Stamp of the Day: Hammarby

Not far from Uppsala, a little to the southeast on the large flat plains of glacial clays deposited just a hudnred thousand to a couple of million years ago, is a farm on a little hill.  It is Hammarby, Carl von Linne (Linnaeus)'s18th century farm, where he lived when he work as a professor of medicine and botany in Uppsala.  In town he had his scientific garden, and out here (within riding or walking distance) he had his farm and wild plants.

There are a couple of buildings at Hammarby, most built of horizontal logs that are painted with the typical red iron oxide paint of Sweden ('falu rödfärg').  This is where he lived with his family, the famous scientist that was convinced that he was put on this Earth to catalogue all living species and put it into some kind of reasonable system. And so he did.  Plants, Animals, Fossils, Rocks... all got a Latin name, a binomial of a genus and species epithet.  Like 'Homo sapiens'.

This Swedish stamp from 50 years ago shows Linnaeus in his garden outside the main building.  If you walk up the creaky and narrow (and extremely worn) stairs to the second floor and then take a right, you end up in his bedroom.  All the walls in there are covered with botanical prints, used as wall paper.  He was surrounded by plants, and even while asleep or in midwinter.  Tropical trees, orchids, fleshy flowers from far-away places were pasted onto the walls with starchy wall paper glue.  I assume there was regular wall paper printed in the mid 1700's, maybe not?  It is a bit strange today to see these antique and extremely valuable prints from the 1700s pasted up on the walls, covering every surface, and now stained with water, insect droppings, and dust.  Some of the prints are colored, maybe by hand. 

Hammarby is a great place to visit, so go there next time you are close to Uppsala.  And then go to the Cathedral inside Uppsala ('Domkyrkan') where you can step (or dance) on Linnaeus' grave.  His gravestone is set in the floor.

Spirogyra butterfly garden in Costa Rica

Yesterday I went to a tiny, rather unknown, little butterfly garden in downtown San Jose, the Costa Rican capital.  In a backyard on a slope down towards a river a family has developed a net-enclosed butterfly forest, with host plants, nectar-bearing flowering plants, and many, many butterflies. I was alone there, and in this tranquil place the butterflies didn't mind me - you could get inches away from them and take the most amazing photos. 

They rear their own butterflies, and the garden is a complete ecosystem with eggs, larvae, and pupas present.  This is nice, much different from butterfly houses where they buy the pupas (chrysalis) from other places and then let them hatch.

Here are some of the native butterflies of Costa Rica, all photographed yesterday and with a little quick snapshot camera, not with a macro- or telelens.  It was amazing how close you could get to the insects. 

 

over 8 million species on Earth they say now...

And most of them have never been described, never given a name, yet...

Great story here, just out yesterday about the new census of Life.

News from space: DNA was there first

Amazing news from NASA today - the building blocks of DNA have been found in asteroids from space.  Maybe Earth's primordial soup was seeded with DNA building blocks, an idea I think is very likely.  Of course it just means that DNA and its building blocks evolved somewhere else in the universe.  I wonder if living cells evolved anywhere else?  Why wouldn't it have?  Fascinating! 

Stamp of the Day: lichens of Scandinavia

Stamps of today are two lichens, Xanthoria parietina (vägglav) and Hypogymnia physiodes (blåslav), which both are very common in Sweden. Xanthoria grows on rocks, wood, and bark, and Hypogymnia are on branches and bark of trees. The stamps are issued by the little island of Aland, between Finland and Sweden.  It belongs to Finland, but they speak Swedish, and have the right to issue their own stamps. I love lichens, they are amazing creatures (not plants), of a fungus and an algae living together permanently. 

Costa Rica nightlife

Catching bats at night, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

One of the most amazing experiences in Costa Rica this year was when we got to catch bats in the early (but dark) evening using mist nets, the same kind of nets you use to catch birds. Usually the bats would 'see' (hear) the nets and avoid them, but we set up the nets near a water hole where they get some needed drinks before they go out hunting. During about 1.5 hours after darkness had fallen at 6 PM we caught 9 bats from 6 different species. Some larger, some really tiny. Our project leader was bat expert extraordinaire, Don Wilson from the Smithsonian. There are photos of several of the species we caught on my Flickr website. Some were male (easy to see!) and one female was pregnant.

