botanizing

By the Selway

When we arrived in the dark the river was only slightly louder than the generator of the RV that was parked 50 yards away.  The river clattered as water rocked flat stones.  The RV droned like a stressed refrigerator.

I woke at first light to see we were enclosed by fog.  I had wished for fog when we went to bed.  In fog, I fell back asleep to wake hours later in bright sun and blue sky.

As I read by our campfire in the morning, I heard dancing in a cottonwood tree.  It must be a squirrel, I thought.  When I looked for the sound, leaves fell.  The brown leaves, stiff from an earlier frost, falling in a slight breeze, tapped and pattered against still held leaves like the feet of cloggers.

We walked into moist forest of the hills above the river’s banks.  Bright sprays of sword ferns stood on dark soil in the sparse understorey.  The shiny green fronds were like lights in the thick shade beneath western red cedar. 

Ravens roared above the dark woods.  I looked for them and followed a trilling screech as it curved down the ravine.  The birds were invisible.

Teeth

A few months ago I squeezed some new color on my palette of duties.  In addition to teaching, research, and directing the university’s herbarium, I accepted a position as interim director of the Conner Museum of Natural History.  The Conner, like the Ownbey Herbarium, which I direct, is a university museum, and its mission encompasses support for research and teaching as well as public outreach.  The Conner Museum is devoted primarily to vertebrates, and it consists of a research collection of about 70,000 specimens, a teaching collection used by university classes, and also three rooms of public exhibits. 

The public exhibits are popular and visited by several thousand people each year.  They are fairly traditional mounts of mammals and birds in display cases.  In the past few years, my predecessor worked to make these displays more interesting and more educational.  That’s an effort we need to continue.  I was also intrigued by the idea of mounting special exhibits in which we could bring material from the research collection, which is not normally on public display, into view.

As part of my introduction to the collection several weeks ago, the collection manager showed me examples of the specimens.  In deep storage in a basement of another building, she showed me elephant teeth that a former faculty member had collected.  Each elephant tooth was larger than my large hands.  An idea born was there:  we would have a special exhibit on teeth.

For the past two weeks, we have intensively prepared for the exhibit “The Conner Museum Has Teeth.”  Last weekend, coinciding with the university’s homecoming celebrations, we put our teeth on display.  There were pharyngeal teeth from carp, a shark’s jaw with many rows of sharp-pointed teeth, and skulls ranging from beluga whale to tiger to shrew.  We had a monkey that need orthodontic assistance and bear with shiny incisors and molars (or at least we had their skulls).  And there were the lovely, intriguing elephant teeth.  I spent Friday and Saturday at the exhibit chatting with visitors.

There was one young boy that especially caught my attention.  Let’s call him Thomas.  He was five years old and came in with his mother.  I could see from the start the brilliant intensity of his gaze.  Thomas went slowly from specimen to specimen as his mother read our signs to him and talked to him about the materials.  Thomas was especially interested in the shark jaw.  He would stand by the jaw with his hand lightly touching the teeth.  Thomas would venture from the shark along other tables of the exhibit but after a few minutes he returned repeatedly to the shark jaw. He told me about sharks and his interest in them. Thomas and I also talked about the pharyngeal teeth of the carp and about the Great Horned Owl he had seen in a local park over the weekend.  I had seen an owl in the same park the weekend before.  I could sense a sort of burning inquisitiveness in Thomas that impressed me.  One wanted to put the world on a platter for him to explore and see what thoughts he developed.  One wanted to take him into a laboratory.  Thomas was at the exhibit for an hour and a half, steadily studying and holding the skulls and jaws for several minutes each, unhurried, intensely curious.  He made the planning and preparation of the exhibit worthwhile.  He made me think of my own childhood, when my interest in science coalesced at eight years old.  I then began to read, to synthesize ideas, and to write books on scientific topics.  It was delightful to think about being eight and consumed by the beauty of science.  It was delightful at eight to learn about discovery.  It was delightful last weekend to discover the workings of elephant teeth and to talk about them with Thomas and our other visitors.

A slide show with audio that advertised our exhibit is available here.

 

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Photos:  Coyote skull, tiger teeth, dolphin jaws, and exhibit poster.

