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Be the first on your block to get the Moby Dick lego set! Both the free standing 3D Moby Dick and the mosaic mural of Ahab were created out of legos. Moby is fairly small for his species, only standing about 7 feet tall, but that's still one whole heck of a lot of white legos. This particular display was at the Sydney Aquarium in Darling Harbor and it sort of caught my fancy.
Since the unveiling of the MLK memorial, something about the whole thing has bothered me. Anyone my age remembers vividly the civil rights movement and the role that MLK played in bringing about change. MLK may not have been the ideal man, but no denying his impact, so this is in no way an issue about MLK's worthiness of a national memorial. It's a strange nagging feeling that something just doesn't fit. Part of it is that MLK just doesn't look right in white marble, but this wasn't the basic problem although certainly it is bothersome. And then it finally hit me, this statue was more like what you would expect for a stature of Mao during the height of his power. Yes, this was a stature more fitting of Mao than MLK, the arms folded across the chest as he emerges triumphantly from the marble leading the revolution. It just isn't right; it's the wrong sort of image for MLK, just like the stupid sculpture of George Washington draped in a toga is just wrong for the man and his time. Wow! While searching for relevant images, the creator of the MLK monument turns out to be Chinese! Don't know what that explains, but it's sort of a spooky connection. Does this creep out anyone else?
Tomato, tomato (said with long and short vowel sounds), a domesticated solanaceous fruit that by any other name would still taste as good, especially while thinking about the sugo alla puttanesca the Phactor cooked last night from fresh Amish paste tomatoes. For quite some time, botanists called the tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum, the juicy wolf peach, a name which added a bit of European skepticism about how esculent this neotropical, and newly arrived, nightshade might be. If you know anything about Old World nightshades, then you'll understand the skepticism. No one doubted that the tomato was closely related to the huge genus Solanum, the name sake of the nightshade family, and now relatively recent molecular studies have shown that the tomato species is part of the genus Solanum. Now what is usually done in these circumstances is that the specific epithet (esculentum) is transferred back to Solanum to produce a new combination, Solanum esculentum. Ta da! And for awhile that was the species name of tomato, but then someone remembered Linnaeus. Remember Linnaeus? The father of taxonomy. Well, the order in which taxonomic names are published counts with the first name published (the oldest) being judged correct, and no one is older than Linnaeus. Linnaeus was simply set as the starting date of plant names, and Linnaeus had named this plant Solanum lycopersicon. Subsequent to Linnaeus the specific epithet was raised to a generic level and a new specific epithet was added, but now that tomato is back in Solanum the whole thing reverts to Linnaeus' original species name. Image credit - diversely colored wild tomatoes from western S. America: Ana Caicedo, Univ. Mass.
A fruit is a flower at the stage of seed dispersal. Fruits aren't something different, just those parts of flowers that undergo a post-pollination development. Here's a particularly interesting one of Paeonia japonica, a species new to our gardens, and what a cool fruit/seed display. The follicle-like fruitlets have an unimpressive dull green-gray to brownish color, looking a bit like a short pea pod, until they dehisce, opening along a lateral suture and then how colorful is that! The fertile seeds have a dark blue fleshy covering (aril probably, or fleshy seed coat) while the undeveloped seed are soft, fleshy and red, and makes you wonder if this is a plant making to most of an otherwise wasted resource (unpollinated seeds) as an attractant and reward because they are considerably larger than at the time of pollination. If not pollinated, most ovules abort their development. The inner fruit wall is purple. This display is exactly what you would expect for bird seed dispersers. Calling all cedar waxwings!
Quite a number of fruits snap open is such a way that the seeds are expelled ballistically. The basic principle is the fruit in maturing and drying is constructed such that a force is built up and when the force gets great enough to overcome the anatomical constraints, themselves often weakening with maturation of seams and sutures, and the whole thing snaps open and the seeds are thrown several meters. Cool. However the detailed features of the mechanism have not been much studied, and here's a pretty neat image of one of the two fruit walls of the hairy bittercress (a mustard, Cardamine hirsuta) after the two halves have split and thrown the enclosed seeds. Many such fruits (siliques) just open with maturity and seeds drop out (yawn). The study featured in the latest American Journal of Botany documents the type and shape of cell wall thickenings that result in the rapid shape change of the fruit wall that forcibly expells the seeds. The image is from the cover of the August 2011 issue.