Part of the experience was also to get chewed up and bitten by many many chiggers, tiny little mite-like creatures that suck blood and give you big itching welts for days after wards. They are so small they crawl through sock and pant-fabric, unfortunately. I probably had 100 bites, but most are healed by now. We have chiggers in our yard in New Jersey as well. Not much to do about them.

Stamp of the Day, and Poetry of the Week

American Life in Poetry: Column 311
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Peggy Shumaker lives in Alaska, but she gets around the world. Here she takes us with her on a ninety-foot dive into colorful mid-Pacific waters.

Night Dive

Plankton rise toward the full moon
spread thin on Wakaya’s surface.
Manta rays’ great curls of jaw
scoop backward somersaults of ocean
in through painted caves of their mouths, out
through sliced gills. Red sea fans
pulse. The leopard shark
lounges on a smooth ramp of sand,
skin jeweled with small hangers-on.
Pyramid fish point the way to the surface.

Ninety feet down, blue ribbon eels cough,
their mouths neon cautions.
Ghost pipefish curl in the divemaster’s palm.
Soft corals unfurl rainbow polyps, thousands
of mouths held open to night.
Currents’ communion—giant clams
slam shut wavy jaws, send
shivers of water. Christmas tree worms
snap back, flat spirals tight,
living petroglyphs against the night.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Peggy Shumaker from her most recent book of poetry, Gnawed Bones, Red Hen Press, 2010. Reprinted by permission of Peggy Shumaker and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. Posted on this blog with permission.

The stamps are issued by Antigua in the Caribbean. 

Bits and pieces from the internet, B edition

Vladimir Nabokov of 'Lolita' novel fame was a butterfly researcher, and his theory from 1945 suggesting that little blue butterflies spread across Bering Strait, down the Rockies, down through Central America, through South America and down to Chile, has just been supported with DNA data.  The same theory has been shown to be true for tiny gentians too.  You can go far if you have lots of time and persist.(New York Times)

Brown things in nature can be oh so beautiful. (From the great blog Resurrection Fern)

If you were born in Sweden in the late 1960s and early 1970s you could not have missed Barbapapa - here is some nostalgia... I always loved how they were shaping their house out of themselves.

And, here is  B for you all (from North Norfolk Railway, UK, photo by Leo Reynolds)

How and why to do science...

I just read a very interesting and excellent article, The Truth Wears Off or The decline effect and the scientific method, by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker.

Very, very interesting... about how scientific experiments have issues, results can't be repeated, and the impact of our business way of doing science with grants and competition instead of long-term thinking and planning. How our brain is fooling us sometimes, how small sample sizes can randomly cause significant results, how we first want to prove we are right and how hard it is to think outside the box. Why aren't scientists talking about this more?  It also affects medicine and bad and good practices outside of science; it impacts our lives since we live in a logical, rational science-based society (at least most of us would like to).

Excerpt: "According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. “The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,” Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

Another article in WIRED talks about the dire straits for taxonomists... and here there simply is too little research and our articles are sometimes not cited at all for 10-50 years because we might be that last existing expert on that plant or animal group (not in my case, but anybody that works with invertebrates, for example).

Hybrids make us confused...

strange ducks - mallard hybrids, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

...especially mallard hybrids. It is all explained here, but even after that thorough explanation and gorgeous photos, could you always identify a mallard duck hybrid?

In Swedish, mallards are called 'gräsand', which means grass duck. Ni idea why, I guess they like grass.
(PS. It seems the Manky Mallard website is down right now (link above, so if it doesn't load, try again later.)

Comments during tree decorations

Swedish christmas tree decorations, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

- I bet our tree is the only one in New Jersey with mushrooms on it, says daughter.
- Mom, how can mushrooms grow straight out of branches, says son.
- Because they are endophytic and can grow inside the branches until the fruiting body comes out, says the botanical mom.

