Jarn’s Journal — Day 2

I think I have stopped shaking enough to use the recorder.

First, a note to myself. Emergency kits should include warnoffs. Some of the mammals here think they are going to eat me!

I can handle the situation as long as I am aware of the attack, of course. Just implant in the predator’s mind that I am not prey. But these predators, while not sentient, are in some ways quite intelligent. The one that almost got me yesterday evening was an ambush predator. Sheer luck that I heard it leap and was fast enough to reach its mind before it reached me.

This morning I saw another type of predator. This type hunts in packs, and runs its prey to exhaustion before closing in for the kill. I hope they are also territorial, in which case I can reach the minds of the local pack members and let them know that I am not prey. I think.

These pack hunters are a peculiar mottling of black, tan and white, no two alike. They have four limbs, like every other mammal I have seen here. They hunt in rather large packs, and once they have selected a victim, nothing seems to stop them. They seem to rely on sheer persistence rather than speed. They are not terribly large, but I would not want to face even one without a stunner. Which I have – I did remember to put that in the emergency kit!

The one last night was a lot faster – at least over short distances – and a lot larger. I did not get as good a look, but I think it was close to my weight, and spotted. One of the things I was able to skim from its mind was climbing trees to keep its kills away from other carnivores. Other carnivores? I haven’t seen them yet, but at least one seems to be a group hunter related to but larger than the one that attacked me.

I am clearly going to have to modify the emergency capsule to provide shelter from predators as well as weather. I wonder if they fear fire? Many non-sentient animals do, and cooking would definitely widen the variety of possible foods. Especially plant foods.

At least the fish appear to be nutritious, so probably the amino acids here are left-handed. I shall have to try some of the animals the predators regard as prey. I am not sure of using the stunner too much, though – I don’t have that many charges for it.

Note — Jarn’s Journal is part of the early history of the Confederation (fictional.) The animals he encounters during the Last Interglacial in Africa, however, are quite real.

Colored-Leaf Geraniums

Just about everyone is familiar with geraniums (really pelargoniams) grown primarily for flowers. Single or double, one-color or centered with white, they may be any shade of red, white, pink salmon or lavender. Some have scented leaves – rose, peppermint, lemon, and strawberry, among others. My favorites are the colored-leaf varieties.

Colored leaves occur when a mutation prevents part or all of a leaf from producing chlorophyll, the pigment that allows a plant to use the energy of sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates, releasing oxygen as a toxic by-product.

A mutation normally takes place in a single cell. If that cell is dividing, the daughter cells will have the same mutation. In the case of a geranium (or any genetically variegated plant) the critical tissue is what is called the meristem, found at the growing tips of the plant. Meristem cells are to a plant what stem cells are to an animal. If a mutation takes place in the meristematic tissue of a plant, and the mutation is such that chlorophyll production is inhibited in part of the leaf, the whole part of the plant that grows from that apex will show the same patterning. Where chlorophyll is absent, the plant will show whatever other pigments are present—usually carotenoids (red to yellow) and anthocyanins (red to blue.)

P. S, in my original post I missed some geranium colors.

Shoots that have less chlorophyll are less vigorous, but as long as they have some chlorophyll, they can be rooted to produce healthy plants. Back mutations do occur, and a colored-leaf plant will suddenly start growing a green branch. These green branches must be removed, as they are naturally the most vigorous and will take over if given a chance.

One thing I have found with several colored-leaf geraniums is that if light levels are low, as is the case during Alaskan winters, the variegation tends to disappear. When the light returns, so does the variegation. Unless, of course, a cell in a growth tip has mutated back to the green form. Then, as variegation returns to most of the plant, a few branches continue to have new green growth.

This happened to the plant in the photograph. It’s now had the two major green branches removed, and I hope new growth from the remaining branches with their white-centered leaves will remain variegated.

Alaskan Mosquitoes

Springtime in Alaska is beautiful — except for one thing. Or rather, many millions of things. Yes, the mosquitoes are back. The state birds are swarming.

Back in my Science Forum days, I both wrote articles and solicited them from other scientists. This one, How Mosquitoes Overwinter in Alaska, is from April, 1987, but it’s as true as ever. And all too real.

