Category Archives: Nature

How ya’ going to keep them down on the farm

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Now that they’ve decided corporate agriculture is cleaner?

I suppose this was inevitable. First, the incidence of infections from food-borne pathogens is decreasing. For example in the U.S., between 1996 and 2004, E. coli O157:H7 infections are down 42 per cent (betcha didn’t know that, did you!!!) (What? We’re not dropping like flies??? Shocking.)

2. This can possibly be attributed to a systematic approach to establishing food handling standards dubbed “Hazardous Analysis and Critical Control Point” (HACCP).

Okay, fine. But

3. Here’s how the above-linked article (from CBC News) [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry] concludes:

The HACCP approach would never work if you had 10 million farms, 50,000 small feed mills, and 10,000 small processors. What allows HACCP to succeed is the much-demonized size and reach of modern agriculture. A big, mechanized operation like Natural Selection Foods can invest in record keeping, sanitation, delivery vans in a way that smaller ones would find worse than onerous.

Alrighty then. That’s quite a statement. “Worse than onerous.”

Would they really?

Personally, I’d like to hear what some actual small farm operators have to say on that topic. Until then, Strauss comes across, to me, like someone who found something provocative to write and liked it so well he didn’t worry much about whether it could be backed by facts.

(P.S. While tinkering with this post, I found a website of vintage audio where you can listen to a 1918 recording of “How Ya Gonna . . .” sung by Harry Fay.)

If the cougars don’t get you

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Then the jaguars will . . .

New York Times article so registration required. Here’s the lede:

Using the same clandestine routes as drug smugglers, male jaguars are crossing into the United States from Mexico.

Four of the elusive cats have been photographed in the last decade — one as recently as last February — in the formidable, rugged mountain ranges of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.

Actually, no need to panic. It’s believed these are transient individuals; no breeding females are thought to be coming so far north. And all may end pretty soon:

“Of course, if the Border Patrol built an effective barrier in the mountains where jaguars cross into the United States, it’d be all over,” said Jon Schwedler of the Northern Jaguar Project. “You could kiss the jaguar goodbye.”

In any case, those of us in the Northeast won’t probably ever find a jaguar in our backyards, but mountain lions are another story.

The number of sightings in [New York State] during the last few decades has exploded with no sign of abatement: 625 since 1983. In the Adirondacks alone, there were 89 sightings from 1990 to 2000. This mirrors the situation in adjoining states. The Eastern Cougar Network has come into being to keep track of the deluge of facts, opinions and anecdotes related to cougar sightings.

Many people, such as naturalist Peter O’Shea near Star Lake, are certain that several cougars have been prowling around the Adirondacks in recent years. O’Shea believes a remnant breeding population has persisted, quietly, throughout the 20th century even though biologists maintain they’re extinct in New York.

O’Shea cites the staggering number of sightings over the years, often by veteran trappers and knowledgeable observers such as state forest rangers and conservation officers. He also says he has seen cougar tracks six times over the past 25 years — the last time four years ago in the Five Ponds Wilderness. “They’re here,” he says. “They’ve always been here. I think there;s a wide-ranging population, from a dozen to two dozen, in the Adirondacks and surrounding terrain.”

(And thanks, Dad, for sending the link to the Adirondack Explorer piece.)

Fawns

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Golfed with my parents this evening at a course they play often in Chenango County. There’s a doe with twin fawns that they see all the time around the second hole/third tee, and sure enough they were out tonight. I managed to get several pics of the fawns before they stepped into the underbrush. Not that they were in a particular hurry. They don’t let the golfers bother them much.

fawns

(Yeah, I know this doesn’t hold a candle to the photos a certain blogger‘s wife captures when they’re out on the course :-))

Slime mold isn’t mold after all?

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Slime mold is one of those things you encounter when you wander around in the woods, like moss and lichens.

I always thought it was a fungus.

But now I read this article by Chet Raymo, [UPDATE: original story now disappeared, sorry] and it turns out that slime mold isn’t a fungus, but . . . well, something else entirely.

For part of its life cycle it lives as “free-roaming amoebas, single-celled organisms, grazing on bacteria” — during this stage it’s invisible to the naked eye.

If the supply of bacteria runs out, however, some of the organisms “secrete a chemical called acrasin, after Acrasia, the cruel witch in Spenser’s Faerie Queen who attracted men and turned them into beasts. It is a call. A signal.” This caused the organisms to clump into the slime form — at which point the mass is able to move by sliding, say, down a log — and then, when it reaches a suitable spot, organisms within the mass organize to form fruiting bodies.

Raymo gives details of this process in a very readable way, so click through if you enjoy that sort of thing. Incredible stuff.

Raymo then writes that it’s “now widely agreed”

that slime molds are neither plant nor animal nor fungus but members of the kingdom Protoctista, which encompasses some of the most ancient single-celled organisms . . . in their curious life cycle slime molds recapitulate that episode in the history of life, which occurred about 700 million years ago, when single-celled microorganisms, having lived on their own for 3 billion years, came together to form multicellular organisms. Invisible life became gloriously visible, and wonderfully diverse. Creatures individually smaller than the point of a pin piled themselves together to become, in the fullness of time, brontosauruses and blue whales.

