Slow Speed Ahead with a vintage Nordic tug in Puget Sound

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When my parents first told me they’d bought a tugboat, I thought, “Who buys tugboats, I mean, for fun?”

Let my education begin. Turns out, there are legions of tugboat enthusiasts. (A good place to start learning about them is at the Tugboat Enthusiasts Society of the Americas.) And the one my parents bought — a vintage Nordic tug and the first of its kind — makes them rather popular at tugboat get-togethers.

My firsthand experience came with a trip back to Washington State to visit my family late last September. We went out for a day on Puget Sound for what was to be one of the best and coolest family outings I’ve ever experienced. Not only did we all have a blast, but we saw more than our fair share of wildlife including seals and killer whales. And the tugs mellow pace, a cool 12 knots or less, gave us ample opportunity to soak in the view. There’s something to be said for slowing down.

After seeing how much fun my parents were having, especially my dad, a retired Navy commander, I’m no longer hard-pressed to understand why people fall in love with tugs.

Vegetarian spider also a smarty pants

Adult female Bagheera kiplingi eats Beltian body harvested from ant-acacia Photo/R.L. Curry

For ages, ants have had a monopoly on the coveted acacia, protecting the plant from would-be predators in exchange for shelter and food, or so they thought. Skulking in the background, and recently discovered, is an unlikely competitor of the ant — a spider. And this is no ordinary arachnid. The Bagheera kiplingi also happens to be a vegetarian, and is the first of its kind known to science.

“This is really the first spider known to specifically ‘hunt’ plants,” said Christopher Meehan of Villanova University. “It is also the first known to go after plants as a primary food source.”

The veggie-loving tendency of this jumping spider was first discovered in Central America back in 2001 by Eric Olson of Brandeis University. Since then he has teamed up with Meehan, who independently observed the jumping spider in 2007, to learn more about this unusual creature and the extent to which it likes plants. Not only is Bagheera kiplingi the only predominant vegetarian of 40,000 known spider species with plants making up more than 90 percent of its diet, but it’s showing scientists a complex side of arachnid biology and behavior that indicates the spider’s diet is just the beginning of this animal’s surprising life history.

Adult female Bagheera kiplingi defends her nest against acacia-ant worker. Photo/R.L. Curry

Ants are aggressive defenders of the acacia plant making life difficult for outsiders who attempt to encroach on their turf. After all, they want those yummy beltian bodies all to themselves. So how is the jumping spider managing to exploit the acacia for both food and shelter?

Science is still trying to figure that out, but preliminary research shows the spiders take advantage of the invertebrate equivalent of run-down real estate, setting up residence in less-than-desirable regions of the acacia. But their ingenuity doesn’t stop there. Bagheera kiplingi are outsmarting their ant foes, said Meehan, exploiting their intelligence and agility to get around the ants. “Individuals employ diverse, situation-specific strategies to evade ants, and the ants simply cannot catch them,” he said.

As if to add insult to co-evolution, the ants may not even know when spiders are in their midst. Bagheera kiplingi literally dupes the ant by baring young that look like carbon-copies of the ants, and Meehan has reason to suspect that the spiders actually wear a sort of insect perfume that makes them smell like their would-be attackers.

More research is forthcoming, including a look at the possibility that spider dad’s help raise the babies, a virtually unheard of behavior in spider biology. In the meantime, I hear Meehan and Olson’s methods included high-definition video of these smarty-pant vegetarian spiders. Now that would be some footage to see.

Meehan and Olson’s study is available in the October 12 issue of Current Biology.

Here’s to better blogging

The high fidelity of alligator love

Two American Alligators (Photo/Matthew Field)

Oh alligator love, it’s not as fickle as you might think. Get on a gator’s good side and you may just have found a friend for life, if you’re another alligator of course.

In a study that combines field science with molecular biology, researchers from the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory found that alligators were surprisingly loyal partners and akin to birds in their mating habits. The discovery offers new insights into evolutionary links and behavior of crocodilians, birds and dinosaurs – and certainly, at least where one science writer is concerned, proving there is a lot more going on behind those alligator eyes than a cold reptilian stare.

