The Gordian Worm

The Gordian Worm youtube video

The Gordian Worm is a very long, very slender insect parasite that gets its common name because it is sometimes found tangled up in what almost seems to be a living gordian knot. It is also known as a Horsehair Worm because of the typically ill-informed folklore that "the long, thin hairs of a horse's mane or tail [can fall] into the water trough as a horse [drinks] and later [come] to life."

The scientific name for this animal is Nematomorphora. In its larval stage it is a parasite of grasshoppers and crickets. What happens is that the eggs hatch into tiny larvae which are then encysted on submerged grass or other plants. When these are eaten by grasshoppers or crickets, the Nematomorphora larvae grow inside the host until they eventually break free into the adult worms. Exactly how these worms grow as long as they obviously do is not explained in my source material.

Interestingly there are occasional instances of Gordian worms infecting humans--though these seem to occur only in the Far East and are apparently instances of pseudoparasitism. I.e., a person accidentally or intentionally eats an infected grasshopper or cricket. This introduces the worm into the human, but the worm is incapable of thriving in its new host.

For a truly fascinating introduction to horsehair worms and similar parasites, watch this YouTube video: Horse Hair Worms: http://youtu.be/so8ScD6m1MI
Sources:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2012.html
http://www.nematophora.net

The Water Bottle Money Can't Buy`

Cyclists need water. Moreover they often need to drink water while pedaling down the highway at over 20 mph. Yet the design of the usual sports bottle requires one to tilt one's head up sharply, risk taking one's eyes off the road, and both squeeze and suck on the bottle to get a few precious sips of H2O. It's sad. And dangerous.

Enter "The Water Bottle Money Can't Buy." To make this bottle, you need a section of 1/4-inch silicon or poly tubing that is about an inch longer than your water bottle is deep. Drill a 1/4-inch hole through the lid of the bottle and another 1/8-inch hole a little distance away. Now slide the tubing into the bottle and you have a hydration system that is much easier and safer to use.

You can drill your 1/4-inch hole right through the nozzle of a regular sports bottle for a professional-looking bottle. Or you can do what I have done and recycle a 20-ounce Gatorade bottle. Either one is a big improvement on an ordinary sports bottle.

Cell Phone Macro Photography

When I am out and about in nature, I prefer to carry light-weight, minimal equipment. Typically, I'll have a water bottle, a pair of 8x25 close-focus binoculars, and my cell phone (an inexpensive Samsung s390g). The camera on the cell phone takes two megapixel snapshots. When the light is good and I am able to hold the phone steady, these snapshots are adequate.

To photograph insects and wildflowers, however, additional magnification is essential. It turns out that with the aid of an inexpensive loupe such magnification is relatively easy to achieve. Here is a pair of pictures of my cell phone set up for macro photography:

As you can see, the loupe is attached with a rubber band to the phone so that the lens of the loupe is centered over the lens of the cell phone's camera. The only trick to taking fairly decent macro photographs is to hold the phone at the right distance from the object being photopraphed. With this loupe that distance is about three or four inches.

Here is a photo that provides a sense of the degree of clarity and magnification that I can achieve. (I usually set the camera's timer to two seconds so that I can get the distance just right and hold the phone steady enough to eliminate motion blur.)

Click to see full-scale photo

Clearly the loupe does create some distorting curvature along the edges, but the clarity seems fairly good.

Here is a link to a portfolio of pictures of wildflowers on our property that I have taken with cell phone macro photography:

Click to go to Picasa folder

The flower in the center of the first photo is almost unbelievbably small, as is the beetle perched atop the flower!

Those Blasted Bradford Pears

The speaker in our master naturalist class was irate. Her tone was sharp with her voice rising in anger.

"Those blasted Bradford Pears! If I had a chain saw, I'd fire it up and cut down every one in the entire state."

She passed around for our inspection a black thorny branch she had taken from one of the offending trees and described the dense thickets she had seen in her area. She viewed these pear trees as thorny monstrosities that shaded out and choked out all plant life below them; trees that nurtured no beneficial insects and whose non-nutritious fruit could be eaten by birds whose droppings would spread the evil spawn for miles around.