How Mosquitoes Overwinter in Alaska
Article #818

by Skeeter Werner

This article is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Skeeter Werner is a Research Entomologist at the Institute of Northern Forestry, USDA Forest Service, Fairbanks.

One of the more blood-chilling sights of spring in Alaska: the reappearance of the mosquito. First come the big, slow-moving snow mosquitoes, which overwinter as adults, followed by the smaller but more active swarms shown here.

We will shortly witness hordes of mosquitoes emerging from overwintering sites throughout Alaska. Different species of mosquitoes will become active at various times throughout the summer depending on where and in what particular life stage they spent the winter. Mosquito activity following spring break-up is also regulated by the temperature of the water in which the eggs have been deposited. A warm April and May with average precipitation followed by a warm dry month of June is ideal for mosquito development.

The mosquito life cycle consists of eggs, larvae or “wrigglers,” pupae or “tumblers,” and adults. All life stages except adults are aquatic and can occur in a variety of wet or moist places such as ponds, sloughs, standing pools of water, salt water marshes, artificial containers, hollow trees, low depressions of land, and moist areas of fields, bogs, and forests. The flat areas of interior and parts of south-central Alaska are ideal breeding sites because of the abundance of slow-moving and standing water.

The majority of mosquitoes in Alaska spend the winter as eggs within the specific habitat where they will eventually develop into larval, pupal, and adult stages. This means that female adults deposit eggs during late summer in the habitats mentioned above. These eggs then lie dormant throughout the winter until water temperatures are warm enough for hatching to occur the following spring. Mosquito eggs can sometimes lie dormant for several years, particularly when the eggs are deposited in depressions that are not flooded with water each year.

A few species of mosquitoes overwinter in either the larval or pupal stages. The largest of Alaskan mosquitoes, Culiseta Alaskaensis or the snow mosquito, overwinters as an adult under the snow, usually in leaf litter, beneath loose tree bark, or in dead tree stumps. This is the first species to emerge each spring, usually from mid- to late April.

Many insects including mosquitoes survive temperatures below freezing in Alaska. This freezing tolerance is accomplished by two different biochemical processes. In the first process, the insect’s body water is replaced by glycerol, a type of carbohydrate, which acts as an antifreeze and keeps the body cells from rupturing when temperatures reach the freezing point. In the second process, called “supercooling,” the insect’s body temperature is lowered below the freezing point without its fluids solidifying. (The supercooling phenomenon is similar to what occurs in making fudge, when the cooling syrup is ready to crystallize, but cannot start doing so until it is disturbed or a sugar crystal drops in.) The insect’s body temperature is regulated downward as the environmental temperature decreases to a point at which mortality occurs; the insect dies at this supercooling point. During mild winters the supercooling point of many Alaskan insects is never reached in their hiding places; therefore, these insects continue to survive at high levels. The supercooling point varies for different species and life stages of insects. For example, spruce bark beetle adults, which overwinter below snow line in the trunks of infested trees, have a winter supercooling point of -13 degrees F. The larval stage, however, has a slightly lower supercooling point of -24 degrees F since it overwinters in tree trunks above the snow line where it is subjected to lower temperatures.

Below average winter temperatures, light snow cover, and cold soil and leaf litter temperatures during fall and spring months as well as cold water temperatures in May and June are some of the environmental factors that reduce overwintering mosquito populations. Mosquito populations this spring [1987] and early summer may be unusually high because winter and spring temperatures have been exceptionally mild, probably warm enough to overcome the effects of the light snow cover during the winter months.

Unfortunately the lack of really low temperatures this past winter (2011) is likely to have the same effect.

Oz Trivia

 “It’s the thing we don’t expect that usually happens.” L Frank Baum. The Emerald City of Oz. Dorothy’s comment to Billina the yellow hen after she has become lost in the woods.

“The more one knows, the luckier he is, for knowledge is the greatest gift in life.” L. Frank Baum. The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Margolotte, the wife of Dr. Pipt the Crooked Magician says this to Ojo the Unlucky shortly before she is turned into a marble statue.

