There were some items on my agenda today, but I can’t bring myself to blog about them in view of the increasingly horrific situation in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. My other interests at the moment just seem comically trivial compared to what hundreds of thousands of people are going through.

And not just along the coast either; massive rain and winds in upper Mississippi and Alabama have disrupted the lives and caused damage to a huge number of folks.

If you can, find a way to contribute to the immediate welfare of those who have been displaced, injured, or trapped. Immediate is paramount - there are people with a few dollars to their name whose homes have likely been destroyed and are a hundred miles away from their homes in any event. They have no jobs to go back to and even if they do it won’t be for weeks at the minimum. They have no idea what to do.

If you have any good ideas, blog them, or send them to me to blog. The Red Cross appears to be a good organization to contribute to. I know there are components of the Government heavily involved in long-term, non-personal relief. So maybe it’s unfair to say so, but from what I’m hearing it’s hard to know whether the leadership in the Government will offer anything in the immediate sense other than a recommendation to pray.

It remains to be seen the magnitude and full extent of the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. The death toll is likely to rise from the 65 official so far; we’re hearing about 30 dead here and 50 dead here, and many locations have not been explored.

All those gigatons of water dumped and being dumped today inland in Mississippi and Alabama are going to end up in the Mississippi River and other major outlets to the Gulf, and are going to make their way back to the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coasts that bore the initial brunt of landfall. It’s important to remember that the millions of people in those areas are going to be putting their lives back together, not just yesterday in the vicarious thrill of the outsiders' moment, but in the weeks and months to come long after the birdbrained MSM has lost interest and replaced this event with something else.

NPR had a very good piece on Morning Edition yesterday on the role wetlands south and around New Orleans could have played in mitigating the effects of Katrina, had they existed. The Army Corp’s engineering of the lands around the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers might have been well-intentioned but has resulted in the erosion of these wetlands. Like the Everglades Restoration Project, intended to reverse the effects of the good intentions, there should be a similar project to reverse the effects of the good intentions in and around the mouth of the Mississippi. (This is not to say that there haven’t been problems associated with the Everglades Restoration, many of them politically generated.) Had such a project been initiated years ago when the consequences of the original engineering become clear, the mitigation of the damages sustained yesterday could surely have paid for it.

Despite the extensive flooding into Mobile Alabama my parents survived without damage, across the bay in Fairhope. Here in Athens, 400 miles away, we’ve had less than an inch of rain and fairly gentle zephyrs; the only concern has been the frequent tornado warnings popping up in many of the counties surrounding us. We remain under a watch until mid-afternoon today.

Hope everyone else came through ok. How’s Rurality?

Here’s a composite of doppler radar images of Katrina as it moves up through Mississippi and Alabama over the last twenty-four hours. Even later in the day Katrina remained a Category 1 hurricane as it moved inland:

It’s been remarkable to see this incredible hurricane develop into such a monster over just a few days. Right now the reports are of a barometric pressure of 904 mb, which is way extremely low and 155 mph winds, amazingly strong. Low pressures are typical of high-category storms; as has been widely reported only three Category 5 storms have struck the US mainland since records were kept.

The 1935 Labor Day Storm struck the Florida panhandle with 150 mph winds and an incredible 892 mb.

The final days and track of 1969 Hurricane Camille, which struck Biloxi Mississippi were amazingly similar to Katrina’s. 175 mph winds, 905 mb.

And 1992 Hurricane Andrew struck Miami and travelled across the southern tip of Florida. It hit with 160 mph winds and 922 mb.

1989 Hurricane Hugo was a Category 5 earlier in its track, but struck the US East Coast in South Carolina as a Category 4 with 130 mph winds and 935mb.

My parents, who now live in Fairhope Alabama where my mother grew up, have decided to stay. Fairhope is across Mobile Bay, east of Mobile. The downtown is situated atop a bluff which rises steeply from the shore. Last year’s Hurricane Ivan struck close to them as a Category 3 (although it developed into a Category 5 earlier in its track). This year Category 4 Hurricane Dennis very closely repeated Ivan’s strike, in early July. They’ve also had two tropical storms, Cindy and Arlene, pass through their immediate area this year. Mobile seems to be a little-known strange attractor.

All of this is of course utterly irrelevant in the face of what the remaining inhabitants and the City of New Orleans may be experiencing in a few hours. It’s hard to think of that incredible city devastated or destroyed, and I wish the best for them.

Image from NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Program

I have a fondness for primary colors, undiluted and unmixed. Not that there’s anything wrong with pinks and purples, but when I spy an intense red flower it gives me a thrill.

On the left we have Royal Catchfly, Silene regia, so called because the hairy sticky stems tend to ensnare tiny flies and other insects that crawl on them. Glenn identified this one, because it was pretty clear that it wasn’t one of my eldorados, Fire Pinks, S. virginica. I’m not sure where it came from, because I’m pretty sure I never planted it. If so then it would have been years ago.


And on the right is Cardinalflower, Lobelia cardinalis, beloved by hummingbirds and me alike. I’ve been surprised to be able to maintain it in relatively dry conditions; it’s much more adaptable than I would have thought. We’ve been enjoying its brilliant red spikes of flowers for over a month now, since late July. The cardinalflowers will be followed shortly by their blue relatives. We have two of these - Great Blue Lobelia (L. siphilitica) and Downy Lobelia (L. puberula).

I received a forwarding today that disturbed me a great deal.

Some time back, my lovely, well-intentioned, and kindly niece, in her early twenties, put me, without asking, on her email list (28 addresses). No problem. I’ve enjoyed many of her mass mailings, although some have made me uncomfortable since I am not a Christian. Don’t worry - I’m not going to betray any email confidences . And lest you think I’m negatively prejudiced, I’ve often found myself buoyed by the positive aspects of Christianity and other philosophies, as delivered by some of the most marvelously progressive and accepting people I’ve encountered. (Some of them actually read this blog, and delighted I am that they do!)

Nonetheless, I’m uncomfortable with criticizing a bright young woman 25 years my junior, and not the least because 25 years ago I also made statements that people took me to task for. However, enough is enough. And I don’t mind telling you that it’s the hateful sentiments in the forwarded material below that give me a most negative impression of the sorts of people who promulgate them.

My family is a fairly typical southern family, which really means interestingly unusual and varied; there are agnostics and atheists, red staters and blue staters, and there are evangelistic Christians in it, and one of them is my niece, and none of these things is a problem for me. At the very least, I find it rather comforting that the members of my family are accepting and non-judgmental people.

But today I endured for the millionth or so time that there are some people who think that I, and Glenn, and my friends, all intelligent and well-intentioned people, filled to bursting with good faith, are responsible for the deaths of over 3000 people and the destruction of the twin towers.

Now I’ll grant you that somehow we must be devil people, and it really doesn’t matter that we volunteer for firefighting to help protect the community, or work our little buns off protecting our environment, removing invasive weeds and watching our watersheds. It makes no difference that we care for the little helpless things, those species that can’t protect themselves but rely on us to provide them with sanctuaries. It is of no consequence that we care for those close to us, doing what they can’t do. It doesn’t matter that some of us even have jobs that pay a tenth of what we could otherwise get just because we like helping other people. It’s not important that we pay close attention to politics and try to do our best to understand what’s going on. It’s irrelevant that we appreciate beauty and love exchanging books of worth. And lord knows it’s definitely not important that we understand and applaud the US Constitution and its formidable Bill of Rights! If I’m not incorrect in my reading, then my niece couldn’t apparently care less that we have our own spirituality that embraces a lot that she doesn’t see. All that’s really important is that we killed over 3000 people, at least in part because we “took [Christian] prayer out of the [public] schools” that people like my niece never attended.