Honeylocust

My fellow Nits (naturalists in training) oohed and aahed over the prickly branch, but when it got to me, I was unimpressed. My reaction was in part moderated because we have on our property (and treasure!) a honeylocust tree that is the most dangerously thorny thing I have ever seen. The callery pear trees reviled by our speaker have smooth trunks and relatively thornless branches, but the honeylocust is better armed than a porcupine. The thorns on its trunk and branches form 3-dimensional clusters so that no matter how they fall to the ground some thorns will be facing up. Unlike the callery pear, the honeylocust frequently sheds dead branches and clusters of well-concealed thorns. Thus, walking beneath a honeylocust tree (or even parking a car beneath one) is a bit like wandering into a minefield. I have shoved honeylocust thorns right through the soles of my tennis shoes on many occasions. I once incautiously knelt down to observe a pretty wildflower and drove a honeylocust thorn right into my shinbone--a memory that can still bring tears to my eyes. That puncture wound swelled up like a golf ball, and even after healing remained a palpable knot beneath the skin for several years. I love a good honeylocust tree for its incredible ferocity; it is a savage tiger of a tree. By comparison, the callery pear is a sweet little kitten. And the Bradford pear (a special cultivar) is even more tame, being entirely thornless and usually infertile.

Indeed I quite like Bradford pear trees. One reason for this is that I have long experience with them. I planted two tiny Bradford pear saplings by my pond more than twenty years ago (long before assertions about their invasive nature began to be promulgated). Those two saplings have grown into handsome trees. Each spring they are the first trees to burst into bloom and each fall their colors are the most beautiful and the most long-lasting. The authorities certainly do label the trees as nonnative and invasive, but religion relies on reference to authority. Science relies on observation and experimentation. In the remainder of this article I will consider the charges against the tree and share my observations.

1. Bradford pears are nonnative. This is true. But all pear trees in America are nonnative, having been brought by European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries.

2. The Bradford pear is a cultivar of the thorny callery pear. This is true, too. But it is important to note that Bradford pears have been bred to be thornless and infertile and that most fruit pears are grafted onto callery pear rootstock. Fruit pears are much more susceptible to fire blight than Bradford pears, and when the graft dies, the rootstock usually flourishes and grows up into a callery pear. Thus, one should not assume that the thorny pears one sees are the result of unintended propagation from ornamental Bradford pears. Fruit pears are the more likely culprits.

3. Birds will eat the fruit of Bradford pear trees and can therefore spread the seeds through their droppings for miles. This is true, but so what? That birds are nourished by the fruits of the Bradford pear is a very good thing. Their droppings contain these seeds as is the case with any other fruit that nourishes birds. Normally those seeds are infertile, but it is said that cross pollination of different callery cultivars can produce fertile seeds. Later in the year I will try to test this hypothesis with the seeds from my own trees.

4. Bradford pear trees are invasive. This is certainly untrue of the Bradford pear cultivar, but it is possible that fertile callery pear trees can form dense invasive thickets. There is testimony to support that. But a plant that is invasive in one region is often not invasive in another. Since pear trees bloom and leaf out so early in the spring (and retain colorful leaves so late in the fall), this something that one can easily test by observation. I have been driving all over Baxter County, Arkansas, this spring and I have been on the lookout for problem areas. Nowhere have I seen invasive thickets of Bradford or callery pear trees. There is an abandoned amusement park that has an abundance of wild pear trees, but it is not so dense as to be a thicket, nor is it a monoculture. I hypothesize that the thin, rocky soils of the Ozarks are not so hospitable to these trees as richer soils.