This sounded like a good story; a 13 yr old kid does a great science project and figures out something everyone else had missed about solar power. Well, the Phactor thinks he remembers being a kid and discovering that all the good ideas you had someone else already had had, and it was rather discouraging, and this remained a worry until in graduate school you finally knew enough to know what was and wasn’t known. This story illustrates how quickly a nice story in today’s electronic media can spread, and then when someone has to say, uh, no, it isn’t quite such a sensational story, it makes them sound like a jerk for raining on some kid’s parade. Even from the small illustration shown in the original article, it was obvious something was wrong, but while a solar energy person pointed out the problem was about the output being measured from the solar cells, the thing that caught my attention was the form of the tree. Tree form and its evolution has been studied a lot, and from those studies you can generate a form that is optimal for light harvesting, and such trees have horizontally oriented crowns and arrays of branches (B). But of course trees must also reproduce (A optimal form for spore production and dispersal) and they must be structurally sound (C optimal form for structural stability), so selection operates not just on one thing because real trees must do many things so rather than being optimal for light harvesting, trees are actually a sort of compromise in form, sub-optimal for several different functions, but good enough at all of them, and darned if the computer generated forms aren’t pretty similar to the form of real trees (D forms optimalized for all three functions). (Image after Niklas 1997 Evolutionary Biology of Plants.)
Every now and again you avoid stepping into a mine field just by luck, and had the Phactor found this advertisement himself, and offered an opinion or two, one way or another someone would have been offended and gotten mad at yours truly. So with great pleasure the credit for commenting on this garden advertising aimed at women (?), real women (oops!), was called to my attention by the wonderful women of the Garden Rant blog. All that can be said, is Wow, you've come a long way baby! Now what could they possibly be selling that deals with gardens? The ad, presumably a parody, is for Dutch bulbs marketed by women for women (?) using the slogan: Dig. Drop. Done. Anyone there my readers identify with? Where's the career woman who gardens as a hobby?
A few blogs ago a sudden and violent thunderstorm devastated quite a number of the hundreds of "magic lilies" (Lycoris squamigera) that annually adorn our late summer lawns and gardens. A goodly number survived by either flowering later or because of a sheltered location beneath some of our large trees. These are quite a mundane plant, but extremely easy to grow and they provide a week of great color in mid-August when the heat and drought of summer can make gardens fade. This has to be one of the most reliable of naturalizing bulbs. Some of the clumps in our gardens are decades old, and when transplanted they almost always grow and flower in their new locations. However don't plant them too close to smaller spring bulbs because they produce a large clump of leaves in the spring that can crowd out smaller plants. Magic lilies grow well around the base of lawn trees.
The lily pond in our garden is about 90 years old and as it was not constructed with any kind of circulating system, it had turned into a marsh dominated by sacred lotus. While a happy home to quite a diversity of dragon flies and amphibians, the annual spring visit by ducks three years ago had provided an example of plant dispersal by bringing in duckweed which rendered moot the presence or absence of fish beneath the green expanse, all of which resulted in the decision to rennovate the entire pond. Enter the Pond Lady, quite crazily obsessed by ponds. She and her older assistant probably have a total age of around 100 and a total height of about ten and a half feet, so they employ strapping young men to assist with moving the cinder blocks, rocks, old cement, sand, and soil needed for the project. Here's the pond as it looked this spring with a couple of pallets of cinder block waiting for deployment. Pond Lady has been through 5 or 6 young men this summer alone. The last one, new to the job Monday, left for lunch on Tuesday and never returned. He lasted half a day longer than one earlier this summer who simply said, "It (the work) is too hot and dirty." Assistant pond lady laughs, shakes her head, and says, "They just can't keep up with us. We're tough!" How true especially when compared to 20-something marshmallows (my preferred spelling). In spite of slower than anticipated progress due to these labor problems, new plumbing is now in place and the pond is once again filled with water, so in a couple of weeks the project will be done except for all the new landscaping required. Oh, yes, the lotus, being sacred, was preserved, but it will be confined rather than allowed to roam freely.