And I’ll also grant you that one reading of this is that my niece was appalled at the sentiment and had to make sure we knew about it. I do hope that was her intent, and indeed that is how I treated it in my email in response to her, and everyone on her mailing list:

This is important, A- -. It’s important to know that Anne Graham, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, believe that a large segment of the American population, one that includes me, is responsible for the deaths of over 3000 people and the destruction of the twin towers. Thanks for alerting me.

Wayne

Now I know that the message that follows isn’t anything new to anyone who’s been paying attention for the last 30 years. As I indicated, we’ve heard it from the likes of Jerry Falwell and his orange-juice queen Anita Bryant. We rolled our eyes at Jimmy Swaggart, the hypocritic. We watched the makeup drip from the eyes from Tammy Faye Baker. It’s only been a few days so you can’t have forgotten Pat Robertson. And we know the cup of salt with which these messages should be bitterly swallowed. More recently we’ve experienced the excesses of the horror that calls itself Fred Phelps and now we are being entertained by the likes of James Dobson.

Listen folks: these creatures are monsters. And as Glenn said, “where has she been for the last five years?”

So without further fanfare, here’s the message from Anne Graham, one of Billy Graham’s kids. Hope he’s proud (and I’ve thoughtfully reduced it from the 72-point font so you can read it all at once, rather than one regretful sentence at a time):

From my niece:
*****************

I am not sure this passed on let me know....it is an important message

AND WE SAID OKAY

This one will make you think

In light of the many perversions and jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke, it’s not funny, it’s intended to get you thinking.

Billy Graham’s daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her “How could God let something like this happen?” (regarding the attacks on Sept. 11).

Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, "I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives.

And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?"

In light of recent events...terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found recently) complained she didn’t want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.

Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school . the Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock’s son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he’s talking about. And we said OK.

Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with “WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.”

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.

Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.

Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

Are you laughing?

Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you’re not sure what they believe, or what they WILL think of you for sending it. Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.

Pass it on if you think it has merit. If not then just discard it... no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don’t sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in!!
————————————————

Amd then this was at the bottom:

The information in this e-mail is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this e-mail by anyone else is unauthorized. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this e-mail in error and that any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying is strictly prohibited. If you receive this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender via reply e-mail and delete this communication.

QuikTrip Corporation

Now other than the fact that this is no explanation for a deity’s so-called abandonment, merely a scapegoating, be careful to note how important to this logic it is that Madeleine Murray O'Hare (that bitch) was murdered and her body discovered “recently”. Don’t worry about how cavalierly this tragedy is treated, as a piece of evidence. Take careful notice that Benjamin Spock’s son committed suicide, a critical piece of evidence to be sure, regardless of the delightful tragedy. And while you’re at it, note the disclaimer at the bottom of the above email attachment.

Although the original recipient of this promulgation is supposed , without concern or shame for his or her acquaintances who are to read it, to pass it on, those of us who receive it aren’t supposed to disseminate it. (It’s clear we aren’t to object to it too.) The original recipient is shamed into passing it on, regardless of the harm or hurt it does members of his or her family or friends. And yet the cowards who sent it in the first place don’t want it seen.

As my friend Bill would say “Wayne, I’m so sorry....”.

Yesterday I finished the Microstegium vimineum eradication for this year, and you won’t have to hear any more about it until next year!

I can’t wait to get my accolades and reimbursement from the government for my good citizenship. And those tax deductions!

My guess is that the total area affected amounted to about ten acres, scattered over the total forty. I started in mid-July, probably a bit too early. Ultimately it was 90 hours total, split into 40 hours of handpicking sensitive areas, amounting to about 150,000 plants pulled, and 50 hours of spraying 150 gallons of 0.2% glyphosate. I still have to go over a bunch of areas to check what I missed (and at this stage, in the third year of the project, it’s EXTREMELY important to get anything missed), but the vast majority of the work is done.

Generally I’m satisfied with the progress and the specificity with which I was able to apply the herbicide. It wasn’t all that often that I had to apologize. I was disappointed with the status of the little creek - “Sparkleberry Springs Creek”. There were the beginnings of infestations at the upper regions of the creek, and I assume those are coming in from the outside, something I have no control over. But I’m aware that this will be an ongoing thing, although from now on at a MUCH lower investment of work and energy.

Oh - and if you’re reading about this project for the first time, I encourage you (especially if you’re appalled that I’d use glyphosate) to put the word “microstegium” into the little search box at the upper right and read the previous entries on the subject. Fair warning: I’ll be on a short fuse otherwise!

Late last June Thingfish23 posted an interesting link from Hilton Pond (South Carolina) about a significant reduction in hummingbirds returning this spring. Ruby-throated hummingbirds, mostly our only hummingbird here in the Eastern US, migrate to South America in the late summer-early fall and then return in the spring to mate and nest. The hypothesis for fewer hummers is that the late-season 2004 hurricanes got 'em.

Since hummers forsake the feeders in the early summer because of nesting activities and only return later after the babies fly, I wasn’t able to get a good sense of their numbers here in Athens, GA. But it’s later in the summer now, and though I don’t have any quantitative information, qualitatively I’d say we only have half the numbers we had this time last year. I see maybe six simultaneously around the feeders whereas last year there could be a dozen. And most are juveniles.

I wasn’t able to find an update on the counts at Hilton Pond so I’m not sure whether actual counts confirm this. Have others have noticed fewer hummers around?

As for the hurricanes, here’s a summary and cumulative picture from Unisys. Ivan and Jeanne were both major Gulf of Mexico hurricanes that lasted through the entire month of September. Ivan, you may recall, actually existed as two storms, the major category 5 and then another that developed from a remnant left behind as the major storm moved onto land. Ivan lasted a long time. Then there was Tropical Storm Matthew, that affected mostly the northwest Gulf, in early-mid October. So yes, it was a badly timed hurricane season for hummers.

The predictions seem to be that this year will be a repeat of last. So break out your feeders and make sure the hummers are fit to fly.

Ontario Wanderer asked about my assertion in the previous post about jack in the pulpit being male or female, and the answer turns out to be interesting. I also love his Jack and Jill depictions. From my particular bible, Radford’s Vascular Plants of North Carolina, I had said that the pitcher part, the spadix, has both male and female flowers. Most of the time this is true, according to Illinois Wildflowers. However individual plants can change sex, and become strictly male, strictly female, or both. It’s possible that availability of nutrients has something to do with this.

This brings up some botanical words that are worth discussing. Plants can be monoecious, which means “one house”. If plants are monoecious, both sexes are contained within the “one house”, or the individual plant. Plants can also be dioecious, which means “two houses”. If plants are dioecious, each plant is one sex or the other. So jack in the pulpit is usually monoecious but can be dioecious which means that a particular plant may stop making male or female flowers, and therefore be one sex instead of both.

Flowers can be perfect or imperfect. If they’re perfect, then the flower has both male and female parts. If a flower is imperfect, then it has only male OR female parts, but not both.

So a dioecious plant, by definition, is always imperfect, since its flowers are only male or female. A monoecious plant however can be either perfect or imperfect. When jack in the pulpit is monoecious, its flowers are also imperfect and there are male flowers and female flowers hidden down in that little pitcher. Corn is also an example of a monoecious plant with imperfect flowers - there are the female flowers, which become ears jutting out from the stem, and the male tassels, which spring out from the top of the stem.

Tomatoes though, are monoecious and have perfect flowers - each flower has both a female pistil and male stamens.

Some examples of dioecious plants are hollies and marijuana (although the latter can also cross a somewhat fuzzy line like jack in the pulpit does).