(Of course the red and white fly agaric never grows endophytically, only in the soil, but who cares? It is Christmas! And Swedes love to decorate with replicas of poisonous mushroom at Christmas time, :). )

Skrovmål (Nut-fed meat)

 

This is what I discovered outside my work building last Friday - a hawk showing off its rank in the food chain. We are still not sure what hawk species it is, but the prey was a grey squirrel. The secretaries walking out for lunch were aghast, the scientists were amazed, and the students took photos with their cell phones. 

Photo copyright Ilya Raskin, used with permission (with a real good camera, my photos are not this good).

The scale of the universe

This is just enormously cool:  link

Verbal snapshot: DNA

Yesterday, after a long day's workshop on genomics and DNA, a repairman talked to me in the elevator.  When he heard that I worked with DNA, he asked me:
- How much DNA is active in humans?
- I don't really know, I said, it depends on how many genes that are turned on that very moment in your body.
- Oh, no, he said, it is 3 percent.
- 3 percent?, I said.
- Yes, he said, but you can raise it if you meditate very hard.

I didn't know if I should laugh or sigh.  I just said 'oh really' and left the elevator on my floor.  Where do these people get these facts? I mean, someone must be feeding them this fake science. 

Bits and pieces

Maybe life in Earth started between thin sheets of mica ('glimmer' in Swedish).  I remember pulling thin sheets of muscovite (muskovit) mica apart at some of the old mines we visited when we were kids, thinking they were like layered bendable glass. I was told that in previous times people had used mica as 'windows' on their woodstoves for that reason, but I am not sure if it is true.  Scientists don't know if the mica theory is true either, but it is certainly a fascinating hypothesis that the first cells developed between thin mica layers. Read more here...

This is what global warming looks like. = now. (the link is to a pdf, check out the map on the second page.  Scary.)  And today's climate is getting more and more similar to Ordovician climates.

In the beginning, we were all wanderers... (Carl Sagan tribute)

Taxonomic inaccuracies in the food world

Most times I don't care if people can tell the difference between a cow and a deer, a bee or a wasp, or a crow and a turkey vulture, but when authors and publications that are very particular on being accurate in one area don't even bother to check the ID on other things they write or talk about, it really bothers me.  Such as food magazines that proudly distinguishes with fancy words between the top and bottom of a pig, different varieties of kale ('grönkål'), and have different words for types of Italian vinegars depending on the region they come from.  If you are that picky, and pride yourself on it, as a publisher you should check everything and ask the experts when you enter new zoological and botanical territory.

Here are two recent examples:
On Bon Appetit's website there is a blogpost about what to do when you get a fly in your soup at a restaurant.  Good post, interesting comments, however...  the accompanying photo is of a soup bowl with a... guess.... a CIKADA (they are also called locust).  A giant cikada, obviously dead and spread out with its wings in a very unnatural position to resemble a monster fly. I have to ask my family dipterist (that is fly guy) if there even are that big flies in the real world.  But still, why not just say it is a cikada in the soup? The photo is from istockphoto and the photographer said it wasn't a fly, but that wasn't clarified by Bon Appetit, who bought the right to use the photo.  It is like saying you are looking at a pork chop when in fact you are seeing a bison or reindeer steak. 

Second example was a recent article in New York Times about the world-famous restaurant Noma and its chef René Redzepi, who cooks with local (= Aal of the Nordic countries in fact), sometimes wild, ingredients such as wild beach plants, reindeer, wild roses, and puffin eggs. With the article is a photographic slide show of some of the dishes and ingredients, gorgeous photos, but with some big errors in the descriptions.  The small fuzzy flower buds of the 'oxel' tree (whitebeam in English) was renamed "axel" tree by NY Times.  Rose hips ('nypon') turned into rose petals. And a photo of the local pine cone is described as a thuja cone (photo on right, different thuja species look a bit different, but never like a pine).  These things matters, not only do they miseducate but in the case of the thuja, you do not want people to go out there and chewing on these toxic plants. Especially not if you are pregnant, since the toxin can cause miscarriages. I am sure the Danish chef knows what he is doing, but the journalists weren't getting it right, and yes, NY Times have been notified, but not fixed the errors yet.