black shoes like this do not actually make much of a fashion statement especially when worn by day with denim short shorts rather than a little black dress, but you realize that here is a person who does not actually plan to move anything herself preferring to demonstrate the sharp distinction between labor and management by dress. Hmm, want to bet about her major? It isn't biology you can be certain of that. "How come you aren't wearing shoes like that?" asks the Phactor. They look and burst into giggles. "Freshmen," and they shake their heads. 2nd years can be so judgemental.
Today was our first visit to our prairie study site in a month, and let me assure you that the hot, and now dry, weather has not had an adverse affect on the prairie. So let's start with our first task: finding our research plots. Now just in case you think us amateurs, the plots are quite well marked by 30 inch white pvc posts in one corner. In the tall portion of the prairie a bamboo pole was added raising the height to around 6 feet and orange plastic flagging was tied to the top, and in late May and early June that all seems over the top. But now it's August, some 5 months from when it was burned to the ground, and the change is most amazing. A dense canopy of vegetation is in places chest high, and the emergent grasses block your vision (see image) and forbs tower above my fingertips even when my arm is raised straight above my head. At one point we were within a foot of a plot and still could not see the pvc. Some helpful denizens of the prairie had chewed off most of the plastic flagging for reasons that seem quite unclear other than sheer perversity and at a distance of about 20 feet even my colleague was quite out of sight let alone trying to spot nice beige-colored bamboo poles. Even with our trusty map plots were hard to find, and the physical effort of just pushing through such dense tall vegetation was quite taxing; where are bison when you need some? But this is quite impressive vegetation really, and for people who have never seen such vegetation, and these days that is very few, it's quite a revelation that something so cool has been nearly destroyed by the John Deere legacy.
Things are mighty dry, dry to the point where watering only helps a few key plants and garden areas. The majority of plants looked stressed, some only mildly, some very, and a few that were neglected during our 3 week trip looked dead. Ah, well. Our lawn had gotten to that crunchy under foot stage, but about that there is no worry given our philosophy of laissez-faire lawn care. The need for rain was so great that the Phactors watched with some anticipation the building storm clouds late yesterday afternoon, and the rain did come, and so did other precipitation, hail. Our gardens have quite a number of late summer flowering "magic lilies" (Lycoris squamigera), dozens and dozens of clumps, mostly a decades old legacy, but a quite colorful and cheerful one. Not so much any more. Our colorful display was truncated by getting a significant amount of our water in its solid state accompanied by some wind bursts. Unfortunately the rain gauge says the total was only 1/4 inch less than half of what's needed to keep things going, and one quarter of what was needed to begin to replenishing soil water. But to our amazement an 8 foot tall tower of cucumber vines survived. The danger here for the unwary gardener is the appearance that the storms delivered a significant amount of rain, which it didn't. Keep watering those new plantings.
What with the international date line crossings, the Phactor is a bit unclear about the day of the week, even more than usual. However, my trusty international Casio watch, which has a better understanding of such things, tells me it's a Friday, so time to blog about a flower, as if this never happens otherwise. This particular orchid (Dendrobium linguiforme) is a wonderful plant that can (or could be) found in a wide variety of habitats, most often as a stem epiphyte of trees. As you will note the tough sclerophytic leaves and short stocky rhizome form a substrate hugging mat that allows it to survive in some pretty harsh places. Unfortunately it's easy to grow and the flowering is quite lovely, if brief, and the flowers are fragrant, all of which leads frequently to poaching from the wild.