5. These nonnative species do not support insects and birds. This is completely false. Because they are the first trees to blossom in the spring, our Bradford pear trees absolutely hum with the buzzing of honeybees and pollinators of all kinds. At dusk the moths flutter in clouds seeking the nectar. We own four acres of land, nearly all of which is left in a natural state. We have wild plums, wild peaches, redbuds, hackberries, sugarberries, wild cherries, dogwoods and more. But these two Bradford pear trees seem especially prized because of their role as the heralds of spring. Here is an early Bradford pear leaf that has been thoroughly munched by a caterpillar. Here is a caterpillar in action . . . and again a much magnified caterpillar . . . and on my thumb to give a sense of its tiny size. Here is a spider making its home on a pear leaf. Here is a Crane fly in close proximity with what seem to be two spiders! Here is a spider that has spun its web on a pear leaf and captured three insects. In the winter rare yellow-bellied sapsuckers sometimes stay nearby specifically so that they can take advantage of these two Bradford pear trees. They drill dense patterns of holes in the trunks and then return frequently throughout the day to dine on the insects attracted by the sap. No other trees on our property are used by the sapsuckers in this way.

Because I now have good friends who disapprove of Bradford pear trees, I would not plant them again. But I do cherish the ones that I have and I hope that thoughtful naturalists will reconsider the contributions of these ornamental trees to the environment (at least in areas where they are not invasive). . . . Oh, and as to the white flowering trees in the photo at the top of this blog . . . those are American Dogwoods, native trees that propagate profusely as a result of seeds in bird poop, trees that leaf out early and shade out their competitors, trees that frequently dominate the understory in this part of the Ozarks. Delightfully so!

T-DUMB

I was recently sorting through some of my old teaching files and came across this little jeux d'esprit that I created as a way of mocking the pretentions of academic writing. I am posting it on my blog page for whatever amusement it may give to other suffering English majors and scholars.

________________________________________________________________________________

Tabular Development of Useless Mediocre Bombast

DUMB makes it possible for even the most mediocre student or professor to write critical nonsense that sounds quite convincingly intellectual. In some quarters it is felt that the DUMB system is routinely used by those who publish in scholarly journals.

To write DUMB prose you simply string together random four-digit numbers and then read off the DUMBly generated sentence from Tables A, B, C, and D below. For example, 2743 corresponds to the sentence: "On the other hand, any contingent generic element necessitates both anthropological and metaphoric considerations of the individualistic or idiosyncratic symbols." More sophisticated prose stylists can combine the elements in the order BACD, DBCA, or DABC. Some additional punctuation may be required in these advanced configurations.

Table A
1. In particular,
2. On the other hand,
3. However,
4. Similarly,
5. As a resulting implication,
6. In this regard,
7. Based on ethnocentric values,
8. For example,
9. Thus,
0. In respect to specific desiderata,

Table B
1. a large portion of expressive verbal communication
2. a semiotic system of literary artifacts
3. the characterization of archetypal patterns
4. the conception of metatheoretical critical constructs
5. the deconstructing of seminal verbal acts
6. the insight informed by depth psychology
7. any contingent generic element
8. the individuation of structuralist reservations
9. the independent fictive principle
0. a primary interrelationship between various theories and methods of interpretation

Table C
1. must utilize and be specifically interwoven with
2. augments the imaginative aura and minimizes the linguistic deconstruction of
3. underscores the premises that underlie
4. necessitates both anthropological and metamorphic considerations of
5. requires dual foci for scrutinizing
6. is neither mimical to nor inconsistent with
7. embodies interesting methodologies for
8. recognizes the recurrent thematic concerns and formal devices that significantly link
9. exemplifies the psychodynamics of
0. adds ritualistic overtones empathetic to

Table D
1. the dystopian vision.
2. the apprehension of reality.
3. the individualistic or idiosyncratic symbols.
4. the philosophic concern about post-modern discoveries.
5. the prevailing orthodoxy.
6. the evolution of iconographic interests in discrete literary periods.
7. the philosophy of humanistic culture.
8. the cosmos/self relationship.
9. any unique verbal or literary evidence.
0. the striving of humanity for self-actualization.

Based on Honeywell's Buzz-Phrase Generator for Writing Simplified Integrated Modular Prose (SIMP). I first found SIMP in Scientific American, but I no longer have the reference details. Here is a link to another blogger who discusses this buzz-word generator:

http://www.copywriting-on-demand.com/buzzword-generator.htm