Was that fun or what? Thanks OW!

I was pleased a couple of months ago to see that one of the four jack in the pulpit flowers was producing fruits. This is of the green subspecies, Arisaema triphyllum ssp. pusillum; apparently the purple striped one, A. triphyllum ssp triphyllum didn’t set any.


The fruits are a cluster of berries. A simple definition of a berry, such as tomatoes or blueberries (but not blackberries or strawberries), is a fleshy fruit with many seeds inside. (The dry equivalent of a berry is a capsule, like in poppies, or bloodroot, tobacco and jimsonweed.) That we have a cluster here tells you that there must have been many individual, aggregated female flower parts hidden within that spadix, the pitcher part of the jack. Indeed there are both individual pistillate (female) and staminate (male) flowers in each pitcher.

Some of the berries, the ones that are red here, are smaller than others, which are still green. My guess is that these either have set very few seed, or none at all. There’s some hormonal handshaking that goes on between the embryos inside the seed, and the mother plant. If there are no embryos, the signal doesn’t get produced and the mother plant knows not to devote any nutritional flow to that fruit. (Humans have a similar handshaking - if an embryo doesn’t develop, it can’t produce the necessary signal hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin, for maintaining pregnancy and menstruation then occurs.)

In some plants, like seedless grapes, the plant will simply drop the empty ovaries soon after pollination. Here the plant apparently retains them, but they remain small and mature earlier than the full ones.

How then do we get seedless grapes? The flowers are sprayed with a hormone combination of gibberellins and auxins, and this fools the mother plant into retaining and developing the ovaries into fruits, even though there aren’t any seeds inside.

Fleshy berries, and dry capsules, although similar in architecture, are not only just different in fleshiness - they’re also different in how the seeds are going to be dispersed. A dry capsule will open up and drop its seeds, which fall to the ground. Fleshy berries attract birds and other animals to eat them, and then deposit the undigested seeds at a distance from the mother plant.

So I have to watch these carefully; the bright red berries are going to be eaten at some point. I failed to watch my developing Coral Honeysuckle Lonicera sempervirens berries this year. There were hundreds of them, and then one day they were all gone. Not that I was particularly upset; one of my goals here is to use the protected area around the house as a nucleus for plant generation and then watch over the next years for plants spreading outward. Maybe I’ll see some new coral honeysuckles out in the woods!

I’ve had some interesting little discussions with my like-minded blogging friends on the matter of blog hits, comments, and so forth. I don’t want to “out” anyone involuntarily by posting names or linking to entries, so feel free to do that in the comments where appropriate.

Myself, I’m generally happy and pleased with the wonderful audience I’ve accumulated and get to visit with, here and at their own blogs if they have them. I’d say most of my extremely modest number of hits come from yahoo or google searches, from people who will probably never come back, and that’s just fine too. One of my goals was to just provide information that is of concern or interest to me, sometimes just to get things straight in my head, and anyone who can benefit from that is a pleasure hit.

Another goal was to keep a record of observations, generally centering around the environment and ecology of my homeplace. I’ve used this record many times, going back to previous posts to extract or review some little piece of information. At first it was purely selfish; I *said* I didn’t care whether anyone found it interesting or not, but as time went on I saw with some amusement that I do indeed care whether others find it interesting or not, and especially those who pop in on a regular basis. I *like* the people here, and want to please them.

Nonetheless it’s not been exactly a revelation to me that the main topics of interest to me are not going to appeal to the vast multitudes. You don’t have to be a teacher to realize that most people don’t think this way; it’s obvious from the sort of ambivalent reactions of friends and family if nothing else. And while I don’t want to get into the business of pointing a finger at specific types of blogs, it’s truly unwise to try to achieve parity with any political sorts of blogs (for instance), as they appeal to anyone with an opinion. Does anyone have an opinion around here?

Regarding comments: another area where I’m quite satisfied, and again because it’s really nice to connect with people who comment and get that kind of feedback that gives me a little more breadth and scope in what I talk about. But for the same reason that a blog of the nature mine is isn’t going to appeal to a lot of people, I don’t really expect comments about a lot of the topics that I choose to write about. I mean, what can you say about parasites?

One thing I’ve noticed in blogs with a lot of comments is that there is an obvious interaction between the commenters. Pharyngula strikes me as a blog where some critical level of interaction has been achieved. That’s not to take away from the quality of the posts - clearly that has a large influence as well. Nonetheless it seems like when that critical level of interaction between readers is achieved, the number of comments increases like wildfire. The thing is I’m not sure that’s under the control of the writer beyond what he or she chooses to write about. It’s just something that happens. (And again, it seems much easier to achieve with certain topics, e.g., political ones, than others, e.g., parasites, or Microstegium. )

There’s another thing about attracting readers - search engines. I know the search engines are hitting me; I can see it when I google, and from the number of hits that come from surfers using search engines. But what about the folks who use blogging sites like blogspot, for instance. Do the search engines hit your posts and index them?

What I think I want to point out is that blogs of one nature are going to attract a lot of visitors and commentary because there are a lot of people who can read and understand and relate and agree and disagree. Other blogs, of more specific nature, just don’t have that audience in the first place, and the nature of the blog just doesn’t generate a back-and-forth commentary. I’m not going to say it ain’t gonna happen, but I know I don’t have the communication skills and motivation to find a way to make it happen.

Most of the time just writing, or posting a good picture, satisfies me. This is the good result of one of many forms of creative impulse. How many of you who write sit at the screen for half an hour, or an hour, in a semi-trance, composing,and rearranging sentences, substituting words, until you’ve built a structure that satisfies you? And how do you feel afterward having built this structure? It’s the cake. And the cake is perfectly good. Readers and commenters are the icing on the cake. Makes it a lot better, but its absence doesn’t make the cake itself inedible.

The title either puts me in mind of one of Robert Heinlein’s early excursions into jingoism, “The Puppet Masters”, or, well, insert political observations here______.

Parasitism is one of the three categories of symbiosis - which itself is just generally an intimate relationship between two organisms. It’s mutualism which is the type of symbiosis in which both parties in the relationship are benefitted; in parasitism one party benefits at the expense of the other. The parasite benefits, and the host is harmed. (The third type is commensalism.)

These are the simple definitions, but there’s a lot more to being a parasite than just benefitting at the expense of another organism. Without refining the definition we could just as easily call parasitism any predator-prey relationship, such as wolves and deer, or, to mention an example close to my heart, insects and Microstegium vimineum. One limitation is that predators consume their prey quickly, while in parasitism the parasite benefits over the long term and might never kill its host.

Another frequent aspect of parasites is that they often, although not always, require TWO hosts, a primary host where the parasite matures and reproduces, and a secondary host in which immature parasites develop. Little wormy larvae of tapeworms develop in various species of sea snails, the secondary host, for instance. When a shark or ray eats the snail, the larvae mature into the adult tapeworm in its new primary host, the shark or ray. The requirement is often very specific - one species of tapeworm may only be able to inhabit a particular species of secondary and primary host.

(And a third interesting aspect, just to mention it, is that parasites often lose, over evolutionary time, many of their physiological functions. With no need to consume or digest, after all they are bathed in nutrient fluid, tapeworms are little more than chains of gonads.)

I’m not going to delve any deeper than this into the many further aspects of parasitism, but here you can find an illuminating discussion that hits close to home and will make you itch to know more.

One thing I’ve noticed after handpulling and spraying our acres and acres of Microstegium is how pristine the populations of plants are. No blade is marred by nibbling nor disfigured by disease. In contrast just about all the other forbs and trees are beginning to show the stresses of late summer, with ripped and eaten leaves, necrotic spots and blemishes, and various blights and insect-stripped twigs and branches. And the effects of the Microstegium are just as apparent. Within a field, there are no obvious populations of insects. There is little or no other plant growth. And there are no predators - no snakes, no toads or frogs, no birds. Nothing, at least superficially, but Microstegium.

