally and up from below. This is noticeable on the deep trails through the bosque, because they tend to be more deeply incised into the soil by the scraping of many human, dog and horse feet.

 Shallow pools of standing water are very different than flowing turbid rivers. They allow many forms of creatures to thrive, not all of them appreciated. Mosquitos are blood suckers, but both species also will usually only suck plant sap and are also pollinators.

 

Shallow pools are beneficial to many other important animals that are not often seen unless by those who take the time to stop and listen. Snapping turtles are found in many muddy areas and very shy. Those smaller than your hand are completely harmless, but they can grow to amazing sizes if they are allowed to live long enough by the people they share their spaces with.

Red eared sliders are more vegetarian and a lot more active than snapping turtles. They are far less afraid of people and use the heat of the sun during bouts of sunbathing to digest meals of algae and invertebrates.

 Beavers in the Southwest are exclusively nocturnal due to hunting pressures sustained over the last 200 years. These rodents have profound effects on the health of a forest over the long term. The Russian olive trees near to a beaver dam are usually left alone. Sometimes, like in this picture, they will chose to remove one growing over the water when they need dam building material.

 

 The narrow leaf willow forms part of the under story species space, that along with the coyote willow and willow baccharis form dense swales that shade the seedlings the mature cottonwoods depend upon to flourish. The succession process is complex and important, with seedlings growing on open sand bars until the willows catch up and surround them, which gives time for the long taproot to grow which allows the tree to flourish in the next five years it needs before it can form a canopy on it's own. This plant has been designated as a "garden of merit' recipient...in England.

 

Dogsbane is becoming more prevalent in area of open forest floor that used to be flooded, so the south end of Corrales bosque. This is a useful fiber plant that is widely dispersed by the wind. This plant seems to be related to milkweeds and has its own specialist beetle that can sequester its poisonous compounds much like the monarch butterfly does with milkweed.

 

 Horsetail ferns are not actually a plant, as such. They are the sole surviving species from an era 300 million years ago where they grew over 100 feet tall. They release spores, but are not ferns. Their gametophytes can be both male or female because they are not specialized like in phanerogams. When conditions are right, structures called strobilus release spores that have hyprophilic elaters. These are very simple "legs" that react to humidity and surface tension to be motile (they can "fly" and "walk" when conditions are right. Their extensive underground roots and deep starchy tubers mean they are never removed from an area once established.

 

The king of the bosque is the cottonwoods, a species of poplar tree. The do not have as long a growing season as other invasive tree species. Even though they are well adapted to conditions along the river they are just not aggressive enough in their growth, and the conditions along the river has been changing over the last fifty years due to climate change. That's within a single generation for most of the oldest trees.

 

wind dispersal is used by many plants, however, they often use fibers instead of actual wings because the high surface area allows these balls of fluff to tumble along the surface of the forest until they are trapped by moist surfaces which increases chances for successful germination. Cottonwoods can germinate from wind blown twigs embedded in mud, from root suckers, or by dispersed seeds

 

 While the maple samara seems more advanced, it is actually a clumsier design, only designed to disperse and slow it's descent in moderate wind. The design also lays flat after it lands, the cellulose skin allows it to float on water. The maple seed is relatively large, with good stores of energy for the seed inside.

         

 Elms seeds are profligate and send their seeds everywhere. Trees synchronize their seed release as environmental conditions such as shortening days trigger changes in the relative amounts of plant hormones the cells of the tree is exposed to. Things are never quite that simple, of course, but the elms burst their seeds everywhere and the cottonwoods follow at a more leisurely pace afterwards. Here you can see how all the seeds have been caught in a spider's web.

There is a lot of different reasons why spiders build more webs in the spring. Part of this answer is that spiders use their webs for a darn sight more than just for catching dinner. They spin tents to protect themselves from predator wasps, they advertise their houses to wandering mates, they sense their surroundings from the vibrations of these webs, they can use thin strands to fly and disperse to new locations. These flat webs are likely from a grass spider species, these spiders are among the fastest runners in the insect world, pretty large and scary, but totally harmless to humans. This is a common problem in the insect world, where everything looks alike and a few species, out of millions, are dangerous.

