In the Country of Birds by Tim Homan

Everglades National Park*, Ten Thousand Island region.  Paddling partner, Page, in the bow.  First night out, December 21, Sunday Bay Chickee: a roofed camping platform tucked well out of the way behind an island wall of red mangrove, the aquatic trees moored by the arced and intermeshed pilings of their own amphibious proproots.  To paddlers from the Georgia Piedmont, the mangroves appear alien and a little shifty.  They look like they could pull up stakes one new-moon night and spider-walk across the low-tide water to a destination more to their liking.

While we unload the canoe about 300 Blue-winged Teal

Bumble Bee Bites Stimulate Earlier Flowering

A Bumble bee on Mountain Mint.
(photo by Don Hunter)

Bumble bees lead a precarious life. They have annual colonies, i.e., the colony only lasts one season. At the end of the season the entire colony, except for the fertilized females (the queens), dies. A queen overwinters in a sheltered location and emerges the following spring to found a new nest. How does she know when to emerge? The cue she uses is the soil temperature. But as the climate warms the soil will warm earlier and earlier, so a bumble bee queen will start to establish a new nest earlier and earlier. To establish a new nest the queen must be able to find a source of pollen to feed her young larvae. This means that she must have a supply of flowers available. But flowering is controlled by the length of day, which does not vary with the temperature. This creates a problem for the early emerging bumble bees. If there are no flowers open then there is no pollen to feed her young.

A new publication in the journal Science reports that bumble bees punch holes and bite the leaves of plants that have unopened flower buds. Plants that receive this treatment bloom as much as a week earlier than plants that received no bites. 
The researchers attempted to mimic the bites by punching holes in the leaves of plants with tweezers and razor blades. They found only a slight decrease in time to flower, implying that it is not the damage that causes earlier flowering. It must be something transmitted in the bee salivary secretions. 
It seems there is always something new to discover in nature.

The Tale of a Weird Tail

One of the Ramblers, Bobbie Epting,
sent me this picture of a five-lined skink.
(photo by Bobbie Epting)

 

If you look closely at the photograph you’ll see that the color and texture of the tail changes a short distance behind the hind legs. From that point to the tip of either tail the tail is

Mussels That Lure Fish.

I recently participated in an OLLI¹ class, Aquatic Biodiversity in the Southeast, presented by Duncan Elkins, a Professor in UGA’s Warnell School and the River Basin Center. The purpose of the class was to introduce us to the diversity of the fish, fresh water mussels, crayfish and salamanders in the southeast. Professor Elkins did a wonderful job and had outstanding slides for his presentation.

Fresh water Mussels