One of the explanations for why a particular species, whether plant, animal, fungus, protist, or bacterium, becomes invasive when transferred to a new environment is that it has no predators. The zebra mussel, a European mollusk, has invaded the Great Lakes after accidental introduction in the mid 1980s, for instance, and the explanation would be that whatever eats the species isn’t present in its new environment. Here’s a mildly irritating but otherwise informative website on zebra mussels and other invasives. (There’s also a fascinating story of how zebra mussels have indirectly led to recurrent and nasty cyanobacterial blooms in lakes where the mussels are present, but that’s not really relevant to the issue here.)

There certainly is truth to the predator/prey explanation for invasiveness - deer won’t eat Microstegium, for instance - but this sort of explanation always struck me as glib and inelegant. Another much neater explanation involves the invasive alien’s parasites and their requirements. The invasive plant or animal DID contain its parasites, which normally limited growth of its host. However when the host, be it Microstegium or zebra mussel, was removed to a new environment, the parasites' OTHER host which it ALSO requires to complete its life cycle was not necessarily transferred. The host becomes “cured” of its parasites because the other host isn’t there for the parasites. The host is now free to grow and reproduce much more quickly than and outcompete its native neighbors, handicapped as they are by their own native parasites.

The ecology of parasitism befits biological control. Time and again it’s been demonstrated that bad news often accompanies the introduction of a single predator into a new environment. Cane toads, for instance, were introduced in the mid 1930s from the Amazon into Australia (Australia is a textbook case of the effects of invasive introductions) to control sugar cane beetles. They quickly became serious pests that eat far more invertebrate species than they were intended, reproduce rapidly, and are extremely poisonous.

Imagine then if the cane toad had been introduced ALONG WITH a second species that acts as the host pair for a set of parasites that limits the growth rate of BOTH species. This is a much more subtle introduction that has the potential for much better biological control. NOT that I would recommend such a thing as a general measure - as Pablo says, “Nature Always Wins”, and the corollary to this must be “Nature is Full of Surprises” - but perhaps as specific measures to control invasives it has some merit.

I’ve been distracted for a couple of days, nothing sinister, and more later, but here are some developments.

The Camera: Sadly, my five-year-old Nikon Coolpix 990 has developed a glitch, initially periodic and then permanent. It continually registers a low battery, and therefore no pictures can be taken. I’ve done all the usual detective work to ascertain that this is a camera problem and not something obvious. I’m really bereft without it - it’s almost as bad as a crashed computer. If I’d been careless with it, I’d sigh and say ok, but I’ve treated the camera better than I treat Glenn. So we’re looking to get repairs for it, and to perhaps purchase a second camera. Thanks, Brian, for advice on the D70.

In the meantime, I have this spiky, fearsome-looking fellow to offer:


It’s a Gulf Fritillary caterpillar, and again Brian at The BandAid scooped me on it last December. They love Passionflowers. Although we have lots of passionflower vines growing around, there weren’t any Gulf Fritillaries on them, but Glenn found some on the Passiflora on campus, brought them home, and they’re very happy here, munching away. As Brian points out, and Glenn confirmed in his own way that I encourage and you all know about, the caterpillar’s bristly appearance is all lies: he doesn’t sting. We DO have GF butterflies flying around though, and they’re absolutely brilliant orange-red fellows. They should be called Flitillaries - in contrast to the sedate, gliding swallowtails these guys are frenetic, wings in constant motion. I tried for a few days to get one calm enough to photograph, and then the camera screwed up, and now I have no GF butterfly pics .

We’ve been eating corn (Bantam Sweet Corn) out of the garden for the last couple of weeks, and it’s been a wonderful treat. Sadly, it’s senescing now, and now I know I should plant more of it. However the Georgia Rattlesnake Watermelons I planted are beginning to bear fruit, and we had our first one (or half of one) last night - I’d forgotten how wonderful watermelon is. I plant canteloupes, of course, and we enjoy those, but watermelons are something particularly special. As I advised Glenn, you have to swallow aggressively - there’s something ecstatic about the moisture, sweetness, and texture of watermelon flesh. The Georgia Rattlesnakes are smaller than the flagrant, flaming watermelons you usually see, but they’re big enough for us. I’m also intrigued by the fruit maturation - the vines make hundreds of flowers, but clearly they make some decision that they’re only going to mature this ONE fruit out of hundreds - with the size of the watermelons, I can see why that has to be the case. (Probably the ancestor did mature all the fruits, and they were all small; it’s a wonder of breeding and genetics that the plant has been induced to mature only one or two giant fruits instead of dozens of tiny ones.)

And finally, the sad news that BugGuide is shutting down. Brian has more on that here. You can’t fault anyone for making the decision that other things are more important, but it seems there could surely be an alternative to shutting it down; I suppose it would take someone with time and inclination willing to run the site. What an investment, and such a successful return!

This morning I just happened to witness a good Iridium flare as I was watching for late Perseids. I could see a faint satellite moving north, and all of a sudden it brightened for a few seconds until it was much much brighter than the brightest stars in the sky. I imagine this might be fun for people who don’t know about Iridium flares.

The Iridium satellites are a constellation of communication satellites originally intended to be to satellite phones what cell phone towers are to cell phones. There are 66 operational ones and another dozen or so held in reserve. Here’s a good history of the Iridiums, which were launched starting in 1998, went bankrupt, and are now used heavily by DOD.

From Space Views, here’s a diagram of the satellite.


It’s the three main mission antennae that do the reflecting. If the satellite is functioning properly, they hang downwards toward the earth and beam a concentrated spot of sunlight onto the earth. As they orbit, the spot moves, and if you’re under it you will see a very very bright Iridium flare. How bright? The brightest are magnitude -8, which is about 100 times brighter than the brightest star. The satellites are in pole-to-pole orbits so they travel north to south or south to north, to you.

People who do astrophotography absolutely hate these things. The brilliance can blow out their cool CCD cameras. Fortunately it’s easy to find out when and where an Iridium satellite will flare, and at least for those of us who don’t do astrophotography they’re fun to watch and your friends will view you as a brilliant prognosticator when you point them out.

Go to Heavens Above and either enter in the coordinates of your location or select from their database. The coordinates have to be fairly precise, or the location you select has to be within a few miles of your location. Let’s live dangerously - my coordinates are 83.24174 west and 33.86014 north. You can get this info with a GPS device, if you have or can borrow one.

Heavens Above will return a list of Iridium flares for the next seven days - a -6 or -8 hit will be well worth watching. It tells you the time (you only have a few seconds to see the flare), the direction to look (N, S, SSE, etc.) and the elevation above the horizon (15 degrees, 60 degrees, etc.). Look in approximately that section of the sky - if it’s bright, you won’t miss it.

I see I have a -6 flare tonight at 353 degrees (which is almost directly north) and 15 degrees elevation (about 1/6 of the way to the the top of the sky). It will happen at 9:51:46 pm local time.

Oh yes, Heavens Above can also tell you when there are passes of ISS, the International Space Station. If you haven’t seen it cross the sky, you’re in for a real treat.

Hypericum hypericoides, or St Andrew’s Cross, one of the many species in the Hypericaceae or St Johnswort family. The old genus name for this was Ascyrum, you’ll also find the family named as Clusiaceae, and the old family name was Guttiferae. (I prefer using Hypericaceae, since with my three letter designations the abbreviation is HYPHYPHYP, which gives me a perennial mild tickle that CLUHYPHYP couldn’t cut.)