Midterm exam

On Monday of this week I gave the first midterm of the semester for my introduction to botany course.  Midterm time is always a bit tense.  In the last half of last week, I was searching for time to write the exam amid many other commitments.  The exams in this introductory course, in which there are nearly 100 students, use multiple-choice questions, which are time-consuming to create.  I knew I was short of time when I started the exam, and this led me to do something I have not done in the past.

I have always in the past started to write my exams with a fresh sheet of paper.  For each lecture, I would write roughly the same number of questions, and I have always written entirely original questions my exams.  Last week, I took an exam from the last time that I taught the class, and simply rewrote most of the old questions.  This rewriting was extensive—I restructured the point of the question and wrote entirely different answers for the multiple choices, but this approach meant I didn’t spend time thinking about question topics.  Of course, the main topics of the lectures remain the same from year to year despite the bits of new information and different ways of explaining material that are added each year.

By last Sunday morning, I had finished writing the exam and made two forms of it.  The forms have the same questions but in different orders to limit opportunities for students to copy from neighbors in the tightly packed classroom.  I photocopied one form on pink paper and the other on blue.

After I photocopied the exams, I went off to a review session that I had scheduled for the students on Sunday afternoon.  There were about 15 students at the review, and I spent an hour and a half answering their questions.  This small group of students seemed relatively ready for the exam.

The exam went smoothly on Monday morning, although I noticed that students who had blue exams tended to finish more quickly than students who had pink exams.  This had to be one of those odd, random events because the two exams forms were identical except for the order of questions.  But it was odd.  And then, when the scores for the exam were returned from the processing facility (the Deus ex Machina of grades), the mean on the pink exam was three points lower than the mean on the blue exam.  I checked for errors on my key but couldn’t find any.  And I began to think that my pink exam was prone to quirkiness.

The mean on the exam was 68 points out of 100 possible.  The mean was respectable, and I felt it was a successful test, covering broadly the content of the material we had studied and providing student scores that ranged from the low 30s to 94 points.  [O.k., I admit that I am always discouraged that all of my students don’t do exceptionally well on exams.  I really want to believe the lectures are excellent, and that the students are fully engaged and wanting to learn. In the real classroom, both lectures and students are compromises.] When I discussed the exam with the students in lecture on Wednesday, there were a few grimaces and a few hard stares, but otherwise everyone seemed to be relatively content with the test and scores.  One student did suggest that one of my questions was vague.  Surely not, I was thinking . . . and thinking also that they were concerned only [ONLY!] about one question.

Now we move forward with more material—new labs this week and new lecture material.  And my diligent students, who are thirsty for knowledge. . . half of them skipped class yesterday, a lovely Friday.

*  *  *

Here are ten questions from the exam for your test-taking pleasure:

1. The formation of haploid cells from a diploid cell results from:

A.  Recombination.
B.  Meiosis.
C.  Syngamy.
D.  Spores.


2. In autumn, the abscission process that separates leaves from the main part of the plant body involves:

A.  Perforation of cell walls.
B.  Formation of secondary cell walls that seal the leaf from the movement of nutrients.
C.  Breakage of cellulose microfibrils.
D.  Breakdown of pectin in middle lamella.


3. Which of the following is true of plant sporophytes?

A.  The sporophyte makes sporocytes that undergo meiosis to make spores for dispersal.
B.  The sporophyte phase is limited only to the diploid zygote, which undergoes meiosis.
C.  The sporophyte makes gametangia in which gametes are formed after cells undergo meiosis.
D.  The sporophyte is a result of asexual reproduction that involves fragmentation of the plant body.


4. The main constituent of primary cell walls of plants is:

A.  Cellulose.
B.  Lignin.
C.  Pectin.
D.  Protein.


5. Where would you expect to find cells that have secondary cell walls?

A.  Around the photosynthetic cells of leaves.
B.  In the abscission zones of leaves.
C.  In cells that function in providing rigid support, such as those of tree trunks.
D.  In all eukaryotic cells but not in prokaryotic cells.


