Devil’s Walkingstick

The Great Dismal swamp sits on the Virginia-North Carolina border, surrounded by miles and miles of farmland on all sides. There is some sense of wonder as to how this 111,000 acres of swampland didn’t suffer the same fate as its surroundings. It wasn’t for lack of trying, as developers, like George Washington, carved deep canals through the swamp in an attempt to drain it and provide transportation routes. Canals that still run through the swamp today, one of which even remains in use, connecting the Albemarle Sound to the Chesapeake Bay.

The Dismal Swamp survived, not because it was a beautiful place that prescient minds wanted to preserve, which it is today, but because it was indomitable. The swamp could not be converted to farmland, so thick was its foliage and untamable its wetlands. Robert Frost came to the swamp to commit suicide by getting lost and starving to death, but was rescued by hunters who found him. The swamp served as a refuge for slaves before and during the Civil War, as few would brave the inhospitable place.

The Dismal Swamp serves as a natural monument to the fact that sometimes nature preserves itself.

When Vicky was searching through children’s variations on the Google logo for her Google Doodle Trees post, one logo caught my eye. It was a wish to “Bring back the dinosaurs.” I know the kid was talking about bringing back the dinosaurs in the sense of Jurassic Park, but I doubt the child realized that the dinosaurs really never left the Earth. In fact, the dinosaurs are all around us, they just evolved into something more well-suited to the changing environment:

Indian Peafowl (Peacock)

While admiring the Peacocks in the aviary, I overheard a woman tell her friend, “How can anyone look at that animal and say there ain’t no God?” Putting the double-negative aside, I thought about the incredibly fascinating the process of sexual selection that led to the Peacock’s tail. Sexual selection doesn’t disprove the existence of god, but it does disqualify the mere existence of a peacock’s tail as proof of god’s existence.

As long as we’re challenging paradigms, let me remind everyone of one of my favorite examples of homosexuality in nature, the flamingo. Here’s an animal with a well-documented habit of forming non-traditional relationships with its fellows. Two male flamingos will often pair-up, taking eggs from females or females will even give them their eggs, and then the males will raise the chicks. The evolutionary advantage to this arrangement is that two male flamingos can secure more territory than a male-female pair.

Remember, you can’t spell flamingo without “flaming.”

: )

Check out the complete flickr set here.

“Sunshine all the time makes a desert.”
- Arab Proverb

Cacti

Deserts are the metaphor of choice to describe anything bleak, barren, and devoid of life. The word is synonymous with wasteland. It’s a place where prophets go to spend 40 days and nights in fasting and isolation. Life might be sparser in the desert, but it’s also an environment of remarkable biodiversity, and much of the diversity found there exhibits fascinating geometry and emergent patterns.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Greta oto aka. Glasswing Butterfly

As climate change raises the average temperature of the Earth, the subtropical environments will become tropical, as plant hardiness zones move toward the poles. Tropical zones, like the Amazon Rainforest, unfortunately, have nowhere to go.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Century Plant

According to W.H. Barreveld, without the date palm, the human race would not have been able to migrate out of Africa. Dates provided an energy-dense food for journeying across the desert, are mentioned 30 times in the Bible, and 22 times in the Quran. Every part of the palm, its wood, leaves, fruit, and nuts are useful, and civilization has been relying on them going back more than 5,000 years with the Mesopotamians.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

The Horticultural Gardens in Amsterdam is a suprisingly small garden, however, incredibly rich in biodiversity.

Fuchsias

And what a fascinating collection of specimens too. There’s the giant rubarb, the southern ash tree grafted onto a northern ash to allow it to survive the colder climate, the semicircle of systematics, the Wollemi pine a living fossil, and more to follow as I get further sets uploaded.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

Rainbow Following us Out of the City

There are some incredibly progressive cultural values in the Netherlands, as well as demonstrations of enlightenment values. I previously covered the NEMO Science Center, a children’s science center that had sex displays. There were Obama posters everywhere, wind turbines, as well as bicycles, rows and endless rows of bicycles… dorkiest bicycles you’ve ever seen. : )

Einstein on Currency

This is not to say what I saw in Amsterdam was more cultured than America, our museums are bigger, more diverse. Not better, but the stereotype of Europeans having more culture than we do is just that, a stereotype.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

On a recent canoe trip through what has to be the most exotic state park I have yet adventured through, Vicky and I saw turkey vultures, lily pads, beavers, geese, Spanish moss, two bald eagles, painted turtles, bald cypress, and this fine fellow:

Alligator in Merchant’s Millpond State Park Credit: Moi

The pond is the northernmost extent of the American Alligator’s habitat, and was built in the early 1700s, where it was the center of trade in Gates County. In the 1960s, A.B. Coleman purchased the property, but thought it too beautiful to develop on. So he donated it, and his generosity is for all to enjoy.

In addition to canoeing in this enchanting landscape, there is also a six-mile trail that takes you through a variety of ecosystems, from swampland, to older forests, and long-leaf pines.

Check out the complete flickr set here.

To understand the success of insects is to appreciate our own shortcomings. —Thomas Eisner

They crawl, they fly, they swim. They communicate with dance, chemicals, and sounds. They act alone or gather together into superorganisms. They possibly represent 90% of the differing life forms on the planet.

Insect in Amber Credit: Moi

Check out the complete flickr set here.

With final exams, school projects due, work projects due, and the rest of life, I’ve been stressing and slacking on uploading science photos to my flickr account. I’m glad I took the time to get to it tonight for an hour or so of naturalist zen. Lacking anything more profound, I’ll just say this:

Butterflies are pretty.

Spicebush Swallowtail Papilio troilus Credit: Moi

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Butterflies are self propelled flowers. ~R.H. Heinlein

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly. ~Richard Buckminster Fuller

Love is like a butterfly: It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes. ~Author Unknown

See the complete flickr set here

PDF of the Butterfly species at the exhibit here