susanhewitt's Journal

This may be "old hat" to field botanists, but I was amazed to discover that a pretty halophile (salt-loving) plant species can flourish in a man-made microhabitat.

A week ago I found a small but cute plant with five-petalled pink-tipped flowers growing happily right next to the curb in an untended roadside verge. This was in the Bronx, very near the Bronx Zoo.

This spot is many miles from the ocean. However, it is on a curve that is dangerous in snow or ice conditions, which we get every winter here in NYC. Whenever there is snow and ice, the city sprays the blacktop with a salt and grit mixture, which improves the grip of tires on the road, and helps prevent skidding.

It also means that the very edge of the roadside on a curve gets liberally splattered with a wet salt and sand mixture, on and off for a few months each year.

Of course salt will kill most plants, but in the case of a rugged little species of Sand Spurrey, it appears that the road maintenance workers are accidentally creating a perfect little micro-beach.

Sand Spurreys are flowering plants in the same family as Pinks and Carnations -- they are tiny but pretty, and until humans started spraying roads with salt, these plants basically lived only by the sea, or in any other naturally-occurring salt-rich areas.

I would love to know how the seeds are spread in these man-made conditions -- do they get stuck in the grooves of tires and then fall out again? How does this plant spread from one roadside to another, miles apart?

I already love iNaturalist, but I am only just starting to see what it can do for you.

While I was away in the West Indies for a month in May, a contributor here asked me to photograph coastal plants for him, and so I did -- it was fun for me. There was quite a lot of rain for two of the weeks I was there, so a lot of bushes and trees flowered and some annuals grew up out of nowhere rapidly, and blossomed.

The contributor was able to identify almost everything I photographed, even though my images were not very good. I learned a lot about tropical plants from this, and it re-awakened a dormant part of my natural history interests.

Since I have been back home in the Northeastern US, I have been paying much more attention to the wild plants around me, even though in NYC I mostly see what a gardener would call "weeds", rather than gorgeous native wildflower species.

And... after I posted a lot of not very good photographs of these NYC plants, now a lot of them have been identified by other contributors. And, I have been able to ID a few myself, thanks to images that were already on here.

So I am happy to say, I am becoming a bit more of a naturalist, and a better naturalist, thanks to iNaturalist and the help I have received from its wonderful contributors!

The CT State BioBlitz happened on Friday June 3 and Saturday June 4 in East Hartford, which is inland, and not on the coast, therefore (in theory at least) no seashells.

I was there trying to find mollusks. I was there with Jason Michael Crockwell -- berkshirenaturalist. iNaturalist founder Ken-ichi was also there, plus a whole bunch of other terrific iNaturalist folks. We all did sterling work.

This BioBlitz went extremely well. The team of 180 scientists broke the previous world record by a couple of hundred species, with a total that was not far off three thousand, and that is not counting the bacteria, which will add another 145 thousand!

http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/connecticut-state-bioblitz-2016-east-hartford-ct

The freshwater mollusks were pretty great, and thanks to Jason's exceptionally sharp eye, we found quite a lot of species. We got unexpected help from Laura Saucier of the State Government, who not only ID-ed all the beat-up river mussel shells we collected, but she was also able to find three more species, two of them State-Listed. So, all together our freshwater total was about 15.

We found a State-listed Pleurocerid water snail, which was an very elegant novel taxon for myself and Jason.

On land we searched for slugs and land snails, but did not do as well as we could have done, because of the prevailing seasonal dryness. We found about 10 land species though.

Here are the icons for some of the mollusk species that we found:

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&project_id=6011&taxon_id=47115&verifiable=any&view=species

We found it virtually impossible to identify the species in the Amber Snail family Succineidae, and tiny newborn slugs were also too difficult for us.

I did find a valve of one big old marine species right next to the river, but I have to assume a human brought it there, possibly as stuffed clams for lunch?

http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/3383017

Working flat out for 24 hours was tiring, even though I did not stay up and search all night like many people did, but in the end this BioBlitz was extremely interesting and highly rewarding.

While I was on St. Kitts and Nevis, I visited a wild beach -- it is completely undeveloped and rarely used at all by people, because it is so exposed. There is no shade from the tropical sun, and the Atlantic surf is so rough that it is impossible to go in the water.

On the sand, there were turtle nests, plover nests, and tern nests. The upper beach platform had all kinds of fascinating maritime plants growing there, the cliffs were amazing -- it was gorgeous.

There was some plastic trash washed up of course, but other than that there was not much sign of humans. What makes a natural place the most lovely is the absence of people and their deleterious effects.

I believe E. O. Wilson is right to suggest that us humans should occupy only half of the surface of the planet's land masses, and leave the other half completely to Nature.