“No one knows that, except the person who’s writing this story.” L. Frank Baum. Tik-Tok of Oz. The Shaggy Man, while he and Betsey Bobbin are trying to find the Nome Kingdom.

“The wise and fearless are sure to win success.” L. Frank Baum. Rinkitink in Oz. The White Pearl’s advice to Inga.

“If you don’t ask questions you will learn nothing.” L. Frank Baum. The Road to Oz. The fox soldier, speaking to Button-Bright. Quite true, though in this case the questions are mostly unanswerable.

“Every road leads somewhere, or there wouldn’t be any road.” L. Frank Baum. From The Road to Oz. The shaggy man’s philosophy, continued as “so it’s likely that if we travel long enough, we will come to some place or another in the end.” In this case he is right, and the “some place or another” is Oz, where Ozma is having a birthday party.

“Chocolate? It comes from a plant that grows on most Human-occupied planets today.” Sue Ann Bowling. Context? From Homecoming, when Cinda provides Marna with her first taste of hot chocolate.

This week was Oz, partly because I got all the Oz books for my Nook. (I still have some of my grandmother’s copies from her librarian days, some of which were scribbled in by uncles now dead of old age.) Next week it’ll be back to random, mostly science fiction and fantasy.

The Alaska Salmon Bake

Living as I do in Alaska, I have to have places I can steer tourists to in the Fairbanks area. One of these is the Salmon Bake, at Pioneer Park (which is a pretty good tourist destination itself.) I’m reviewing it partly because (1) they’re having their season opener this week and (2) OLLI is having a meal there tomorrow, and I’m salivating in anticipation.

At one time they served lunch, and it was a regular Friday hangout for the library group. Alas, those days are over. But I still try to get out there at least once a year.

Apparently they’ve changed the menu this year, replacing the deep fried halibut with Bering Sea cod though the salmon, prime rib, salad bar and desserts remain. The normal menu is all you can eat, which is far too much. The OLLI meal will be only one entrée plus the sides, which I suspect will be more than enough for me!

Part of the mining display. Water cannons were used to wash the thawing muck off of the gold-bearing gravel underneath.

For me it will be the salmon. Salmon up here is almost always good, but the Salmon Bake has a brown-sugar and lime marinade they keep swabbing on the fish over the open alder wood grill. Scrumptious! I have to confess I am so enamored of the salmon I’ve never even tried the other choices, but others are just as passionate about the prime rib and the deep-fried fish.

The salad and dessert bars? Pretty standard. The salad bar normally offers coleslaw, lettuce salad, bean salad, pasta salad, baked beans and of course tartar sauce, while the dessert bar has white or chocolate cake, with wild blueberry sauce.

Everything’s outdoors, though they do have a large (but unheated) indoor seating area in case it rains. Entry can be though Pioneer Park, but they also have an entry though a very dark tunnel that mimics a mine. I can’t recommend that entrance to anyone with poor night vision, though — I have to feel my way.

I remember when Pioneer Park was A67, once taught dog obedience classes in the steamship Nenana, remember an Alaska Science Conference held in the buildings in the Gold Rush Town (historic houses moved from downtown Fairbanks) and regularly attend writers’ group meetings in the Alaskaland Civic Center. (They have an art gallery there, upstairs, where we have our meetings.)

Fairbanks Weather

Columbine

Sunrise this morning was at 4:25 am; sunset this evening will be at 11:12 pm for 18 hours 47 ½ minutes with the sun above the horizon. The daily gain has started to slow down – we’re picking up less than 7 minutes a day, now. Nautical twilight is essentially gone for the summer; the sun is never more than 6 ° below the horizon.

Delphinium

It’s finally started to warm up. The temperature was 53°F a little after 10:30 this morning, and I was working outdoors in shorts. The moon, almost full, is low on the southern horizon near solar midnight – a counterpoint to the sun being only a little below the northern horizon.

The Famers' Market is mostly arts, crafts and food this time of year.

Summer is not a good time for star-gazing or aurora watching in Fairbanks. Not that the stars and aurorae aren’t there, just that the sky background never gets dark enough to see them.

