jihyunan's Journal
For this homework, I went on a scavenger hunt around campus to attempt to relocate seven of the species previously located by the past class. The hardest part was the obscured locations and finding them on campus. It appeared a lot harder than I had originally imagined because the map on the mobile was less accurate than I had imagined but in the end, finding each species in each location was so rewarding that it made the entire experience fun.
Over Spring Break, I conducted a mini bioblitz by going down to Yosemite National Park and making observations of plants and other living organisms I found there.
This plant is native to California. The plant has evolved to be poisonous in every portion of the plant. The toxicity allowed the plant to be of great value to the Native Americans. The Native American tribes like Pomo, Yukut, and Luiseno used the plant to help with fishing and for firewood.The tribes also used nuts to replace acorns when there is a lack of food.The plant is vital to the native pollinators that have co-evolved with this plant. The relatively new honeybees, the European Honeybees, on the other hand, are not and not adapted to the toxic amounts. This has caused bee larvae to be killed from the poisonous pollen consumption. This plant thus helps to foster the native honeybees and to maintain a habitat for this species.
The first plant has pink/purple flowers that are very long. This flower is probably for the hummingbirds. The petals were connected so they were not separable from each other. The leaves were round.
The second plant had a strange shaped leaves. Each of them were split into six parts like a starfish and each part had large spike shapes. There was also a brown stalk that I could not tell if it had a reproductive function or was even a part of the plant.
The third plant had leaves that were very thin, probably to conserve water. The ends of these leaves were light green most likely new and just came up this spring.
The fourth plant had leaves that were round but speckled with black specks all over each of these leaves. The leaves also gave off a mint fragrance when cut.
The fifth plant had a dark purple flower with yellow-orange pollen. The leaves were of light green color and shaped long and round.
The sixth plant had a pink-red flower with numerous petals. It was shaped like a rose in a lot of ways and the leaves were of dark green and round and short.
The seventh plant had a flower/fruit that stood out of the sea of leaves. The leaves were a little pointed-round shape with dark green color.
The eight plant had three leaves per branch and the leaves were turned very spiky shaped.
The ninth organism is a dragonfly that is very dark in color, almost camouflaging with the ground.
The last plant had six petals that were white on the end with yellow parts in the middle. There was then three separate petals that were on top. The leaves for this plant were very long, skinny ones.
As a part of Geography 171 class, I went exploring near the Fire Trail to examine the Chaparral and Moist Evergreen Forest ecosystems present. From my trip, I found numerous trees with large leaves on the moist evergreen forest which makes sense from the amount of rainfall this side of the hill gets. The waterfall allows the plants to maintain those large trunks and leaves. On the other hand, on the chaparral side, I found mostly small plants with relatively small leaves. There were numerous small leaves on each plant that probably evolved from adapting to low amount of waterfall.
As part of the Geography 171 class I'm taking, I had the opportunity to examine four different stages of plants. One was a flowering plant that was bare, one was a flowering plant that had a flower, one was a plant with leaves and one was a plant without any leaves. The first two exemplified flowering phenology while the last two exemplified leaf phenology since they showed the presence or absence of flowers/leaves.
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to go on the Fire Trail with one of the classmates. It was a relatively warm day and it was not raining so the ground was quite dry. On the way to reaching the trail, we got to see some turkeys, under taxonomy of birds, on the side hill. Once we reached the hike, we got to see numerous coast range fence lizards, amphibians. Further on, I got to see a very interestingly shaped plant.