In Corrales we don't have the large rhinoceros or stag beetles, but the desert stink beetles get pretty large. They grow in the leaf litter of the forest before heading into the sandy uplands to feed on plant detritus as they try to avoid the hot sun and various predators.

Beetles are one of the several very successful insect species on the planet. This is a weevil, from the long apparent snout with antennae. The official name for this long appendage is a "rostrum". The genus is some sort of Orchestes.

 Beetles cover a great many niches. While the weevils are a group of herbivores that use their rostrums to bore through the tough covering of nuts and grains, this convergent lady beetle feeds on soft bodied aphids and is incredibly common, being released by rose gardeners in large numbers, as well as being found in the wild. Just about everyone knows what a ladybug looks like, but for other species, especially wasps or spiders, the distinction is not so clear.

 

 Ironically, most wasps are parasitoids, their young feeding on the living bodies of spiders and caterpillars. They often fly very little, hugging the ground as they search for the emergence holes of females, or the lairs of grass spiders. Without the bright yellow stripes and propensity for sugary sodas, these drab wasps are barely noticed at all.

 

 Ants and wasps last shared a vespoid ancestor about 100 million years ago. Given that all cells come from pre-existing cells, it shouldn't be a huge surprise to find out the last common ancestor between humans and ants was around 600 million years ago. This queen ant is shedding her wings and looking to make a burrow to lay the eggs of your long distant nieces.

 Being mistaken for something else is quite annoying unless it is intentional. This Lappet moth is completely camouflaged when it is lying near to fallen leaves. In an urban environment, however, it is very conspicuous. Still very pretty, notice the thatch of long hair behind the head that helps heat conservation, and also muffles bat echolocation signals.

 

The sphinx moths are huge insects. The larva are called hornworms, but also called piyatem by those who still eat them. Studies show the caterpillars have a similar nutrition profile to a hamburger. The loud thrumming and erratic diving flights of the adults often cause many people to think they have seen the first hummingbird of the season.

The hummingbirds have certainly arrived, of course. Their rapid fire twittering are aimed at anything and everything as their territorial drive impels them to harass everything, up to and including their own shadow. They have one of the smallest DNA genomes of any vertebrate and are often trilling in short arcs are they court a hidden female. While they are obnoxious, they are mild compared to the rufous hummingbird that will come later.

 

Summer tanagers are bright orange all over, but they can be remarkably well hidden when they sit in a tree's shadow. They have a loud song, but only occasionally seem to appear in the trees near my house, before moving on. They are very unique and distinctive if you can spot their flash of color.

Damselflies, dragonflies and ant-lions all have started flying around. The common blue damselfly eats the many gnats and mosquitos that are currently around the pools of water. their larvae, unlike the dragonflies, have actual gills, which can be drawback in the oxygen poor waters of many marshy pools but allows them to stay still for long periods of time under water.

The genus of willows covers a lot of plants. We have coyote willow, gooding's willow, and this, the narrowleaf willow. We have also named many plants a willow that are not. There is the desert willow (a catalpa species), and the willow baccharis (an aster). 

    There are those who try to see the trees in the woods, or those who can't see the woods for the trees. Some like reality to be defined, and others who like to contemplate mysteries. I would postulate that if you prefer theme parks to churches, you will only enjoy nature by shrieking when you see a wasp. But if you like the mysteries of old churches it is a fact you will have a deeper, more personal experience of life than those wearing mickey mouse hats and calling everything with long leaves a willow. this is because although anyone can make the same summit of Mount Fuji, the journey is different for everyone.

sploosh

I always feel like our descendants—they're going to be upset with us for wrecking the planet anyway—but they're really going to be mad that we didn't even bother to take a good picture.          Jack Longino

It often feels like studying nature is like imagining an unseen dimension where connections exist between things that we cannot even identify. Still, we can imagine. The reason we should, is that there is far more out there to learn from that we can find just using our five senses.