Researchers trapped and re-trapped alligators at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, 76,000 acres of alligator dream real estate bordering the Gulf of Mexico. “Given how incredibly open and dense the alligator population is at RWR, we didn’t expect to find fidelity,” said researcher Stacey Lance. “I don’t think any of us expected that the same pair of alligators that bred together in 1997 would still be breeding together in 2005 and may still be producing nests together to this day.”

Crocodilians have already proven to be more invested in the care of their offspring than most other reptiles, actively nurturing young and defending nests. Crocodiles are even known as considerate egg-layers. As a female drops the egg, she will blindly catch it with a hind leg before it hits the ground and gently place it in the nest. But up until now alligators were thought to be polygamous, mating with several different partners and leading to many fathers for a single nest.

After ten years of following alligators at the refuge, scientists Lance, Travis Glenn, Ruth Elsey and Tracey Tuberville discovered that 70 percent of female alligators stick with who they like. Even if they have multiple partners, the same bachelors get picked year after year, regardless of whether females encounter a new slew of potential suitors.

The study marks the first time fidelity has been observed in any crocodilian species. “In this study, by combining molecular techniques with field studies, we were able to figure something out about a species that we never would have known otherwise,” said Lance. “Hopefully future studies will also lead to some unexpected and equally fascinating results.”

Results of the study were published in the October 7 issue of Molecular Ecology.

What is Conservation Photography?

You can tell when someone puts their heart into something. And young conservation photographer Hunter Nichols is one of those people. The camera is but a tool to help save a place that he loves, Alabama’s Cahaba River, an ecosystem falling apart under the stress of increasing urbanization.

more about “What is Conservation Photography?“, posted with vodpod

Conservation photography goes beyond iconic beauty shots of nature, connecting us with these places and their struggles for survival. Nichols not only takes us through a dream-scape river echoing with a cacophony of birds and wildlife, but shows us the active clear-cutting, new neighborhoods and environmental consequences of rapid urban sprawl. As Nichols says in his video, “we never miss something we never knew, but we suffer from what we’ve lost.”

Then again because of people like Nichols, we not only learn of the unknown places, but just might get to one-day experience them for ourselves. Watch this short video to see what Hunter is trying to protect, and learn a little something about conservation photography.

You can view more of Nichols’s work at hunternichols.tripod.com.

Photo Tour: Autumn at Sawhill Ponds

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For you naturephiles out there, there’s nothing like finding that local wildlife hotspot you can explore whenever the fancy takes you. For me, that place is Sawhill Ponds, a series of 18 reclaimed gravel pits that now support a wealth of interconnected habitats from meadow to woodlands and marshes. This busy microcosm offers more than a peaceful place to take a walk, no matter the season. There is an abundance of wildlife to enjoy, including owls, coyotes, waterfowl and frogs, and it’s all within a stone’s throw of downtown Boulder, Colo.

These images are part of a project documenting this wildlife refuge and its inhabitants through the year. Stay tuned in a couple of weeks for Sawhill Ponds: Winter.

Milky Way or Bust: Give Light Pollution the Brush-off

The Milky Way as seen from Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, Saturday, Sept. 19, 2009. (Photo/Morgan E. Heim)

With the prevalence of light pollution even in smaller towns, it’s not often that I’m privy to star-filled nights. But when my partner and I took a trip up to Rocky Mountain National Park, I had to give it a try. Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous road in the United States, is known as an excellent place for star viewing. If you’re planning a visit to Rocky Mountain National Park in the next couple weeks, it’s worth missing dinner to see a sky like this. The road should be open until mid-October, or until bad weather hits, whichever comes first. So take some hot chocolate, and enjoy the view.

Got any tips for star photography? Would love to hear them.

Reclamation, restoration and mountaintop removal

My first taste of reclamation came as a grad student while on a fieldtrip along Colorado’s “Uranium Highway.” We stopped in the ghost town of Uravan, a former Uranium/Vanadium boomtown. And except for a couple buildings, everything had been torn down, the tailings ponds evaporated, land reclaimed or in the process of being so. It was then that I learned that reclamation and restoration were not the same thing. Above the once upon town sat tailings sites. Instead of a rust-colored desert environment,  meticulous patterns of white and black rock zig-zagged across the hilltop, laid out like some sort of interpretive landscape project.

Reclamation, I thought, was supposed to help clean up after we’d finished using the land. It was supposed to help return the land to itself. I’ve seen many reclaimed sites since that fieldtrip, and have yet to come across one that resembled nature’s design.