Most plants of this family have five petals, but St Andrew’s Cross has four, and they’re extremely fragile, falling off at a touch. Lots of stamens; in some members of the family the stamens are so abundant, long, and colorful that they’re the major feature of the flower.


This is quite a common little subshrub found throughout the eastern US. It’s a woody perennial, and very adaptable. It’s inconspicuous and modest; you could walk right past it and not even notice, but I love it. It grows anywhere from full sun to part shade (and I’ve even found it in deep shade). It’s drought tolerant, and does well in our pine understories, which makes it valuable since many plants don’t like that environment. It’s anywhere from a foot to 3 feet tall, and about as big around.

Here’s a couple of photos of the shrub itself. It’s hard to get the impression of the flowers under normal lighting, so I used a flash in the second photo to accentuate the flowers at the expense of the vegetation.


There’s two subspecies, ssp. hypericoides and ssp. multicaule. I’m not sure which this is but the latter is threatened/endangered according the USDA Plants. We have quite a few scattered populations so it’s probably worthwhile finding out if we have the threatened one too.

I’ve seen Eastern Tiger Swallowtail and Spicebush Swallowtail butterflies in enormous abundance for the last month, but no caterpillars. This is probably understandable given what the HOSTS Plants Database tells me about their caterpillar food: tulip poplars, maples, alders, cherries, hornbeams, hickories, oaks - in other words, they’re way up in the middle of the air.

On the other hand, I haven’t seen any Giant Swallowtail butterflies Papilio cresphontes, but yesterday I did find the caterpillars. There were several of them happily munching away at my Common Rue plants (Ruta graveolens). They are quite unlike any other caterpillar; so ugly they’re cute:


In my neck of the woods we’d call this a bulldawg face.


Little kids love to poke at things with sticks. Imagine my surprise when I irritated him and he shot these bright red things at me.


They’re sensing organs, called an osmetrium. The photos really don’t do them justice - they’re much longer than this and strongly resemble a snake’s darting tongue. He shoots them out, and then slowly withdraws them back into his head. As far as I know they do not become antennae in the adult. Oddly, all my books show the caterpillar with these things extended, but none says that a relaxed caterpillar doesn’t show them; only when disturbed.

By the way, Common Rue is not native. However it does encourage not only Giant Swallowtails, but also Black Swallowtails and Anise Swallowtails. Have to watch for those too.

Something new every day!

Is it a special boy? Is it our boy?

Indeed it is, and what a hardworking boy he is. Yes, I know he doesn’t look like a hardworking boy right now, but that’s because he’s just gotten back from three or five hours of work pulling Microstegium in the deep woods.


Every morning at about 7:30, I get on my dirty clothes and dirtier shoes and apply the DEET, and there’s Gene, just about the tiniest cat in the world, utterly fearless, having had his breakfast, ready to go. He follows me down into the woods toward the gully, into the creek, up the slope, wherever I lead, and helps me pull Microstegium. Admittedly he doesn’t do much pulling himself, but he does climb trees, walk along fallen trees, investigate holes and undercuts in the creek bed, lie down and gaze at things only cats can see, and we DO have long dialogs that I needn’t detail because you undoubtedly know what they sound like. But what a companion he is. Yesterday he even waded in the creek after me as I pulled the evil weed from the banks. Just look at those dirty paws; you can tell he’s no effete, he’s a working cat. I’ll always thank Patty at South Athens Animal Clinic that she rescued him as a day-old kitten, the runt of the litter and the only one who survived, and nursed him back to health until we found him a few weeks later.

Now to serious matters. As you know I’ve been handpulling Microstegium vimineum from areas that it has infested, and a good job I’ve done indeed. I’ve covered probably four acres, and reviewing them in the first week suggested I’d gotten at least 99.9% of them. Now I’ve discovered that with all our cool wet weather that there seems to have been another flush of germination that has led to more plants from where I’ve been pulling them up; today I got 1/3 bucket from an area I’d removed about six buckets before, thus there’s about a 6% regermination rate. This is distressing. It means now I have to continue to patrol and remove plants from the areas I’ve already covered. Well oh well - I can at least be comforted by the fact that these new seedlings are coming up from four-year-old seed that would otherwise germinate next year.

I knew there would come a time when I’d have to abandon handpulling and begin resorting to spray again. I just didn’t expect it quite this soon. If there weren’t a deadline of along about September when the evil weed begins to flower and seed, it wouldn’t be such a problem but there it is and so in the next day or so it’s back to spraying, and unfortunately I’ll have to lock Gene up in the house while I go forth. Fortunately I (and Gene, of course) have been VERY strategic and have handpulled particularly sensitive areas - along the banks of the creek, along slopes, and in areas I know to harbor important natives. I’ve found lots of Decumaria barbara, climbing hydrangea, and a good bit of downy lobelias and zigzag goldenrods. I’ll save re-pulling areas already done for days when it rains, but it appears that my strategy of non-toxic eradication has come to an end.

I’m afraid part of this will give it away to aficionados. The author said (approximately) of this book: “My mother would call it trash, but perhaps she wouldn’t call it bad trash.” And now you know something about Wayne, he loves to read what others call trash with a frequency that contradicts mere coincidence, but at least he doesn’t read bad trash.

“'Oh my,' Mabel Werts said, and pressed her black silk funeral hankie to her lips. Her eyes were bright and avid, storing this the way a squirrel stores nuts for the winter.”

OK, you can refer back to your library, but let’s not be googling, now.

I know it can’t be so, but it seems like July and August are the months for blue flowers (the whites of asters and the yellows of most of the wild sunflowers and goldenrods are still a month away). We’ve somehow come into possession of three species of Ruellia, or wild petunias. The family Acanthaceae is a large one, but most species are tropical, brought here as ornamentals. There aren’t many natives in the US - but with 26 species in the US, 21 of which are native, Ruellia is fairly well represented. (They aren’t “petunias” though; real petunias are in the nightshade family Solanaceae, which also includes tobacco, tomato, potato, eggplant, and of course nightshade.)

Here’s Ruellia caroliniensis, Carolina wild petunia, and R. humilis, Fringleaf wild petunia, on the left and right. You can see why they’re called wild petunias. The flowers just last a day. Not pictured is R. pedunculata, Stalked wild petunia.


Here’s one of the non-natives, R. brittoniana, sometimes called Mexican petunia. Brian at the BandAid informs me this is a pest in Florida. It has stiff, dark purple-green stems, grows fairly tall, and seems to be spreading by rhizomes. My MOTHER gave me this one! I’m afraid it’s for the compost.


This isn’t Ruellia, it’s Tradescantia, or Spiderwort. It’s in the family Commelinaceae, which also includes dayflowers and a large number of other species. It’s a monocot, which you might have known from its three-petaled flowers. There are 33 species in this popular horticultural genus, with 29 native to the US. We actually found these in the woods, and don’t have a species identification on it yet. This is one of the favorites in botany labs for demonstrating cytoplasmic streaming. The anther filaments are hairy, and the hairs have large transparent cells. Under the microscope you can see all the organelles within a cell whirling about through the cytoplasm. It’s a pretty dramatic sight.

What were ocean temperatures like 5 million years ago and why should we care? And incidently, how do you go about sticking a thermometer into an ocean 5 million years ago? And when is Wayne going to end all this? Today, as a matter of fact.