 

 It is odd that decomposition is a computational and biological term for taking a complex thing and breaking it down into simpler units. By ignoring the relationship between things a process becomes clearer, but the loss of the relationships often means people are looking at the wrong thing. Here, the trees are crowding out the sunlight that the grasses are needing, while the grasses are preventing new sapling for growing. The overall effect is a charming woodland glade scene which many people have been quite taken by.

 

Here is an example of seeing a thing in a different light. This is the abscission zone of a tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima). Right above it is the axillary bud which is dormant because of the vertical dominance of this species of tree. The whole process is regulated by the relative concentration of auxin. This is the abridged version of the whole story, there is so many relationships to look at in this picture. The biological process of decomposition is personified in this picture of both senescence and fecundity. The computational concept of decomposition (factoring) is the unconscious process all school educated people do, where the picture is broken up according to a paradigm to be understood as objects that interact is some predefined way.

Yet most people just appreciate the symmetry of the cells producing a picture of a heart. While others wrestle with the false dichotomy of whether the tree of heaven is a great fast growing garden tree, or a noxious invasive species.

Barren sand is the trademark picture of apocalypse movies. But some plants see this as open real estate ripe for exploitation. This is the Russian thistle plant, which took over the midwestern plains in the late 1800's. The human plough and following development removed competing root systems and dried out the soil, allowing the deep taproot of the seedlings to rapidly establish a toehold. The radicle pushes downwards rapidly and responds to the conditions it finds, so both intrinsic and extrinsic factors affect taproots versus lateral growth.

Cockleburrs form large seeds that stick to animal fur to travel. Here you can see the release of the seedling from the distinctive seed casing. Those two "large leaves" are actually cotyledons, a type of storage vessel. The true leaves that photosynthesize are the tiny ones inside those. Cockleburrs have been studied for the toxic substances in the seed, the oil, and the adhesive produced by the spines. Most people know the seeds are the inspiration for the idea of velcro.

 

 Rains and snow form the source of water that eventually makes its way down to Corrales. Even though it doesn't look it, the Rio Grande is the fifth longest river in the US and has a watershed that includes eight US states.

 

There is a lot of fish in the Rio Grande, but the diversity is nothing compared to what there used to be. The clay silt caused by near constant changes to the river level (causing erosion) has caused many fish to become rare, and other fish to dominate. The grass carp live in the turbid, alkaline and clay silted waters of the main river. They often will swim into the drainage canals of Corrales to feed in the warm, shallow, acidic, sandy, and clear waters of recently inundated areas to feed and breed. In the past there have been many other fish species, but these have mostly vanished since the siphon irrigation water was cut off two years ago at the north end of Corrales.

The abundance of ecosystems in the relatively unkempt Corrales ditch verges house an impressive number of bird visitors. Egrets normally don't stalk the drier parts of Corrales, but they can be seen. The cattle egret hunts insects and anything else in tall grasses. Large numbers are currently roosting at the Tingley ponds but they like to check out the inundated fields for slow lizards at this time of year.

Turkey vultures visit the bosque to rest as they are not great fliers when conditions are less than ideal. Their appearance presage the hummingbird migrations who have just arrived. Vultures usually do not stay long in the wooded areas, preferring quieter locales out in the open plains and hills to the west.

Coopers hawks in the area are engaged in nest building and courtship. The males are often on sentry duty near to the nest and chirp out warning and probable blasphemies when vehicles and other birds pass by.

As the number of coyote visits decrease, the flock of feral turkeys has become more active, especially in the middle of the day in fenced wooded areas that are free of pets. Their gobbling calls can be heard in the mornings as they travel in a flock of about eight individuals along the lateral ditch. As usual, the research on leucitic (not albino) birds is speculative, and suggests that oddly colored mutants reduce breeding stress in social birds like turkeys.

The elm seed snow is on us, most will not germinate due to the dry conditions they land in. Carpenter ants and mice often snatch many and store them underground. The elm seed bugs proliferate in response, with the eggs being deposited on developing elm seeds.

