Benweb 3.1

You certainly wouldn’t want to tread on an ant that looks like this. Sent to Gigapan by the inimitable Brian Fisher, of the California Academy of Sciences, one of the sites that you really must see when you visit San Francisco. (Next time I visit San Francisco, I’ll try to take my own advice!) There really is something amazing about seeing such a tiny creature in such exquisite detail. [UPDATE: Today, the ant is identified: Eutetramorium mocquerysi from Madagascar, one of the two main focuses of Fisher's collecting.]

Fisher is the entomologist who revolutionized the study of ant taxa by deciding to bypass the traditional classification scheme, in which a naturalist collects specimens, pins them, labels them with locale information, and then waits for a museum specialist to get around to looking at it. Instead, he vacuums up the critters and analyzes their DNA wholesale, relying on molecular biological assays to identify strands to the species level. (The website calls this process “large-scale discovery, description, and naming” of ant species. For more on this, read the essay in Conniff’s Swimming with Piranhas.)

His enthusiasm for the new, IT-assisted science led him to name a new ant species the Google ant back in 2005. (For the background on this story, check the Google blog entry from September 30, 2005.) This was all big news back in 2005, but since I hadn’t started reading my E.O. Wilson, I wasn’t paying attention.

Here’s what my father’s day has been like:

Hope yours has been more comfortable, at least out of doors.

Every summer I think about how much fun it is to watch a fireworks display: there’s the fun of finding one (which, I must admit, has gotten a lot easier these days thanks to the Internet), traveling to it, parking, sitting outside either freezing (in California) or sweating and swatting mosquitoes (here in Florida), and heading on home through the crush of people. To this mix, we then add a toddler, and, well, you can see why I’m looking for alternative ways of celebrating our country’s independence.

What is it that people like about fireworks?

Is it the noise? They certainly are noisy; noisy enough to drive dogs to distraction, keep toddlers (and parents) awake when they would rather be sleeping, and generally cause the same level of nuisance as our inconsiderate neighbors do when they hold their outdoor parties that BEGIN (not wind down, but START UP) at 3 a.m.

Is it the colors? The colors are definitely awe-inspiring. Brilliant reds, vibrant greens, bright yellows and whites, purples. They are absolutely lovely, particularly against the night-time sky.

The danger? Every year, thousands of people head to the local emergency room for treatment of firework-inflicted burns and worse injuries. Even as a child, when everyone in the neighborhood was lighting off sparklers and sending up bottle rockets, I always preferred keeping my hands and face intact to the possiblity of severe injury. I don’t know; that might just be a personal thing.

I have to admit, when I happen upon a fireworks display, it is impressive.

But there’s a much less dangerous way to enjoy impressive displays of vibrant colors: plant them! Firebush, for instance, flowers year-round. Many other Florida native plants flower at different seasons of the year; here is what’s around this season:

[Show as slideshow]

One of our favorite places to stroll near our house takes us by an artificial lake left over from one of the most interesting attractions that Palm Beach County ever offered the world: Africa USA. It was the brainchild of one John Pedersen who, in the 1950s, imported herds of antelope and giraffe, along with whole groves of exotic plants. There was a huge artificial waterfall, and a fountain in the middle of the lake. The canals had to be replumbed to accommodate this place.

Now all that remains is the lake, a footbridge, and some of the plants.

As you can see, though, even the remnants of this place are fun to explore:

Strolling by the lake, I can just imagine the huge fig trees overhead screaming with monkeys; the possibility of a giraffe poking its head through the treetops doesn’t seem at all out of the question!

To read more about the neighborhood and its past, visit the website maintained by Camino Gardens (the neighborhood).

Having just finished the new book by Richard Conniff, Swimming with Piranhas (SWP), I was sufficiently taken with the author’s style that I started reading his earlier collection of essays, Spineless Wonders (SW), which is a similarly delightful stroll through the animal kingdom. In this volume, though, the charismatic megafauna of Africa–the leopard, the cheetah–make no appearance. Instead these essays are devoted to the largest group of animals on the planet, a group that most of us instinctively shy away from–the invertebrates.

Beginning with the humble housefly, and ending with the aptly named slime eel, Conniff examines the uneasy relationships we have with these animals. As he puts it, his interest in these “animals humans commonly deem loathsome, [is] somewhere between the scientific and the sociopathic” (92). Loathsome though we may find them, they are essential to life on our planet. Without humans, the planet would function just fine–better, even. Without invertebrates, Earth would be almost unrecognizable.

Continue reading Spineless wonders

This weekend was perfect strolling weather, so we loaded up the buggy and went out to see what we could see. It wasn’t even 8 a.m., but it was already close to 80 degrees outside, with the ever-present south Florida humidity, so we knew that we had better get out there while the getting was good.

Off we go, keeping a close eye on that mischievous sippy cup:

Continue reading More Boca wanderings

With all the rain we’ve been having recently, I’m really glad that I put in rain barrels back in April of last year. They tided us through the long, long, dry season we had this winter, and now they’re overflowing almost daily.

Here they are in a brief rainshower Saturday night (almost an inch of rain fell in under an hour):

Here’s what the first one looked like when it went in over a year ago:

You can just barely make it out hiding behind our newly-pruned vegetation out front

Within a week, that twiggy Jatropha had already leafed out, and now it’s really putting on a show. I need to put on my bonsai hat and try to trim it back in line with reality… Then you’ll be able to see the second rain barrel.

I got my first rain barrel at a workshop held at Mounts Botanical Garden by Keith Patterson of Florida Yards & Neighborhoods, a program of IFAS. It was part of a big expo put on by the South Florida Water Management District, with booths demonstrating all kinds of different ways to save water, from low-flow toilets to drip irrigation. I had really been looking forward to building a rain barrel (in fact, I’d asked Keith and everyone I knew at Palm Beach County Extension when they’d be doing a rainbarrel workshop), so I was eager to attend.

So I show up, watch the presentation, and then at the end of the show, they hand me a completed rain barrel and send me on my way! No time with glue, drills, nothing! Oh, well. I suppose, given the percentage of the population in south Florida that is past retirement age, it wouldn’t have made sense to have it be a truly hands-on workshop.

If you look closely at the first photo, you can see that I’ve had to modify the downspout from the gutters, adding a second flexible element to accommodate a higher platform. The higher platform was a result of my visit to the larger expo at Mounts; I entered a drawing and won, of all things, a second rain barrel! So I had to modify my existing setup to make room for it.

It’s a really good idea to have more than one barrel; after all, it only takes about a half-inch of rain to fill a barrel. Having another one in line with the first just doubles my water catchment at no additional expenditure of energy. And water is precious here in the land of 60 inches of rain per year but precious little storage.