Yesterday I bent your ears and eyes toward an understanding of the El Niño phenomenon, with lots of accessories and ornamentations added for your amusement. The relevant feature (to this post) is that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the equatorial Pacific occurs in cycles that include a “normal” phase, an El Niño phase, and a “supernormal” phase called La Niña. The cyclic changes have profound effects on weather systems all over the world, but it might be nice to remember that these profound changes are a part of our world and have been for close to 2 million years. It might also be nice to remember that in El Niños, the differences in sea surface temperatures across the Pacific from western South America to Darwin, Australia are small, while in normal and La Niño conditions the temperature differences are large, with the western Pacific up to 5°C warmer than the eastern Pacific.

One of the questions that engage a lot of climatologists is what effect global warming will have on the ENSO cycle in the next century, as temperatures rise 1.4-5°C. You can imagine the effects if ENSO were to become stuck, for example, in an El Niño phase - permanent dry conditions in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and northeast Australia with drought and fires devastating the tropical forests and rainforests (and incidently adding significantly to the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels). Getting stuck permanently in a La Niña phase would result in a similar situation in equatorial South America and North America. There’s just enough ENSO data to offer the tantalizing glimpse of more frequent and longer El Niños in the last few years, hinting at the possibility of a permanent El Niño as global temperatures rise. (Of course these are just superficial consequences; who knows what might happen to monsoons, typhoons, hurricanes, and so forth if there were to be a permanent El Niño? Heat loves to travel, and it’s gotta go somewhere.)

Yesterday I also mentioned a paper in Science (309, 758-761(2005)), by MW Wara, AC Ravelo, and ML Delaney at the Ocean Sciences Department at the Univeristy of California in Santa Cruz, and I might as well give away their conclusions now with the title: Permanent El Niño-Like Conditions During the Pliocene Warm Period.

The Pliocene is the name given to a period of time beginning about 5.3 million years ago and ending about 1.8 million years ago, just a hop, skip, and jump away from the modern time. (Two excellent websites detail paleontological descriptions and timelines: The Palaeos Website, and The PaleoMap Project Climate Section).

During the Pliocene, the continents were in essentially modern positions and the climate was warm, warmer than today, about 15°C globally compared to today’s 12°C global average, and the carbon dioxide levels were close to what they are today, about 30% above preindustrial levels. It was about the same temperature, give or take, as we expect to experience by the end of the century. The Pliocene represents a natural situation with similar boundary conditions to today, and these climate scientists were asking the question, what was the ENSO like then, 5 million years ago?

Two groups actually looked at this question, the group publishing the paper above this past week in Science, and another group, R Rickaby and P Halloran at University of Oxford, UK, who published THEIR findings in Science 25 March 2005, page 1948. The two groups, using the same samples as detailed below, came to opposite conclusions.

The most recent findings determined the temperatures across the Pacific during the Pliocene to be very nearly the same from 4.5 million years ago up until about 1.6 MYA, when present-day surface sea temperature differences became established. So during the early warm Pliocene permanent El Niño conditions prevailed. This group based their conclusions on about 200 temperatures spanning 5 million years and at least two types of measurements as I’ll describe below for the particularly adventurous.

The group that published their findings in March, let’s called them the La Niña group, found that the eastern Pacific was dramatically cooler than the western Pacific from 6.5 million years ago up until about 2.5 million years ago. Their conclusion was that for 4 million years during the warm early Pliocene the ENSO was stuck in a La Niña mode. They based their conclusions on 6 temperatures determined over the same 5 million year span.

With its many more measurements, the El Niño group claims greater confidence, and suggests that with only the six measurements made by the La Niña group there’s the larger possibility of just happening to measure temperatures at an anomalously cool time point. I should also point out that the El Niño group made additional measurements that suggest there was very little upwelling along the South American western coast, a hallmark of El Niño and circumstantial support for their conclusion. The La Niña group claims that their colleagues didn’t clean their samples well enough. And that’s where the story ends at the moment, but the results are interesting enough either way to guarantee that someone is going to continue these investigations.

(What do I think? I’m more impressed by the 200 temperature estimations obtained by the El Niño group, compared to the six obtained by the La Niña group. I find the objection concerning sample treatment by that latter to be weak, as peer-review process by the same publishing journal should have questioned that, if it were relevant. But I’m not a paleoclimatologist, just an interested (and innocent) bystander. I should point out though, that in practical terms, the actual answer hardly matters, if one or the other condition should come to pass. Ultimately a process normally requiring millions of years will be accomplished in a century, thereby dooming large numbers of species of plants and animals that have no opportunity to migrate or adapt.)

Enriching Material: How did these folks measure the temperatures of an ocean 5 million years in the past? By determining the composition of the shells of a tiny protist, Foraminifera. There are many species of forams - some float near the surface, some float just at the photic zone, where light barely penetrates 100-200 meters below the surface, and some are benthic, living at the ocean floor. The little guys secrete their shells using carbonates taken from the seawater around them. As they die, they sink to the bottom, covering their ancestors and waiting to be covered by their descendents, forming strata of once-living history. The two groups took core samples made at two sites, one in the eastern Pacific, and one in the western Pacific, and sliced apart the cores to liberate the shells at different periods of time from 5 million years ago to the present day. Not only this, but they separated, an incredibly tedious process, the different species of the forams so they could determine both the sea surface temperatures and the temperatures of the ocean 100-200 meters below sea level, thereby getting an idea of upwelling conditions.

It turns out that the composition of the shells differs according to the temperatures the forams lived at. At least two measurements can be made - the oxygen18-oxygen16 isotopic ratio, and the ratio of magnesium to calcium. Both ratios are dependent on the temperature the organisms lived at, and temperature can be deduced by measuring them. There’s a lot more to it than that, but that in a nutshell is what it is.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time and an article in the most recent Science on permanent El Niño conditions in the much warmer early Pliocene, 4.5-3 million years ago prompts me to do it now. I’ll get to that article in another post, as it has to do with global warming implications. Beware. I should further note that I’m writing here in a qualitative, intuitive sense more than in a rigorous, quantitative sense. I’m not up yet to writing GCM programs.

(For those who are eager beavers and want to know what I’m getting at, the article is found at Science 309, 758-761 (2005); a good summary by Richard Kerr is in the same issue on page 687.)

It’s a moral obligation to write something about El Niño when you encounter such a large number of students who already confuse global warming, with its associations with increasing carbon dioxide levels, and the ozone hole, caused by emissions of CFC, chlorofluorocarbon gases. Both of these are “unnatural” phenomena which are caused by humans and are related only in the most indirect sense. El Niño, on the other hand, is a fully “natural” aspect of an atmospheric oscillation that has been going on for hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of years and is not something caused by global warning, another conflation students sometimes make. (Fear not the word “oscillation”; it just means going back and forth.) But the main reason I’m writing about it is because I like thinking about and trying to understand these things, and this is my blog, so there.

The El Niño phenomenon has been known for centuries by sailors and fishing folk along the western coast of South America. Every few years, and especially along about December, the Eastern Pacific warms up anomalously and the fishing gets bad. At the beginning of the 1900s Sir Gilbert Walker identified a Southern Oscillation in atmospheric pressures and sea surface temperatures throughout the equatorial Pacific. Although he failed to correlate this with El Niño, we now know that all of this lumps together in the ENSO, the El Niño Southern Oscillation which includes normal periods, an El Niño period that usually starts up in spring every two-seven years and may last for a season or as long as several years, and finally a La Niña period which may or may not follow the El Niño.

The significance of all this is that the equatorial Pacific, and the ENSO, drives planetary weather like nothing else. I tend to think of it as a sort of climatic heartbeat or breathing mode. A more vulgar metaphor is of a bathtub sloshing back and forth, but the bathtub here is the enormous Pacific Ocean, the slosher is the pulsing of the atmosphere driven by changes in heat transport, and the time scales are in months and years instead of seconds. There’s a great tutorial with pics on all the events surrounding ENSO and driving it here (in fact, this is a rather neat site in general), but the basics are very simple to understand.