 

Periwinkles are grown as a ground cover plant in areas with high acidity in the soil. They would be invasive if the native soil was less alkaline. The flower is admittedly beautiful, but then there are also so many other native candidates. This flower is also repellent to many browsing species like rabbits or deer. A flower with five leaves exhibits radial symmetry, which allows pollinating insects to approach from any angle and have the same view of the identifying colors and features. Other flowers which have a bilateral symmetry need to be approached from one specific angle and usually have a specific, co-evolved pollinator.

 

Studies of patterns in nature are not just abstract concepts. Patterns are how plants and animals communicate. Spirals seen in disc phyllotaxis are efficient packing arrangements that emerge spontaneously and have helped guide human understanding of mathematics, which is just another form of communication. Asters, like this salsify flower, guide insects to a central platform. The outer petals are called ray florets and are just advertisements of the health, age, and species of flower. The disc florets at the central are the male and female flowers that appeal to any insect that has short, generalized proboscis. Many asters become locations for invertebrate mating later in the season, exactly like a human dance floor in a popular city party spot.

With the recent record high spring temperatures, many stone fruit orchards should do very well in terms of fruit production. There are many small trees around Corrales that can yield apricots, cherries, or apples and most of those are blossoming now. With the last freeze past here will be an explosion of color all over central New Mexico in colors from purple, white, pink or yellow.

With the explosion of lawn culture in the 1860's in the US dandelions became the enemy, but they cannot be eradicated with herbicides or many lawn management strategies. They love bright sun, they have large taproots that mean they can live in compacted soils and can regrow easily from this root. They are also very flexible. There is a Scalesia species in Galapagos that evolved from a dandelion ancestor to form tree forests.

Pappus and Apomixis are not common words thrown around much by general biology readers, but everyone who tends a lawn knows about the effects of these words. Pappus is the unique seed of the dandelion that allows it to use winds to aid in dispersal. Apomixis is the asexual reproduction that can occur in some aster plant species like dandelions. While there is a loss of diversity from clones, they can rapidly spread into new areas if the conditions are right, and there is increased importance of environmental fitness from the original progenitor.

 

Silverfish in the wild hide under large logs where there is more moisture. They feed on starch, so the abundant elm seeds are a boon for them. These insects live for several years which is a long time for an arthropod. They undergo many molts during their lifetime which means they are resilient, able to repair a lot of injuries they might face.

 

It is always amazing how much goes on under the surface of the earth. These white grubs are the bane of many a gardener, they are the pupae of the scarab beetles that feed on shallow roots in lawns and gardens. They are much prized by skunks and turkeys, but are a cause of much garden spraying for pests

The larvae of the crane fly is also an agricultural pest but have only been found in the US for about forty years. They are among one of the oldest fly species, having been around for 245 million years and so have had a chance to spread to most parts of the globe. A lot is known about crane flies, mostly because one man studied and identified almost 11,000 species.

Spring is a strange time for many reptiles. The daytime highs are perfect for basking, but the nights are still cold. This means lizards are still sporadic in the bosque and have to be constantly moving to regulate their internal temperatures for activities and feeding. Still, this one looks very content in the sun, and their many natural enemies, such as snakes are not yet active.

 

Personally, the appearance of spider webs in the morning sun and strung across trails is a clear sign that spring has sprung. I notice that these arachnids predominate until the ants take over with their superior numbers and activity. This type of spider prefers the crevices under logs and tall grasses.

 

 Cobweb spiders are very different and prefer to live in dry, dusty corners of people's houses feeding on tiny midges and fruit flies. Very shy and completely harmless they are preyed upon by the daddy long legs species of spider.

 

 There are many dangers around human habitation. There is a cost to be paid for the increased shelter and food found near humans and often this is the dangers of cars and domestic pets. Humans are not very good at controlling nuisance animals, but we excel am manipulating whole ecosystems, usually completely accidentally. While this mouse may have been run over, the missing head suggests a saw whet owl in a hurry.

 

Now there are fish in the ditches, the fishermen have begun trying to catch them. Their extra bait often attracts animals out into the open, but its the abandoned fishing line that often snags birds and other creatures. These unseen effects on our backyard affect everything in the bosque and can be quite affecting. Still, it is the secretive nature of the bosque that makes the unraveling of these layers of nature all the more worth it.