Did you ever sniff a spider up your nose?

(DrTom is about to suck a crab spider up his nose and transport it to another flower.)

My favorite flowering plant at DrTom's is the butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii). I have purple and white varieties. This woody perennial gets about 8 feet tall and several feet wide. I have taken to planting so many of them that I am not sure the sun will ever hit the ground near our house. They flower profusely beginning in July, and the flowers remain until frost. The flower spikes contain hundreds of tiny individual flowers, which are visited by a huge assortment of bees, spiders, hawk moths, hummingbirds, butterflies, and other insects. The plant attracts an entire community of organisms by its visual display and its flowers' highly aromatic fragrance. Even I can smell the flowers when I am several meters away.

At this time of year, our evening Happy Hour usually consists of sitting on a small patio I am constructing adjacent to two butterfly bushes accompanied, of course, by a scotch and a cigar. The patio is designed to sit facing downhill, with the bushes at your back. But the plants are so full of life when they are in flower, that we have turned the chairs around to face the plants. I sit there, sip scotch, puff on a stick, and simply watch the show like it was an HBO action thriller. Great entertainment, and cheap.

One of the little critters sitting patiently on a flower spike of my butterfly bush is a little spider known as a crab spider. It is called a crab spider because its body is shaped like a small crab and, duh, it IS a spider. It is obviously sitting there waiting for the appropriate insect to land and become its next meal. But I made an amazing discovery the other day when I was observing, up close and personal, a bright yellow crab spider nestled in a flower spike in ambush pose. I decided to take a deep inhalation of that beautiful flower scent and I immediately felt a strange sensation inside my nose (left nare, to be exact). You guessed it. It was then that I also noticed that the crab spider, which had been right in front of my face, was gone. I toppled to the side, still surrounded by flower spikes, and aggressively blew through my nose to relieve the tickly feeling. To my astonishment, the yellow crab spider flew out of my nose and plopped onto a new flower spike, none the worse for wear.

You biologists will immediately see the significance of this story. I had, in effect, served as a dispersal mechanism for the spider. I enabled it to get from one flower spike, which might have been depleted of insect prey, to another spike where the hunting might be more productive, without having to climb all the way down one spike and out to another one. We are all familiar with dispersal mechanisms that plants and animals employ to get from one place to another. I published a paper once about the pollen that sticks to hummingbird beaks and, therefore, get moved from flower to flower. But an arachnid using a mammal nose to disperse or emigrate from point A to point B? That is fascinating. Did I simply suck up the spider when I inhaled? Did the spider see that beautiful schnoz hovering above it and jump into it? We know that this species has good eyesight, but does it have a "search image" for mammalian noses?

So there are lots of unanswered questions here and plenty of room for graduate research projects. I can imagine someone going from one type of flower to another and documenting the animal contents of his nose after visiting each species of plant. There's a scientific publication for the journal Science. I can imagine quantifying the animal contents of your nose in spring vs. fall. There's another one. I can imagine determining the relative proportion of eggs to larvae to adults of organisms produced from your nose. That's a good one for Nature. This approach could even develop into a new census technique for sampling arthropod abundance on various plants as the investigator simply walks a straight line through a field while inhaling deeply at each flower he encounters. Throw those insect sweep nets away, discard insect pheromone contraptions, and forget about those messy sticky traps. This is a sampling device you will never leave home without.

(Had this anecdote actually been true, I would have written it up as a short note and submitted it to the journal Ecology for publication. But isn't this the kind of craziness from which ideas develop?)

Compost: The Holy Grail

(I wish my compost pile smoked like this.)

My wife and I always have a large vegetable garden. It has never produced all that well. My wife blames me; I blame the soil. Our soil here in southern Tompkins County is clayish and is always in need of more organic matter. It tends to be soggy in early summer and then bone dry in late summer. It is obvious that one answer would be to add that rich, black, loamy material that one can produce by composting. Ahhh, compost--farmers' gold, Jayhawks' jewels, pioneers' platinum, homesteaders' heaven, cornhuskers' crack. Well, you get the idea--it is rich stuff.

To produce compost you simply mix together "green" material with "brown" material. Green material is fresh plant stuffs like grass clippings or kitchen waste, and the greens are your source of nitrogen. Brown material is dried plant stuffs, like old leaves or straw, and this is your source of carbon (=sugars). The nitrogen to carbon ratio in the compost pile is critical to get the pile to do what a proper compost pile is supposed to do--cook. If mixed properly with sufficient moisture, microorganisms multiply in the pile, and their biological activity raises the internal temperature of the pile to about 170 degrees F. The high heat, naturally produced, decomposes the plant material, kills insects, pathogens, and weed seeds, and results in a beautiful mound of black, loamy compost that can be used to amend your lousy soil. I have this vision of looking at my compost pile from afar one cool morning and seeing steam slowly rising from a smoldering heap.

Has never happened. I have built compost piles for about 20 years, and I can never get the temperature of the damn thing warmer than the gravel in my driveway. On the other hand, my younger brother Bill, who lives in Corvallis, Oregon, loves to call me and describe the trash cans full of fantastic compost that he has produced. He produces so much compost that his entire backyard of perennial flower and vegetable gardens is grown in compost only. He doesn't even use the Willamette Valley soil that God put behind his house some time ago. He uses only compost, HIS compost, HIS BEAUTIFUL compost, HIS BEAUTIFUL COPIOUS amounts of compost. I now use my caller ID not to answer the phone when I see that Oregon area code, because I can not stand to hear about HIS compost victory one more time.