It really isn’t necessary to have a grip on the evaporation of water at the equator and its condensation north and south, the division of the earth’s atmosphere into three huge cells above and below the equator, and how the coriolis force drives all of this, but a good explanation is found here. The main thing is that one of the consequences is that the famous trade winds blowing from east to west within 30 degrees north and south of the equator are generated by all this stuff.

In normal years, the trade winds consistently blow from east to west above and below the equator. In the Pacific, these easterly winds drive the warm waters ahead of it into a great warm pile in the western equatorial Pacific around Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and northeastern Australia. The warm waters evaporate, creating the low pressures and moist air that produce the rains typical of this part of the world. Of course the surface water that blows westward has to be replaced, and cold, deep ocean waters laden with oxygen and nutrients upwell along the western South American coast to accomplish just that. It’s this upwelling that makes fishing such a great enterprise along Chile and Peru during normal years. It’s all a great dance called the Walker Atmospheric Circulation Cell, in honor of the aforementioned Sir Gilbert Walker.

Every two to five years though, the trade winds come to a crawl, a stop, or even reverse. When this happens, that warm mound of water sloshes back toward western South America in a Kelvin Wave. The moist low pressure atmosphere leaves the western Pacific and moves toward the eastern Pacific, upwelling of deep ocean waters off western South America stops, warm surface waters appear, the fishing gets bad, and a full-blown El Niño results. Here are some rather cool animations of this process.

The consequences of an El Niño are felt worldwide. The loss of moist, warm, low pressure in Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and Australia results in droughts and forest fires. The presence of all this moisture in the eastern Pacific results in heavy rains in western and equatorial South America, western North America, and wetter winters in the southeast US. The jet stream which normally meanders west to east in the Northern Hemisphere upper latitudes is pulled south across the continental US, pushing colder air southward and resulting in more frequent storms and wet cooler weather. And the more southerly presence of the jet stream creates turbulence in the upper atmosphere above the North Atlantic which tends to shear developing hurricanes, so El Niño years are usually accompanied by fewer and less violent hurricanes in the North Atlantic.

Gradually though, the trade winds pick up again and the El Niño comes to an end. If however the trade winds become substantially more vigorous than usual, a great deal more warm water is piled up into the western Pacific and a La Niña results. Its consequences are roughly just the reverse of its El Niño counterpart: heavy rains and floods in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and northeastern Australia, strong cold upwellings off western South America, droughts in the southeast US, and increased hurricane activity in the North Atlantic.

This is a cycle that has been going on for hundreds of thousands, probably millions of years. Its climatic effects are so dramatic that satellites and a string of buoyed instrumentation are used to constantly monitor sea surface temperatures and atmospheric pressures to detect developing El Niño conditions so predictions can be made. (There’s a nice series of color-enhanced images Earth undergoing various stages of ENSO change here.)

All these measurements are massaged and compiled into various sorts of ENSO indices. Here’s a plot of these data from 1871 to present; strong positive values indicate El Niño and strong negative values indicate La Niña:


Notice extremely strong El Niño of 1982-83, the strongest ever measured. Another strong El Niño formed in 1998. After that we had a four-year La Niña, and some of the driest weather in the southeast US that I can recall. Currently we are under fairly normal conditions, perhaps trending toward a weak El Niño state.

Since you now understand the ENSO, let me complicate these issues just a wee bit.

ENSO is not the only cycle of atmospheric and sea surface changes; there’s a bewildering variety of indices that are used to roughly predict variations in world climate. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) are two of these that occur in time periods of decades rather than in months or years, like the ENSO.

The PDO is sometimes called “The El Niño of the North” and is a switching of sea surface temperature differences between the northwest Pacific and the southeast Pacific, again off the coast of western South America. Among other things it affects the weather of the northwest US, and in fact was discovered in the late 1990s by Stephen Hare, a fisheries biologist who noticed that the salmon production ran in multidecadal cycles. Warm phases encourage salmon production; unfortunately for the Northwest, we appear to be entering a cool phase. Isn’t the overlap between scientific disciplines as wonderful as the imaginative individuals who notice such things? Here’s my plotting of the PDO cycle (unfortunately “cool” means a warm Northwest Pacific and a cool Eastern Pacific - I never said this was going to be REALLY easy):


The AMO is a warming and cooling of the North Atlantic, also occuring in time periods of decades. We seem to be in a dramatic intensification of North Atlantic sea surface warmth. Here’s another offering of a time series plot of AMO data by yours truly:


None of these cycles works in isolation, neither in cause nor effect, and how they work together helps predict climate patterns that result.

You may have heard that the next few decades will be a time of increased hurricane activity. There’s three reasons for this. The PDO and ENSO, for instance, overlap in the playground of the east Pacific; they interact significantly. Hurricanes in the North Atlantic are enhanced by La Niñas and warm conditions in the Atlantic, and suppressed by the opposite features. It turns out that a “cool phase” PDO, which we are just entering after years of being in the “warm phase” PDO, intensifies La Niña and suppresses El Niño. We also appear since the mid 1990s to have enthusiastically entered a warm phase AMO period, after years of being in a cool phase. These are conditions that favor the development of frequent and intense hurricanes.

In fact, you may recall the spate of intense hurricanes in the late 1990s and first year or so of 2000. It was during that time that we had the La Niña that I mentioned that coincided with such intense drought conditions here in the Southeast US. But notice that we also had a downswing in the PDO into cool phase at the same time. Live or Memorex?

So watch out for the next couple of decades, especially during La Niñas!

Added: Since it’s a question on everyone’s minds, I note that RealClimate has a new post up discussing the issue of whether recent hurricane activity can be attributed to global warming or to expected cycles of climatic variation. I’m not sure I agree about the assertions of frequency vs. intensity of Atlantic Storms, I suspect there are latitudinal details I haven’t included, so I’m adding my own plot of Atlantic Storms below. You decide:

Like the cucumbers and squash in the last couple of weeks, we’ve had butterflies and moths everywhere. I was ready to photograph a nice Eastern Comma yesterday when Gene ate him. Fortunately this Haploa clymene turned up and allowed itself to be memorialized. Very easily identified too, with its striking black and beige patterning, and a special sulfur yellow treat when the hindwings are exposed upon opening the forewings. Clymene moths are in the Arctiidae family, the Tiger moths, which also include some woolly bear caterpillar types. In this family are some destructive species as well; fall webworms, for instance. Clymene moth larvae like Eupatorium-type plants and oaks, which we have aplenty.


Besides that, we had 3.5" rain yesterday, a rather unusual August dog day period occurrence, unless during tropical depressions moving through. More rain today, probably, which with the accompanying cool temperatures are a nice enforcement measure for staying inside and being a sluggo.

Recently I’ve been considering replacing the source of electricity of some of the more easily isolated electrically operated power users in my home with solar panel generated electricity. (Well, not “recently”, really, I’ve been reviewing costs for years, and they haven’t changed significantly to date.) Those who have traversed this path won’t be surprised that I’ve made the sad discovery that the costs of doing this outweigh the cost-savings of not doing it. (Not that money is everything.) That’s why this article (Science 309, 548-551 (2005)) interested me.

This 22 July 2005 issue of Science has a News Focus by Robert Service on a Department of Energy report by Nate Lewis (Cal Tech) and George Crabtree (Argonne National Laboratory) “exploring the emerging potential for basic research in solar energy”. Some factoids from this article:

The US government funds solar power research to the tune of $10 million a year.