To compensate, the garden is waking up. The white iris, the daylilies, the white violets and the chives have been showing green for a week or more, but the delphiniums and the columbines have now joined them. Buds are swelling on the wild roses and the birch trees, giving the birches a pink cast that should soon turn to green. The Farmers’ Market is open, though it’s still more crafters than growers. Spring is here!

Those pinkish trees will turn green soon. Can't be soon enough for me!

The Geophysical Institute

“From the center of the Earth to the center of the sun.” The Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks covers a lot of territory, and a lot of subjects. It started out with space physics and aeronomy, but has expanded its interests to include atmospheric sciences, seismology, remote sensing, snow, ice and permafrost, tectonics and sedimentation, and volcanology.

The building to the right is actually the International Arctic Research Center, but this is the building that now houses the GI's climate and atmospheric science program.

A large part of its work is cutting-edge research, but it also provides aurora forecasts, earthquake information, the Alaska Science Forum (a popular science feature distributed to media outlets throughout Alaska, which I once wrote) and volcano alerts. It maintains the world’s only scientific rocket launching facility owned by a university.

If you’ve read the bio on my website, you know that I spent more that 30 years  at the Geophysical Institute as a student, researcher and teacher. But what’s the Geophysical institute all about? What problems does it address? And what on earth does it have to do with writing science fiction?

I certainly can’t cover everything the Geophysical Institute does in a single article, but why not use this as my new article series for Sundays? As to what it has to do with writing science fiction, not much with the plots, but a tremendous amount with the planet building.

Next week I’ll try to give a little of the early history of the GI (as it is mostly called by those who work there.)

Jarn’s Journal

Wondering where the Journal of Jarn segments I’ve posted the last two weeks come from? Here’s a bit of the framing story, set just before the Kharfun epidemic.

“Your Galactica needs practice, Faelle.  Would it help if you had some chips in Galactica, until we get home?  We still have a couple of fivedays’ travel.”

For some reason the scene with Uncle Toklas came again to her mind.  “You said our Book of Jarn was based on your history,” she said slowly.  “Would you have anything on that?”

“His Journal, of course,” Nolan replied.  “We’ve got a Galactica translation along, I think, read by one of our better speakers.  And a print version in Galactica and a couple of commentaries as well, but I think you might like to hear and read a translation of Jarn’s own words.  It’s rather blunt in places; enough to scandalize the priests on some planets into expurgating their Holy Book.”  He frowned as he thought.  “I think your Book of Jarn has quite a few of the more explicit bits cut out.  But Jarn was simply recording what happened to him.  You won’t be bothered by that?”

“Not by something that really happened.  And Jarn’s my ancestor, isn’t that right?  There’s a lot of prohibitions that don’t hold with another Family member.”

“I’ll get you the chips,” Celine said.  “Everyone through eating?   I’ll put what’s left into the recycler, and we’ll give you a quick tour of the ship.”

Where did the First Plants Come From?

How did plants invade the land?

Any living creature had to overcome a number of problems in moving from the water to the land. These include protection against desication, support, fluid and nutrient transport, gas exchange, ultraviolet radiation, and reproduction. The fin-to-limb post looked at how animals overcame those obstacles, but animals had to have something to provide an energy source before they could even begin to make the leap to land. That means that photosynthesizing organisms had to move onto land before animals could even get a start. So how and when did they do it?

Lots of natural and artificial selection between the earliest plants and these California Poppies.

Algae have been around for a long time – something like 2.1 billion years. Photosynthesizing bacteria are even older, and either could have formed thin mats where wave action or stream turbulence kept the ground wet. I’ve put photosynthesizing slimes in the wave zone on Mirror, one of the planets I imagined for Homecoming. Such thin mats or slimes, however, would be been dependent on being kept wet.

The first appearance of cuticle, the membrane that acts as a skin for plants and keeps them from drying out, was in the Ordovician, around 450 million years ago. Once you have a cuticle which prevents the interior of a cell mass from drying out, you also need some way of allowing carbon dioxide into the cells and oxygen out so stomata, the pores plants breathe through, are probably about the same age.