When I worked at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1980 to 82, fairly often I used to be able to sit with Wilson in the tearoom, and have wide-ranging conservations. He is one of the most brilliant and kind people I have ever met.

We should listen to his words.

Nature is our original mother. We have to cherish our planet and all the organisms which are our family of living things. If we don't do that we harm ourselves irreparably, and we destroy our only home.

Here in New York City right now it is still cold. Tonight the temperature will dip into the 30s, although we will (hopefully) not get a frost. Today is bright and sunny, but very windy. It just barely got into the low 50s this afternoon. Most of the winter waterfowl are still on the Reservoir in Central Park.

Spring is underway, at least it is in the early stages, but many plants and animals are still in their winter sleep. The buds of many of the plantings outside the apartment building here, and in Central Park, are opening, but the city as a whole puts out a lot of artificial heat, and this warms the outside temperature several degrees compared with the surrounding countryside.

I do go out and about during the cold months, as much as I can, but I am so looking forward to shedding some of these layers of warm clothing and spending some more pleasant and comfortable time outdoors.

It won't get really warm here until June, by which time it will probably get really hot, really fast.

Currently I look with envy at observations from warmer climates. I long to be able to justify spending two hours on the subway and bus to go to my favorite beach on the outer coast.

But I really should not complain, because if all goes according to plan, I will be in the tropics for 4 weeks starting the end of April.

I hope everyone else is enjoying their regional weather, whatever it is.

It is difficult for some people to understand why taxa names change. People find that they go to the trouble of learning a whole set of Latinized names, and then a few years or decades later they check another respectable source, and... so many names have changed, some of them completely! Why?

This can seem arbitrary and annoying, but these changes are an attempt to reflect more accurately both the historical details of the naming of taxa (the nomenclature) and the increase in knowledge about the actual relationships between organisms (the taxonomy).

There are hundreds of reasons why a taxon name can change, but here are a few examples:

Nomenclature:

Sometimes a species name will change as a result of nomenclatural research, for example, because someone has discovered that there is an older, perfectly valid name, for the same taxon.

Taxonomy:

Ever since Darwin, the taxonomy of organisms is required to attempt to reflect their phylogeny -- in other words, how organisms are classified is supposed to represent their tree of descent.

Because of this...

Sometimes it is discovered that a species needs to be moved to another genus, or even to a brand new genus.

Sometimes a genus is broken up into many genera, as per the sea-snail genus "Conus".

Sometimes a family is broken up into many families, as per the sea-snail family "Turridae".

All these changes have good reasons behind them. We may not like the demands that all these changes put upon us, but basically we only have three choices...

1. We can give up on the scientific names entirely, and use only common names, which have their own set of confusions.
2. Or we can keep using the old scientific names and risk not being understood.
3. Or we can make the effort to learn the new names.

Currently in biology, molecular research is leading to a lot of discoveries about taxa at every level, so a great number of taxonomic changes are resulting, and will continue to result from this.

Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a bumpy few decades!

I am in the West Indies, the Leeward Islands right now. This is my 19th visit to Nevis. My husband and I are staying in an inexpensive house rental and taking the local buses around, cooking at home rather than eating out, and coming much more into contact with the local "reality" than those visitors who stay in carefully manicured and sanitized hotels and resorts.

The house, which has a screened porch, is inhabited by quite a lot of different creatures: I think there are two species of gekko (a small dark one in most of the house, but a large impressive one in the laundry room) as well as a lot of Anole lizards (yes indoors!) Day before yesterday I found a tiny tree frog hiding under my flip flops in the big screened-in porch.

Right at the beach access point from the yard, there is a veritable small thicket of juvenile Manchineel trees, which is really bad news: one of the most poisonous trees in the world. Don't touch! Don't even brush against the foliage or you will blister up like crazy!

There is a whole small area of dirt pock-marked with the craters of antlion larvae in the shady back corner of the house, and the entrance holes of tarantula burrows are all over the yard.

The tropics is an odd mixture. It is nature at its most exuberant, beautiful and rich, but sometimes also almost excessively deadly. There is life springing up everywhere, but also skeletal remnants everywhere too; not just the dead empty shells on the beach, but bleached out skeletons of domestic animals here and there, the dead animal having been left to lie in place.

The two most impressive large "wild" mammals here are feral donkeys and introduced African Green Vervet monkeys, both species naturalized, and extremely adundant.

There are two magnificent native Mahogany trees in the yard of this house, but also two Neem trees and a Mango tree, both of those latter two species are introduced from India. We humans have changed the West Indies so radically that it is hard to imagine what it was like before we arrived.

From the plastic trash on the beaches to the chert fragments brought over to Nevis from Antigua 2,000 years ago by the first human settlers, our species leaves indelible footprints wherever we go.