6. In the life cycle of plants, zygotes result from:

A.  Plasmolysis of gametes.
B.  Syngamy of gametes.
C.  Daughter cells of mitotic cell divisions.
D.  Daughter cells of meiotic cell divisions.
 

7. In autumn, leaves change color in some trees from green to yellow or orange because:

A.  Chlorophyll degrades to reveal anthocyanin pigments in cell vacuoles.
B.  Chlorophyll degrades to reveal carotenoid pigments in chloroplasts.
C.  Chloroplasts begin to form carotenoids rather than chlorophyll.
D.  Nitrogenous compounds in leaves begin to glow red when they are absorbed back into the plant body from the dying leaves.


8.  The energy that drives the light reactions of photosynthesis is obtained from:

A.  Electrons.
B.  Sunlight.
C.  ATP.
D.  Sugar molecules.


9.  Plant cells are turgid when:

A.  Cellulose microfibrils in the cell wall are locked in place by keytanes.
B.  An equilibrium of water movement into and out of a cell is achieved.
C.  Secondary cell wall formation prevents cell expansion.
D.  Osmosis causes the entry of water into the cell and the protoplast pushes outward against the cell wall.


10. The volume of mature plant cells consists largely of which of the following?

A.  Vacuole.
B.  Nucleus.

C.  Chloroplast.

D.  Cell wall.

*  *  *

The answers are: 1B, 2D, 3A, 4A, 5C, 6B, 7B, 8B, 9D, 10A.

Flowers for fungi

In the conifer forests at the edge of the Northern Rocky Mountains, flowers appear to be gone for the year.  It appears that flowers have been traded for fungi.  The woods bloom with fungi.

There are wooly chanterelles that have tops like shaggy funnels.  We find these in clumps, young and old together.  The young have burnished button tops. 

The western russulas are especially common.  The tops of their basidiocarps are purple and some approach six inches in diameter.  There is a slight dip in the center of the russula’s cap, and in those centers little moss communities stand where they have been displaced from soil to the top of the mushroom pedestal.  The western russulas do not age well.  They chip and crack.  Diamonds shaped cracks creep across the purple tops of the basiocarps to reveal white interiors.

Slimy red caps adorn the tops larch wax caps, which go also by the name Hygrophorus speciosus.  These caps—the diameter of a quarter and a half—we find tucked beneath the still green leaves of low plants.

There are upheavals of soil and duff at the trail’s edge pushed up by orange lips.  I bend my head to look and see down a throat to subterranean darkness.  It is as if we have found evidence of subterranean souls—like those belonging to Wagner’s Nibelungs that mine bright minerals.  I look closely and see the orange lip is the rim of a basidiocarp.  Gills stand behind the lip.  And yet, for a moment I think, those gills might be teeth, and this mouth, lips, throat and teeth might speak.  Whose mouth this is I cannot tell, but I stop to listen, hoping for words from the mysterium of mycelium.

*  *  *

Top photo is wooly chanterelle, Gomphus floccosus, and the bottom photo is western russula, Russula occidentalis (at least I hope those are correct determinations).  I've used the recently published Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest by Steve Trudell and Joe Ammirati as my guide for identifications.

A tense season

This is a tense season for leaves.  Green remains, but one anticipates its quick dissipation.  Laminas in this season look worn, and they are spotted or fringed by yellow.  The worst bear hard brown cankers as if lamina had given up its defense against infection and allowed bacteria or virus to establish themselves in the final days of photosynthesis.

U-Haul to the sunset

The U-Hauls and other moving trucks parked outside the window of my stuffy room in a Motel 6 in Boise, Idaho, are emblematic of the season.  It’s time to move—time, before school starts, to pack one’s stuff, load the U-Haul yourself, and take the intrepid drive to new possibilities.  None of us rides off into the sunset on a horse anymore; instead, we are more likely to use a U-Haul to haul all of our enigmas out of old dilemmas and put them in new places.  By the time the sun sets on our U-Haul we are likely to be tucked into a table for dinner or napping lazily to the grumble of televisions in economy lodging.  Cheap comfort keeps us going.

Of course, I’m simply watching all of the moving while on my way home.  After a long day of driving, I peak through the motel window and imagine the inspiration that drives all the U-Hauls. 