Early plants began to lift their fruiting bodies above the ground, but not far. They also had branching, cuticles, stomata, and photosynthesizing stems, but no leaves. Ultraviolet protection was probably a combination of pigments and enough oxygen in the atmosphere that an ozone layer formed. Gradually plants evolved mechanisms that transported nutrients and fluids via hollow cells that combined to form tubes (vascular system.) They also needed a system of roots to hold them upright.

The first plants did not have soil as we know it. A certain amount of mechanical weathering would have broken the rock down into silt or sand, but today’s soil is largely the result of chemical weathering (in which plants assist) and decayed plant matter.

Support systems developed slowly. The plants gradually began to show secondary growth (stems widening with age, instead of just getting longer) and the ability to synthesize cellulose from the sugars they produced via photosynthesis. By the time the first amphibians crawled out of the water, tall trees had developed. Why? Most likely competition for light.

Plants were not, however, a good food source. Even without the toxins that plants of today have evolved to avoid being eaten, neither cuticle nor cellulose is easy to digest. The herbivorous animals of today have a long history of adaptation to plant eating, but even so a large part of their (and our) digestion of plants is actually carried out by microorganisms.

The millipedes and other invertebrates that preceded the amphibians onto land were mostly detritus feeders, relying on bacteria and fungi to decompose the plant matter enough they could digest it, or carnivores that ate the detritus feeders. The fact that so many of the plants of the Carboniferous wound up as coal may even be due in part to the fact that few animals could eat them. Early amphibians may well have obtained most of their nourishment from insects and from the water.

Although many of the early plants reproduced by spores rather than seeds (as do mosses and ferns today) they had evolved seeds by the Devonian (around 380 million years ago.) Our amphibian ancestors would have found forests that included trees resembling today’s conifers and ginkgo. Flowers, however, came much later.

This is the last summary of the OLLI classes on major evolutionary transitions. Next Friday’s post will be on some other aspect of science.

My New Toy — an iPad2

I finally decided to take another step into the digital revolution. I’ve bought an iPad. I’ve had it all (well, not quite all) of three days, so this is hardly a complete review, but I’ve already found some things it does very well, and some that are huge disappointments.

Photograph of the iPod (not a screen shot) with a page from National Geographic.

It’s great for magazine subscriptions. I’ve wanted New Scientist and National Geographic for some time, but I’m too much of a pack rat to throw them away, and I don’t have room to store them. They are beautiful on the iPad, and the subscriptions are far less than paper. I can enlarge or reduce the size as I need—not just the text, but the pictures as well.

Books are in some ways better than on my Nook, especially those with illustrations. I don’t think I am going to be able to enlarge charts, which is the main complaint I have with the Nook. No problem enlarging the reading text, but figures and maps? Forget them. (I should remark that I am one of those people who finds reading on a computer screen easier that reading on paper.)

The only games I have are Shanghai and Sudoku. The latter is actually easier for me to play on my iPhone, but the former is great on the iPad. It helped while away the time in the doctor’s office today quite nicely. (Normal reading with one’s eyes dilated is not easy.)

Disappointments? One major one at this point. One of the reasons I bought the iPad was so that I could use it to carry the Excel spreadsheet I use to track my blood sugars, insulin dosages and exercise to my doctor without having to lug along my laptop. I was assured that the Numbers app could read my Excel spreadsheet. It apparently can’t. I may try having Numbers on my main computer read the Excel file and turn it into Numbers before transferring it, but the heart of the spreadsheet are time graphs of blood sugar, for which I sum date and time of day for the horizontal axis. Numbers apparently can’t do this, so none of my graphs (except the histogram of frequency of various blood glucose levels) can be read in Numbers.

I haven’t had time yet to try adding the PDF of Homecoming (which I have on my main computer), or Word files. The word files are supposedly readable in Pages, though after my experience with Numbers I’m wary; PDF’s on my computer rather than in iTunes might be a problem.

Calendar and Address book seem to have transferred over just fine.

Finally, I’ve had a bit of fun with the Photo booth effects—as you can see.