Something to muse upon the next time you see a splotch of “dog vomit fungus” in your perennial bed.

Fake corks

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I can’t afford to spend a whole lotta money on wine. I tend to buy bottles in the $10-15 range (below that price point I seem to run into wines I don’t find particularly drinkable); I drink them a glassful or so a day to make them last; and I generally only buy a bottle or two at a time.

I hate opening a bottle and finding it skunky.

That’s never happened to me with bottle that’s been closed with a fake cork.

Here’s an piece by Mark Fisher of the Dayton Daily News about fake corks — read the comments, too, a number of knowledgeable people chimed in.

Unfortunately, phasing out cork wine stoppers may have an environmental price: as long as cork wine stoppers have value, it’s a good bet cork oak tree forests will be left intact.

These scattered pockets of cork oaks, mostly in Portugal and Spain, thrive in the hot, arid conditions of the southern Mediterranean, sheltering a wide array of biodiversity and helping to protect the soil from drying out. In addition, some wildlife depends upon cork oak forests for their survival, including the Iberian lynx and the Barbary deer, as well as rare birds such as the Imperial Iberian eagle, the black stork and the Egyptian mongoose.

Figures, doesn’t it?

(Hey, can I drink fake corked wines with a clear conscience if I install cork flooring somewhere? I’d love to install cork flooring somewhere . . . )

The rats dunnit

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Terry L. Hunt, anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, proposes a new explanation (PDF) for the environmental degradation of Easter Island.

What Hunt believes happened is that people brought rats with them, and the population of rats mushroomed (“the rat population could have exceeded 3.1 million”). The rats fed on the island’s palm nuts, and that’s what led to the deforestation.

His theory undermines the validity of Easter Island as a 1:1 parable for the consequences of population and deforestation; he thinks it’s unlikely that the local population grew to as many as 15,000 people, or that it was man’s deforestation of the islands (for building and fuel) that rendered it inhabitable.

The article is a long one with a lot of detail on how Hunt came to his conclusions. Reluctantly, btw.

Hover flies

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The other day my daughter and I noticed a small, slug-like caterpillar-y thing eating aphids that had infested a wild lettuce plant.

I looked around a bit tonight online and ID’d the critter: it was a syrphid fly larva.

Syrphid flies, also called hover flies or flower flies, are pretty ubiquitous insects in the summertime, so you’ve probably seen them. Many have coloring similar to bees (yellow and black stripes) although they don’t sting, and they are (usually) much smaller than a honeybee. They’re called hover flies because they can hover in place in the air.

Here’s a great site on syrphid flies including how to tell whether a bee-like insect is really a bee, or a fly in bee’s clothing.

I knew syrphid flies were a beneficial insect from my organic gardening days, but I’d never seen a larva in action before. Pretty cool. If you like that sort of thing ;-)

When life gives you toxic waste . . .

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Not recommended you make lemonade, but it turns out there might be some good that can come of it.

Scientists are racing to identify the weird microorganisms growing in Berkeley Pit Lake in Butte, Montana, before it’s cleaned up.

The “lake” was once a copper mine. It filled with water when the mine was closed 24 years ago.

Dissolved metal compounds such as iron pyrites give the lake a pH of 2.5 that makes it impossible for most aquatic life to survive. In 1995 Stierle discovered novel forms of fungi and bacteria in the lake. More recently her team has found a strain of the pithomyces fungi producing a compound that binds to a receptor that causes migraines and could block headaches, while a strain of penicillium fungi makes a different compound that inhibits the growth of lung cancer cells.

This week they reveal that a novel compound called berkelic acid from another new strain of penicillium fungus reduces the rate of ovarian cancer cell growth by 50 per cent (Journal of Organic Chemistry, vol 71, p 5357).

Wild.

Another alternative to DEET

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Compounds in the leaves of the American beauty berry plant (Callicarpa americana) apparently help ward off biting insects.

Here’s hoping they find a way to turn this into a product. Anything has to be better than citronella spray. Yech.

Speaking of natural remedies, if you apply the juice from jewel weed (Impatiens capensisto) a fresh mosquito bite, it won’t swell up or itch.

I mention jewel weed in my novel.

Dean’s driveway was so narrow that tree branches whipped the side of Maisey’s car as we drove in. I noticed the piles of brush I’d helped him move off of it after the ice storm were half-hidden now by brambles and, in the wetter places, tall pale clumps of jewel weed.

Worse than Agnes

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The Susquehanna is still above flood stage in Binghamton.

I’m IMing my dad right now. He’s passing along the news. The worst, he says, is the gas leaks. A couple of homes have blown up.

It’s a mess. This is only just starting to sink in for me.

Here are some bloggers who are in the middle of it: FreeWillBlog is in Endicott, I gather. Lots of details on what’s happening. Robblogs reports that a couple of truckers died when they plunged off a bridge washed out on Route 88 near Sydney. Webblog-ed has a link up to a Flickr photo stream with lots of pics of the Delaware River.

I’m heading out that way this weekend, will try to get some pics, also.

Previous post on the Chenango River here.