That’s not to say that reclamation is a lost cause or a sham, just that it can be better. Now scientists are trying to help make that happen with arguably one of the most destructive and controversial mining practices at work today, mountaintop removal. Sarah Hall, of Kentucky State University,  and her colleagues Christopher Barton and Carol Baskin, of the University of Kentucky, have discovered a new method of replanting mined Appalachian sites, one that gives native landscapes a leg up at renewal. (You can find their study in the online early edition of Restoration Ecology)

Mountaintop removal reclamation projects often involve planting blasted and terraced mountainsides with non-native grasses. (Early surface mine reclamation would sometimes simply abandoned the site.) Perhaps one of the more unexpected outcomes of reclamation comes from Mingo County, W. Va., where reclamation turned a blast site into what’s now known as the Twisted Gun Golf Course.

Rather than seeding mined areas with grasses, which tend to stunt recovery of native species, Hall sought to test the possibility of replanting mountaintop removal sites with the trees and forbs kin to the forests that had existed before the mines. Hall’s idea seems in hindsight to be quite obvious. Put back the original topsoil scraped away when creating the mine. This soil she found was rich with the seeds and microbial recipe that could help re-establish forest. Where Hall and her team tried the method, the plants started to grow, including arrow-leaved asters, Virginia pines and blueberry.

The method is not enough to completely recover the forest, but it’s a start, and a step up from the grassy slopes that have come to replace so many of Appalachia’s mined mountainsides. Hall’s research highlights a two-fold lesson  – we need to recognize that reclamation is not restoration, and there are practical ways to make reclamation better. Then maybe these environments that have given us so much of their riches at least have a chance to return to themselves, even if it’s just a little.

Lady bug swarm turns Green Mountain red

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Lady bugs unite! When a friend of mine posted some photos she took while on a hike on Boulder’s Green Mountain, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I saw entire tree trunks covered in red. The red was lady bugs, a mass gathering of a gardener’s best friend, as they search for mates and prepare to hibernate for the winter. Now this was something I had to see for myself.

Of course, not everyone can make the hike to Green Mountain, but hopefully you can live a little vicariously through this slide show, and learn a little something new about this “cuter” member of bug-dom.

There are more than 400 species of lady bugs, (or as they’re more officially known ladybird beetles), in North America. This year has been an unusual one for lots of natural phenomena in Colorado — a wet, cool summer has led to an endless green summer and multitudes of wildflowers — and this year’s lady bug gathering is no exception. Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks estimates that this could be a record-setting year for the annual swarm.

Besides the slideshow, I’ve made a little list of interesting lady bug facts you might not know.

• They’re cannibals.
  • at least during their larval stage. Researchers recently discovered lady bug babies hatch and eat their siblings. Don’t get too disillusioned. They grow out of it.
• They don’t change their spots.
  • Some people think you can tell the beetle’s age by the number of its spots, but according to the Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks, you keep what you’re born with when it comes to the dots.
• They “play dead.”
  • If an adult ladybug feels threatened it will fall down and “die,” or let off a foul yellow ooze from its leg joints that most animals won’t want to eat, (University of Arizona)

Urban Black-tailed prairie dog gets some love from National Geographic

A black-tailed prairie dog shouts the all clear from its burrow in a suburban Boulder neighborhood of Colorado.

On a visit to National Geographic.com today, I couldn’t believe my eyes as I looked at the Photo of the Day pick. There, featured in the little window was a thumbnail of an all too familiar prairie dog. I photographed him a few months back while hanging out along Boulder Creek Trail, and submitted the pic to National Geographic’s Your Shot.

Needless to say I’m jumping and pointing and wanting everyone to see, “make it your wallpaper!” But bottomline, it’s a reminder to me to enjoy local wildlife. Just because a species seems ubiquitous doesn’t mean it is, (the black-tailed prairie dog is being considered for endangered species listing). And even if an animal is common, isn’t it just as cool that we get see them?

Why not head out to take some pics of your own local wildlife? If you get any you like, feel free to shoot me an email, and with your permission and credit, I’ll post some on The Nature Files.  Or better yet, submit it to Your Shot, you never know where it could end up!

To see more photos from moheimphotography, click the name.