akumar's Journal

please see physical journal.

please see physical journal.

please see physical journal.

we got to spend class touring three stations in the biology/botany greenhouse on campus today. I LEARNED SO MUCH ABOUT PLANTS, it was wonderful.

the first station i was at was tasting miracle berries and learning about chilis with professor tewksbury. miracle berries (Synsepalum dulcificum) are a fascinating fruit that, when eaten, block one's sour and bitter receptors (in your taste buds)- making otherwise sour and bitter things taste sweet. we tried this by eating lemon slices- which tasted like tantalizing lemonade to me. we also tried thinking about why it does this- since the berries are bird dispersed (hence the red color), and have no immediate gains from having this effect on humans. the point was emphasized that plants use chemistry to communicate, mask certain things about themselves, and trick life around them. i don't think there is a consensus on why the berries do this... we also decided it might be to mask bad chemicals (such as tannin or chemicals that prevent against pests, etc.) while tasting good to others.

we also talked about chilis. why are they hot? and is heat a taste? i hadn't thought about it before, but heat is caused by a pain-sensing neuron (the same as is activated when you touch a burner), not taste buds. these neurons tell your brain that tissue damage is occurring where you feel the heat (as it would be if you touched a burner), but this isn't actually true.

the active component of chilis is called capsaicin, which isn't actually inside the seeds but coats them like a thin layer of oil. it helps stop fungal growth. we were looking at a curious type of chili in which some trees have hot peppers and some don't (also known as chili russian roulette). we learned that birds don't taste the heat, though all mammals do (including snails)- but birds evolved long before chilis, so why do some trees not have capsaicin? the prevailing thought is that there is some cost to producing capsaicin, so for some trees, the costs must outweigh the benefits to being pungent.

i noticed that i was salivating a lot more after eating the chili than before- why does that happen?

at the next station, we heard several different stories from doug. the first was regarding the largest seed on the planet, which weighs 26 pounds in the greenhouse but can weigh up to 60. it is a palm tree that grows to be 100 feet tall. the seed cannot float, nor is it marine dispersed or generally mobile, BUT you can pack a lot of nutrients in it. so it falls right under the mother tree, but it can produce a 30 foot shoot that tunnels underground and starts the tree further away.

the leaves of the tree are produced at a fibonacci angle, and doug showed us that when it rains, the water is funneled straight towards the roots.

the next plant he talked about was Monstera deliciosa, and is a native. it seeds on the forest floor, germinates, and then actually grows toward the darkness (is skototropic). but later switches to becoming phototropic. the leaves had a beautiful holed-out pattern in them, which i guessed correctly to be mimicking catepillar feasting. this discourages butterflies from laying their eggs there. doug also said that the fruit right now would be painful to eat, but that when it sheds it has a delicious pineapple-like fruit- hence the name "deliciosa."

he talked about a few more plants (Dischidia, Eichhornia, Nymphaea) before we moved onto the desert room with susan.

the first plant we talked about was Welwitschia, which comes from the Namibian desert and gets only 25mm of rain per year. this heat has selected for reflective leaves. the plant is also dioecious, meaning that individual plants are either male or female. it is a gymnosperm, or a cone-bearing plant that produces pollen but not flowers (same taxa as douglas fir). it can live to be 2,000 years old! susan also illustrated the point that the plant doesn't "like" living in Namibia under those harsh conditions, it just couldn't compete anywhere else- so doug watered and cared for it like any other plant, and it grew to be enormous relative to other Welwitschia.

she also talked about how leaves have stomates (or pores) that open to let in CO2 to make sugars, but the trade-off is in losing water when the stomates are open (through transpiration). the Peperomia plant in the desert room, however, retains its water by doing photosynthesis inside the leaves through leaf "windows" that let in light.

we then walked over to a much damper room and learned about some carnivorous plants and peat bogs. the latter are usually characterized by sphagnum moss. bogs tend to be acidic and low in nutrients, thus plants that thrive in that environment tend to be carnivorous- where they can eat bugs for nutrients that they can't get from the soil.