Sydney Australia is not the greatest city on Earth, but it is a very picturesque city, and one to be very much apprecitated from the correct venue. So here's the Sydney skyline from the perspective of a pub high upon the top of the Rocks near the base of the harbor bridge which costs close to $300 to risk your life climbing up on top of. But at a considerably lower cost, a 
pub's rooftop beer garden offers a great view of the harbour and serves beer. Here's the view. Wow! What a great view of the opera house! Happy campers, disappointed that they couldn't afford a life-risking tour to the top of the bridge, consoled themselves with beer. Somehow these people are related to the Phactor, but clearly something is amiss. They are way too good natured, optimistic, and happy to be related to yours truly, but the beer, and the view, was good (an IPA).
One of my favorite tropical organisms are the orb weaver spiders, and Queensland has some spectacular ones. Here's an image of one that had woven a big web in the corner of the car port of our beach house. When pointing the beast out, the Phactor refered to it as a "her", and was chastised by family and friends as being unable to sex spiders, but in this case the big ones are always female because these spiders have a tremendous sexual dimorphism: huge females and dwarf males, spiders so small that they are generally not noticed if you don't know what you're looking for. The female spiders are locally refered to as "bird-eating spiders" and you do occasionally see a feather stuck in the web, but while the web can hang on to the stray loose feather, even these substantial webs seldom can hold a bird. Old Shelob here has a body 4-5 cm long and a leg span of 20-21 cm! So just maybe she could "eat" a small entangled bird, but not sure how reliable some of the reports of bird catching are. While running into one of their webs and tangling with Shelob is a bit creepy, she's actually harmless to people, at least big people.
My old friend Woody introduced me to this plant on our first trip to Australia 30 years ago for another botanical congress. “Stand next to that plant for a size comparison”, he said. Pointing to it, the Phactor said, “This one?” And the pointed finger was too close and a small hypodermic needle of a trichome (hair) slipped under the edge of my finger nail. The stinging sensation that resulted was something to behold because even though there was no visible injury at all, it felt like a hot ice pick had been shoved under my finger nail. The pain was severe and it just throbbed, and after subsiding 3-4 hours later, it would begin throbbing again every time my hand was in water. The rather innocent looking shrub that 
does this is Dendrocnide moroides, the stinging bush, one of the nastiest members of the nettle family. Another colleague tripped and fell into one, and the reaction and pain required a trip to hospital. Imagine how his showers felt after this! The fruit is a rather attractive red raspberry looking thing, but all those stinging hairs give you real pause about trying it. So visual ID of this plant is one of the first things you learn before doing field work in rainforests of Queensland. Slow learners will get a lesson they won’t forget.
Rainforest always looks its best just after a rain or during a light rain; in a real heavy rain you just can't see anything. Took our traveling companions of a field trip to see some rain forest in a light rain. This particular forest was in a national park at about 900 m above sea level. Here's a nice picture of the forest profile, a particularly difficult type of picture to get because you are seldom in the right place to see the forest like this. The primary vine in this forest is rattan palm, not one of the Phactor's favorite plants as it is forever trying to rip your head off. In just showing people the darned thing it ended up planting some of its grappling hooks in my hand. It's why the locals call it "lawyer cane" because once it gets its hooks into you it never lets go. Our temperate forests have fewer layers and are deciduous. Next blog another nasty denizen will be introduced.
Even if UTF (ubiquitous tropical flora) is a bit over done at times, a number of its components are very colorful, very attractive plants, and the red powder puff (Calliandra haematocephala, a mimosid legume) is one of my favorites because its display is both gaudy and long lasting. The nicely landscaped beach house recently occupied use vegetation very effectively to be both attractive and to generate privacy. But the red powder puff inflorescences (note the heads of flower buds) generated even more color than its flowers here in far northern Queensland by attracting rainbow lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus) each morning providing them with some nectar for brekkies. As the generic name indicates they have brush-like tongues for swabbing up nectar. Took this picture from the veranda while having brekkies myself.