5%?

When I went to a colleague’s office this week to chat, he offered me a squirt from the Purell bottle that sat on his desk opposite the guest chair.  I held out one hand for the ethanol-based hand sanitizer and then rubbed my hands together.  My colleague gave himself a squirt as well and rubbed it around his hands.  “I’m following university recommendations to avoid swine flu,” my colleague said.  Indeed, we have received various communiqués from the Provost and other university powers that detail procedures for student illness and recommendations for avoiding the swine flu.

We have an outbreak.  Although flu seems at odds with our beautiful days of bright sun and cool breezes, a little epidemic of swine flu has arrived with the return of students to campus.  So many of our students have swine flu we have been in the national news all weekend.  The media attention rivals our once-a-decade participation in the Rose Bowl and the twice-a-decade appearance we make in the NCAA basketball tournament.  Seldom does national news emanate from dry, rural eastern Washington.

Students have been sending me e-mails all week that say something like this:  “I’m sick, and the doctor has told me not to go to class for the rest of the week.”  I’m impressed by the communication—few students ever e-mail to say they are sick and won’t be in lecture.  Indeed, surreptitious skipping of my lectures by students has always seemed very popular.  I send e-mails back to the students to tell them not to worry—stay away until the fever passes, and we’ll take care of the missed work next week.

In my botany class of nearly 100 students, perhaps five sent e-mails this week to say they were sick and told not to attend class.  That five percent is impressive, although perhaps not as astounding as the numbers of students who succumb to sniffling, sneezing, and coughing about a month into the semester when tests, late nights, and stress in the tight living environments of dormitories and apartments add up to colds in a substantial proportion of my class.  None-the-less, I am impressed that five percent of my students may have swine flu, and I’m a bit concerned about the time when the virus reaches the front of the class.

The five percent illness in my class is short of the level in the university as a whole, in which the national news has been reporting that about 2000 of our student population of nearly 22,000 have swine flu.  With nearly 10% of the student body putatively suffering swine flu and only about 5% suffering in my class, I wonder about the difference.  Is my class not a random draw from the university population as a whole when we consider disease distribution?  For example, are all of the landscape architecture students in my botany course too tasteful to be living in cramped quarters with other students and, thus, avoiding infection with the virus?  Or perhaps more than 5% of my students have the swine flu and only 5% have opted to stay away from class—it is a bit worrying that the other ill 5% of my students may be bringing swine flu viruses to class with them.  And it’s possible that swine flu infection rates on campus are growing quickly, and I may find a much higher percentage of my students with the disease reporting to me next week.

The natural history and epidemiology of swine flu on campus make me curious.  I’m not so curious, however, to want any expanded personal experience with the disease.  It would be pleasing not to have any more students with swine flu.  And so far, I can report that the students who have returned to class after recovery appear as bright and lively as they did before the disease.

*   *   *

N. B.—I am not the only person on campus to blog about our little pig pen outbreak, I see the university’s president is also blogging about the disease.  He wisely repeats on his blog the university’s recommendations to avoid Swine flu.

Gentians

We walk in the Clearwater Mountains through lodgepole pines to the scrubby flank of a valley.  Canteen Creek lies below us, and its headwaters are ahead.

Little is in flower. Along the margin of the trail we walk, there are a few late season composites that have weedy proclivities. Fireweed release fuzzy fruits.  Petals have shriveled on the white rhododendron, and its fruits swell.  The once lovely, saffron flowers of menziesia, a cousin of the rhododendron, have browned. In lieu of flowers, we turn our attention to huckleberries, and eat as we walk.

We cross Canteen Creek on stones, and I find among the grasses of the far side gentians in flower.  Little is as lovely as a gentian flower. 

The blue of these gentians is like the summer sky boiled-down to pure essence of blue.  That distillation feels especially concentrated in mountain light. I know when I find gentians in these mountains that summer is about to fade.  The still, cool blue of gentians has foreshadow of ice.

Evening at Big Fog Mountain Saddle

After dinner at the Wilderness Inn Café, we drive up to Big Fog Mountain Saddle.  The days have been hot, and we want to escape to a cooler place.  The saddle, set in an angle of the Selway River, is a high perch in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains. 