we also saw examples of epiphytes, and i learned that this is just a term for plants that "piggy-backs" onto other plants for some benefit, usually to get access to more light. this includes mosses and lichen, as well as the plant we saw- Platycerium.

today i spent some time walking around Carkeek Park in northwest seattle. there are several different parts to the park, including a sandy beach that opens to the Sound and overlooks extraordinary views of the olympic mountains, a railway that runs adjacent to the beach (and along much of the coast, i believe), a swampy/creek area that you can walk over as well as more wooded areas for hiking, and open grassy fields with playgrounds and picnic tables. there are hiking trails on the northern and southern ends of the park, and today i walked around the southern end- crossing over both the wetlands and hiking in the trees.

it was a warm, sunny day (around 55 degrees F) with light winds. the park is essentially at sea level, unlike the higher elevation hikes we did on mount rainier- but i saw much of the same vegetation.

the small wetlands area had only a few inches of standing water, and along the paths leading up to it i saw a lot of blooming salmon berry bushes as well as sword fern. there were a number of smaller, bare, twiggy trees (some with bright green leaves) that i have yet to identify. in fact, many of the trees on this side of the park were bare (deciduous, i would presume), and so i had trouble identifying them. there were many more green conifers on the northern and eastern sides of the park. i only identified one western hemlock, and some other scattered conifers that i didn't know on the spot.

the creek running through the park is called Piper's Creek, which apparently has salmon come through it. the trails were all very well-maintained.

i noticed most trees were fairly thin or medium sized, though there were occasional large trunked trees as well. because i had trouble identifying them where i was, it's hard for me to make generalizations about the state they were in, or the characterization of the wooded areas. i did see a number of catkins (and what looked like female cones) that had fallen on plants below the bare trees, so there might have been a number of alders (though i only spotted one that specifically looked red from afar).

a lot of the understory was sword fern, oregon grape (i think i only saw m. nervosa), several salmon berry trees, sparse sightings of salal and red flowering currant (closer to the grassy fields), and several small leafy plants that i have yet to identify.

i could hear crows and seagulls, and sounds of other birds that i am not familiar with. i also saw a banana slug (i think Ariolimax columbianus), and a tree that had been ravaged by what looked like it might have been termites- check out the pictures to offer your thoughts!

today we spent half of our time working in group projects, and half of our time touring bird archives in the burke museum with the collection manager of birds there, rob faucett.

he made the point that the bird collections there were just a library of data-rich bird specimens, and that his role is that of a librarian- helping people to find the right ones. often archaeologists. it's a two-dimensional record birds of the world in time and space.

there are four different kinds of ornothology- skeletal specimens, steady skins, spread wings, and tissue specimens. plummage patterns are extremely important in identifying birds. and their breast muscles have to be strong to fly- which is one way you can tell which birds were better at flying by bone structure.

the first species we learned about was the black-footed albatross. the most interesting thing we learned was that their wings have groups of feathers in different colors/patterns because they replace them at different times, as it's too costly to replace all their feathers at once. hence they've developed the most optimal molting pattern over time-- replacing every third feather to maximize flight ability.

the next species we learned about were marbled murrelets. a group of scientists decided to look at the stable isotope signature of their feathers from species over several decades, and found that these isotopes matched with different prey species, which changed drastically from 1875 to 2012. marbled murrelets went from eating anchovy to sand lance to krill-- species that are getting subsequently smaller and smaller, meaning that the murrelets had to spend more time foraging and less time protecting their young. this goes to show that the more obvious reasons for species decline might not be the only factors that explain these things, and emphasizes the importance of keeping collections such as these to be able to refer to and use data from.

we also learned about warblers: hermit warblers, townsend warblers, and hybrid warblers. the interesting story here was that the zone where hybrids are found shifts south every year because of the interactions between the hermit and townsend warblers, whereby the townsend warblers (from the northern end) are much more aggressive than the hermit warblers, and keep taking up more territory in the zones where they come into contact, pushing it further south. however, they will soon be hitting the end of the region/climate that suits hermit warblers, so only time will tell what will happen to them.