And then yesterday morning, it happened. I dutifully checked my pile like I always do and, what the heck, there was heat. Not scorching heat, but an unmistakable increase in temperature that I could feel with my hand. I had to tell Robin right away. I ran to the house screaming "We have heat!", stubbed my large toe on the top rung of the garage stairs as I skipped up the steps, fell into the laundry room just inside the house, and banged my head on the washing machine. I was excited, happy, angry, in pain, and out of breath, all at the same time. I was like a carbon:nitrogen ratio that had gotten all out of kilter. I described to my wife that we had heat in the compost pile but, I must say, she was not nearly as impressed as I had hoped. But, never mind, I had a prideful lilt in my step all day, aside from a small limp.

But by evening, it was gone. What the hell? No heat at all. What kind of a cruel joke is this? Had I imagined the whole thing? Had I incurred that lump on my head for nothing? What will Robin think now? What happens when my brother calls? Within an hour, I had calmed myself into my usual passive state about how life is not fair and don't expect it to be. If my soil sucks and I can't grow beautiful veggies, so be it. Farmers in Iowa might have great soil, but they don't have the Finger Lakes. My brother might have great compost, but he has larger slugs. New York pioneers might have been able to live off the land here, but they didn't have a Toro rototiller. So I'm doing ok. And after all, we can buy tomatoes Saturday at the local Farmers Market.

I'm makin' money with Google Adsense

(Keep clicking friends.  I made about three cents today.)

When I started this blog, I signed up for Google's Adsense program. This is the program that places ads on your site automatically based on the content of your blogs. Today, those ads appeared from Googlelandia like magic. And my Adsense report shows that so far I have made $.01. Every time someone comes to my blog (called an "impression") and every time someone clicks on one of those ads, I make money. Since the ads appeared, probably sometime last night, there have been 5 impressions, which I think is worth a penny. An actual click on an ad is worth more, I think, but I will find this out today when one of you clicks on "Cigar Humidor", or some other ad. By the way, it is absolutely illegal to click on your own ads; this is referred to as "click fraud", and Google will squeeze your family jewels in a vice for that offense.

Now, I didn't start this blog to make money. I wanted to blog because when you have taught classes for 30 years and then stop, your mouth keeps on going even though you are only talking to the black lab at your feet. If you suppress the talking, your blood pressure goes up, you drool more and, well, I explained all of that in a previous post. I just have a need to tell someone what I saw or what I am thinking. So consider this post as a "truth in advertising" thing, where I am explaining that I make beaucoup bucks when you come here and click. For example, at this rate of earning power, I could comfortably buy a Whopper at the end of a year, with some coin left over.

On the other hand, this is kinda cool. The Adsense report gives me an idea of how many people are coming to this site. We all want to know if we are having any kind of effect in life, and if no one reads your words, you are certainly NOT having any effect. So my approach is to lure you in with cute or sexy images (like family jewels in a vice), give you some information that you might actually enjoy hearing (like the chickadees are nesting now), and then slap you in the face with something that really concerns me about the world (like we are all going to hell in a hand basket). But this is only Day 4, so no slapping yet. Just show up, and read this over with your favorite beverage, and click a little more. I would like to buy a soda with that Whopper.

Time for Noah's ark?

(The webbing between my toes is now nearly complete.)

Yesterday's downpour was the most rain I have ever seen fall at my house in Ithaca in 29 years, maybe the hardest rain I have ever seen in my life. It came down in sheets for a solid 30 minutes. It is exactly the kind of rain in parts of the West that results in flash floods that kill people. I had water flowing on my property in places where I have never seen moving water. And of course, it rained almost every day in June, much of July, and now more of the same in August. Fortunately, we live near the top of the hill surrounded by forest, so the chances of sliding off into an abyss is small. If this is the new normal, I may as well live in Costa Rica where I can find really good rice and beans, and cheap rum.

How wild animals endure these weather events is not clear to me, because who wants to be out there trying to find out? I have hummingbirds all over the place this summer, and I assume they are sitting under the protective cover of some tree branch. But it would be fascinating to observe the exact location and position they assume. After the rain, I walked through my woodlot and saw water flowing through a buried hollow log that I know is a runway for short-tailed shrews. Where the heck did they go? On the other hand, these large slugs we have in abundance this summer must have popped the top on a cold one, closed their sun umbrella, and rolled over on their backs to get more comfortable. It would have been a great time to make more slime!

Only time will tell if our summers become more rainy in general due to climate change, but more extreme rainfall events are predicted for the Northeast (see http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap3-3/sap3-3-final-all.pdf). Is this summer a hint of what is to come? More rainfall will result in shifts in abundance or geographic ranges of plants and animals over time. So, will we have more slugs and fewer shrews? More water cress and fewer tomatoes? More umbrellas and less moisturizing cream? Just a thought. But in the meantime, I am searching Google Do It Yourself sites for "arks".