The road to the saddle is slow and dusty.  It is beset with switchbacks, which keep one in first gear, at least to avoid shifting from first to second and then back to first every seven seconds, where the road climbs the lower slope above the Selway.  When the straights lengthen, the road tightens.  Thimbleberries overhang the road, and we dodge their slaps at the open windows.  The steep, straight runs of road serve also the runoff, and the roadbed is as eroded and rocky as a creek bottom.  We creep and bounce over the rocks and ruts.

Big Fog Mountain Saddle is a swayback meadow split by a dusty parking lot.  A forest service toilet sits among broad patches of yarrow, whose corymbs of flower heads make white spots in the thin, wiry grass.  The pussytoes are beginning to fruit, producing fluffy, stellate efflorescences from the sides of their pinkish heads. Pearly everlasting, a close cousin of the pussytoe, has elegant heads of rice papery bracts.  A few blue flowers remain among the fruits, which have collars of wrinkled brown corollas, on the stalks of penstemons.  Bees and butterflies visit the bright, orangey yellow saucers of potentilla flowers.  Sentinels of beargrass stand in formation at the edge of forest.  The beargrass flowers have finished for the season, and the infructescences bear young fruits.

As shadows slip from the evening, we walk down a trail.  Spindly paintbrushes, heavy with fruit, sway like pendulums when our shins knock against them.  We pass from warm to cool to warm to cool.  The temperature differences along the trail are sharp.  Cool sweeps down slope in broad bands that surround the trickles and seeps of water.  Tofieldia grow in the seeps.  I break-off a stalk for a closer look and its many glands leave my hand sticky.  The lily-like fruits of the tofieldia are swelling with seeds.  Small orange flowers stand above the mosses of the seeps.  These flowers belong to the bog St. John’s-wort, a small plant that creeps across seeps.  Dense runs of mountain boykinia, a rough plant that has toothy leaves, edge the trail like fence.

We can see a fire in a distant side valley of the Selway River.  A small plume of smoke rises from the valley and pools in the air above it.

When we return to our camp, the gibbous moon stands over the forest service toilet. We sit beside the truck in the encroaching darkness and extend our feet in the meadow grasses.  We drink tea as the sunset fades in front of us.   Arcturus enters fuzzy and red to my left, and Venus brightens behind my shoulders.  There is a whistle, perhaps a pika, at the meadow’s edge.  Cool breeze sweeps from the east over my exposed thighs.  We sit on the last step of summer.

Neighborhood hawks

While seated on my deck a few weeks ago, one of the neighborhood hawks zipped twice overhead just above reach.  After the last pass, it caught air and curved upward to circle high above the neighborhood.  ‘Screee  . . .  screee,’ the hawk screamed.  I went in the house to get my binoculars.  Two Swainson’s Hawks have had a nest among the upper branches of a spruce that stands about 50 yards away.  After I swept my binoculars along with the hawk in flight, I focused on the nest, which was constructed on the far side of the tree and has been hard for me to see.  When I lowered the binoculars, I noticed a large nodule about the size of Jeffrey pine cone on the upper branch of the larch in my back yard. My near-sightedness didn’t allow me to resolve the nodule as anything more than a shadowy carbuncle, so I lifted the binoculars for a look.  What I saw was one of the Swainson’s Hawks, watching me with great scrutiny.  I was looking down the barrel of the hawk’s hooked beak.  It’s eyes were steady.

*

Through most of the summer I awakened early in the mornings to the ‘Screee  . . .  screee’ cries of the Swainson’s Hawks.  In the late afternoons when I came home from work, the hawks were often soaring above the neighborhood or I saw them fly from tree to tree, often with some other badgering bird about them.  Before evening, I again heard the hawks’ cries.  The shoulder-hunching cry inevitably made me look up.

*

In the past two weeks, I have not heard or seen the hawks. I have no idea whether the neighborhood mates had a successful nest—I travelled enough during the summer to have missed early flights of any young hawks that the nest might have produced.

The Swainson’s Hawks have most likely departed on their annual migration.  I hope they have good luck on their flight to Argentina.