It is impossible to know personally all the correct names of the 1.7+ million species in the world, but I think we should at least try to get it right as far as we can.  Or maybe I am too picky.

(Thuja cone photo by Luis Fernández García, Creative Commons license, on Wikimedia)

Stamp of the Day: The love and hate of cilantro

Some people hate cilantro ('koriander"), and think it tastes like soap.  I used to be one of them, but changed after I had some really good Asian and Mexican dishes with it.  Now I only really don't like celery, especially root celery (celeriac).  A little of it cooked in soups is OK, but raw celery is not my thing. I am not sure it is genetic since my family all loves celery and cilantro, but it certainly is something biological about it.  AREA loves to eat whole celery sticks dipped in peanut butter.

The NY Times article I linked to above is currently the most e-mailed article on the NY Times website - it must really have struck a cord with the readers.  Who knew we cared so much about cilantro, a tiny little herb?

The stamp is from Israel and shows cilantro (Coriandrium sativum) in its full glory. 

Pandora is heaven for biologists

Over the Christmas break I saw the 3-D movie Avatar with the kids, and loved it. OK, I admit, I only saw it because I was told that Sigourney Weaver played a botanist. But, it turned out to be a really good movie.

But what surprised me most was that they must have employed some real biologists to work on the movie (see article here). Animals, fungi, and plants were based on shapes and forms that exist on Earth, just in new compositions, combinations, and colors. Take a spiral algae from the ocean and put it on a tree branch in the rain forest. Aquatic hydra colonies are becoming branched fungi. Animals are still vertebrates, but are hexapods instead of tetrapods.

Everything is connected, like a large Gaia, and luminous, like feelings and neurons showing of light. Of course, as a botanist, I can't help think about what they didn't change. Tree trunks and branches are the same, fern leaves and palm stems are just like on Earth - someone needs to do some biometric studies to see if this is likely (especially since humans can't breath the air, but everything else can). But I think it is more a fact of that it is easy to create large masses of green with palm and fern leaves, they are so easily fractalized and scaled up or down.

Seeds that swim like fluorescent jellyfishes in the air - gorgeous!







Of course there was lots of violent action, bad people vs. good people, story lines from Fern Gully, Pocahontas, Save the Earth, Greenpeace, the Iraq War crazy president we finally got rid off, and grassroot heroes. But the real take-home message was: Life is beautiful. That Sigourney Weaver is a botanist is just mentioned once ('she is famous, she write THE flora of Pandora"), but science and biodiversity is portrayed in an unusually accurate way. You can read more about this aspect in this great article in New York Times. (And here is a kind-of-stupid article as a contrast.)

Stamp of the Day: Ice on the moon and snowflakes in Sweden

Yesterday, NASA reported that they have the first solid evidence for ice (from water) on the moon. Now we know there is water on both Mars and the moon, soon I think we will hear there are little bacteria-life things living there too. DNA can survive space and be transported from a planet to another through asteroids, so why not - life on other planets than Earth is quite likely I think. The first life on Earth wasn't living in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, it survived in what we think are hellish environments - boiling acid mudpots, deep-sea hot vents, methane gas filled environments, and other places of what we now think are extreme environments because we are used to the extreme oxygen-rich environment we live in. But it appears that early life on Earth at least was dependent on water. This is all very exciting - congratulations NASA!

The stamp of the day are ice crystals (snow flakes) on Swedish stamps.

It is all the universe's fault!

There is an interesting article in SEED MAGAZINE online about extinctions and time:
"Sometimes, something kills nearly all life on the entire planet. But is there a regular cycle to this creation and destruction of Earth’s biodiversity?" Read more here about the geography of the universe and the sun and how it all can create giant extinctions about every 62 million years: The Extinction Oscillator by Adrian Melott.