Our current civilization uses 13 trillion watts (terawatts) of power to run it. That figure is projected to be 43 terawatts by 2050. Burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) currently supplies about 80% of this; as a consequence of burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide is produced.

To replace fossil fuel-generate power with nuclear power would require the opening of one nuclear power plant every other day for the next 50 years.

The US has not opened a new nuclear power plant since 1973.

Placing solar panels on the roofs of all “70 million detached homes” in the US would produce 0.25 terawatts of power.

To harvest 20 terawatts of power with 10% efficient solar panels would require covering 0.16% of the earth’s land surface with solar panels. I scanned the figure below which roughly illustrates this:

The article cites some of the problems with collecting and storing solar energy, including:

The cost of capturing it with solar cells (approximately 10-20 times that for producing power through burning fossil fuels).

Methods of storing the energy captured (batteries, flywheels, pumping water uphill to reservoirs, generating hydrogen).

Land use requirements generate environmental concerns.

The article is fairly optimistic in summarizing some of the possibilities for bringing the cost of photovoltaics down.

Improvement in designs and manufacturing methods (organic solar cells, nanotechnology to produce nano-sized silicon crystals which have greater efficiency).

Increasing the efficiency of using gathered energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, thereby storing it.

Banks of reflectors to concentrate solar energy, possibly reducing land use requirements.

But the main problem, the authors conclude, is jumpstarting the technology to solve these problems in a timely manner. They suggest that $50 million a year would be sufficient to do this. (In all fairness, some disagree with this proposed figure.) A 5-cent a gallon gasoline tax could provide $10 billionyear, but it is unlikely that Congress and this president will allow that, for all sorts of reasons, mostly associated with pork and ties to the fossil fuel industries.

A couple of other factoids involving money use:

The solar industry is currently a $7.5 billion industry, growing 40% per year.

The war in Iraq has cost us on the order of $200 billion, enough to fund 4000 years of solar energy development. The consequences of the war in Iraq will continue to drain hundreds of billions of dollars for years to come.

NASA expects to spend $200 million to “safely deorbit Hubble, allowing it to burn up in the atmosphere” (page 543, same Science issue). That would be sufficient for four years of jumpstarting solar technology. Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center say that judicious use of remaining fuel on Hubble and clever use of orbital mechanics could keep the space telescope in orbit until 2030.

You can undoubtedly come up with your own funding boondoggles that could contribute to the paltry sum of $50 million a year for funding solar tech research. I’m naive, but $50 million a year for jumpstarting a technology that has the potential for solving energy problems for centuries to come seems to me to be a rather small investment. Even a pessimistic ten times that amount is insignificant compared to the moneys being spent in questionable ways, given the potential for benefit. Benefit - given the stakes involved with increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, I would even support a Manhattan-style project to bring the cost of photovoltaics down sufficiently to replace the fossil fuel industry with photovoltaics.

Some things I haven’t yet found out:

The size in $billions per year of the fossil fuels industries.

The amount in $billions per year in tax breaks to the fossil fuels industries.

President Bush, during the election cycle last year, supposedly pushed a hydrogen-based economy. This is a very good idea, since burning hydrogen for energy is the ONLY such approach that doesn’t produce carbon dioxide (it produces water). So why would he not include photovoltaics and funding for them to produce the energy required for producing the hydrogen needed without emitting carbon dioxide? Given the lack of concurrent push for funding of solar energy collection and storage research, I’m sorry to conclude that the President must be pushing a hydrogen economy that is energized by the further burning of fossil fuels. (Although he hasn’t really mentioned the hydrogen economy lately, has he? It must be hard work for a War President confronted with serious issues when he has painted himself into a corner with falsified ones. Maybe we can wait three and a half years for someone responsible. Maybe we can’t.)

President Bush punted on the Kyoto Accords for reducing carbon dioxide emissions on the basis of a number of considerations, which you or I may or may not agree with. However the only alternative he’s presented has been that “new technologies” will provide the miraculous cure for the global warming which he’s only recently, in a lukewarm sort of sense, admitted is occuring. Well. Here’s a technology. Am I the only one puzzled by why he’s not embracing it, if he’s sincere?

Finally, I notice that Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansashas also written about this article.

A year or so ago I wrote a little basic program (using Liberty Basic, a windows-based basic compiler which I like a lot) that takes orbital elements of the planets and any asteroids you want to throw in there, and then plots the orbits as time goes on. Various versions do different things, and gravitational influences are included in the model. My primary motivation was to plot orbits of near-earth asteroids, but that’s not relevant here.

Here’s a screen shot of the shape of the orbits of the four innermost planets, as seen from outside the orbit of Mars, from now until Oct 29, the point of closest approach to Mars. It’s easy to see that from now until Oct 29 we’ll be catching up to Mars, and then after that pulling away from it. You can imagine sitting on the night side and looking out and see how it would be that Mars is high in the sky on that date, and why it’s an early morning planet in the east now.

There’s an email circulating the internets right now, maybe you’ve gotten it, that proclaims that on Aug 27 the Earth and Mars will be at their closest in 50,000 years and won’t approach as closely for another 50,000 years. This was true 2 years ago, in 2003, an event that was promoted widely at the time. The email also says that Mars will appear to the naked eye as big as the full moon - uh, NO. Is our children learning? So this email is bogus.

Still, Mars and Earth do approach each other closely every 26 months, and so on Oct 29 of this year they will do so and be about 69 million kilometers apart (right now they’re 121 million km apart). Compare that 69 Mkm Oct 29 2005 with the Aug 27 2003 approach: 56 Mkm. (If you’re interested, the reason for 2003’s extraordinarily close approach was because Earth and Mars were not only at their usual diannual close approach, but they were BOTH at perihelion at the same time, their closest approach to the sun. This coincidence of events is very rare.)

While that 13 Mkm difference is significant, it won’t make a visible difference in the brightness. Right now Mars is quite bright and red in the high eastern sky at 4am (to read the map, imagine lying on your back with your head to the north, looking up at the top of the sky, the zenith. Then east is to your left and north is back of your head):


It will become increasingly brighter and rise earlier as Oct 29 approaches. Here’s where it will be, just past the zenith, on that date at 4am (by this time Mars will be visible much of the night, climbing from the east to the zenith):

Attribution: Images were generated with Chris Marriott’s SkyMap Pro 7, highly recommended if you’re into this.

The parents called on Monday from Linville Falls where they were cooling off after several hot and eventful weeks, and announced their arrival yesterday afternoon on their way back to hot, humid Fairhope Alabama. So in honor of their visit, two organisms found recently:

This appears to be Yellow-Necked Caterpillar (Datana ministra), a caterpillar with an adult form as bland as the larva is repugnantly colorful. The moth is a Prominent, in the family Notodontidae. I noticed it denuding one of my little sparkleberry bushes, and then immediately after having noted what a wonderful pest-free plant blueberries were, found a disgusting little writhing mass of them gorging themselves on blueberry leaves. As it turns out its favorite host plants are in the Rose family, especially Malus, apples; and Vaccinium, including blueberries. Despite its fierce appearance, it doesn’t sting. This one is in defensive posture.


This homely little plant is Fireweed, or Pineweed (Hypericum gentianoides). It’s a soft, brushlike minimalist plant that is now putting out tiny 5-petaled yellow flowers. It is in the family Hypericaceae, and the many species of Hypericum are variously called St. John's-wort, St. Andrew's-cross, and so forth. Some of the species, Hypericum perforatum, for instance, are sources of the pigment hypericin, which forms in black glands dotting the leaves and flower petals. Hypericin is the active ingredient claimed to have anti-depressant qualities. I like the Hypericums, and in particularly this one.