Identifying insects can be pretty easy in this modern age!

This morning I found several lovely moths on my porch.

I didn't know what they were, but they were striking enough that I knew I could find out just by using the power of the internet.

It may seem overwhelming to start to identify an insect if you have no idea what it is, but the internet is made for boneheads, so for these moths I googled an image search for, "yellow and black moth Sonoma." Its always a good idea to include a location when you're searching for insect IDs, believe me. County is a common piece of data recorded for biological collections. Lo, I scrolled through the first page of results and found a visual match from butterfliesandmoths.org, which suggested that this was Grammia ornata, the ornate tiger moth. Their map showed a lot of sightings from the bay area, which was encouraging.

But how could I be sure this wasn't some species that looked a lot like G. ornata, but wasn't? Some  insects can look almost identical to each other (to the untrained eye) but still be different species. Since my moths looked so similar to the G. ornata in the picture, and since it was in the right locality, I figured that Grammia was probably a good guess for the genus. Butterfliesandmoths.org lets you search by scientific name (under "Learn -> Species Search") and I found about 30 different species in the Grammia genus. That's a lot of clicking to do, so instead I went over to Pacific Northwest Moths.

This is a great website for (you guessed it) butterfly and moth identification... if you live in the Pacific Northwest. However, there's often some overlap in ranges of insects between northern California and Oregon, and I really like how user-friendly this site is. One of the greatest aspects is the "Similar Species" feature for each entry. For G. ornata, two similar species were suggested: G. complicata (only found near the Salish Sea in Washington) and G. edwardsii, which is rare, but found in the vicinity of San Francisco. Well, that got my attention. The distinguishing characteristics were clearly spelled out, and one of them seemed easy enough for me to check: G. edwardsii has antennae that are pale at the base, whereas G. ornata antennae are dark all the way through. The likelihood of finding a rare species sitting on my porch - actually, three of them - is pretty small, but I wanted to be thorough, because you never know! This is how exciting things in entomology are discovered!

Since I had done a sketch of the moth, I knew I had paid pretty close attention to details like that, but I checked the moths that were still sitting on my porch, just to be sure. Sure enough, dark antennae.

The last website that I checked out is the one I usually go to first for insect ID, BugGuide.net. This site has a ton of photos submitted by pros and amateurs, and has a really clear way of showing the classification system for each taxa you're looking into.

Poking around into all of these sites - not just one - helped me feel confident that I had the right ID for these moths. Each site gives slightly different information for its entries, which is good for cross-checking, looking into location information, and in general putting the pieces together.

Why go through all the trouble to put a name to a moth? There's a lot of poetic things said about names, and honestly, I find most of them to be true when it comes to understanding the natural world. If you don't think it worth naming, it tends to slip by and be forgotten. If you can put a name to something, you make a place for it in your mind. You form a relationship with it. It becomes unique. You remember it. You understand it in way that you didn't before. You can recognize it when you see it again. And the value of that is that you now have another personal connection with some other small part of that big world out there. That big world gets a bit bigger, and you get a bit bigger, too.

<> Abner

Species Highlight - Aquilegia formosa

Red Columbine is my favorite flower! (Until the purple larkspur, Delphenium, comes up - more on that later). "Formosa" is the word for "beautiful" in Latin - I think it is the most aptly named thing in the world.

This patch of Aquilegia came up like a surprise present by the side of the creek just the other day.

All About Grouse

Today I was working on one of the many steep hillsides around here, when I had to stop suddenly. I wasn't out of breath, but my heart had begun beating uncontrollably! It was totally silent in the woods, and I could hear each beat - bum bum bum bumbum bubububum! I had no idea what could be going on - maybe I had imagined it. I continued work, unsettled and slightly worried. But a few minutes later, it happened again! And then, again! When I put a finger to my pulse as I listened, I was even more confused. The beats seemed to match up, but in some ridiculous double-time. What could I be hearing? Then, it came to me - I was hearing a grouse beating somewhere far away in the forest. By some coincidence of the angles and hillsides, I couldn't place a direction on it and had the impression that it was something very close and quiet, rather than far away and loud. Heartbeat of the forest! I was aortically synced with a Ruffed Grouse, Bonasa umbellus.

The male ruffed grouse beats his wings upon logs as part of a territorial display. Since it is early May, this male was probably looking for a mate. His ability to defend his log communicates his fitness, and therefore, his desirability as a mate, to females all over the area. Pictured here is a photograph of a female strutting along a road. Now, who wouldn't want to impress that lovely lady? She is looking perky because she doesn't know what to make of my truck.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website, allaboutbirds.net, both sexes of ruffed grouse mate with multiple partners, and the females raise young alone. The benefits to a male grouse are obvious; his genes are passed on to as many offspring as possible. But if one assumes a "normal", human model of mating biology (and why wouldn't one? We are, after all, humans!), then it is less obvious why a female bird would prefer to mate with many males. If the first male she mates with is most likely to fertilize her eggs, then what use are the rest of her mates?

It turns out that bird reproductive biology is rather different from mammalian reproductive biology. Many kinds of birds have evolved sperm storage tubules, which are basically holding tanks for sperm before they reach a female's egg. These tubules facilitate what is called passive sperm loss, in which sperm die at a constant rate over time. In fact, it is the last male she mates with who will receive the honor of fertilizing most of her eggs, since his sperm will be the most recent and thus, the most numerous. Of course, there are other factors which influence male success - the timing of mating relative to the development of the egg, and the viability and amount of each male's sperm.

It is still unclear how the female bird benefits from these multiple partnerships. Most research on the subject addresses species which pair-bond ("socially monogamous") and then copulate outside their pair-bond, not species in which females raise their young without paternal care, like grouse. Perhaps in socially monogamous species, a good caretaker male is not necessarily genetically desirable for a particular female. Thus, two males may be needed to play two different roles.

But for species like the grouse, all a female needs is a genetically desirable male - not a good caretaker, too. Perhaps behavioral studies will elucidate: if a female only mates with successively more desirable males, then her eggs will be fertilized by the latest, and thus, greatest, sperm she has found so far. Any previous matings retroactively become backup. However, I cannot find scientific literature discussing how, or if, female mate choice works in conjunction with sperm storage structures.

Who knew that bird sex was so complex? My eyes will be peeled for scientific developments in this area. <>

sources:
Peterson Field Guides: Western Birds.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology: Bird Songs of the Pacific Northwest (cd)
All About Birds: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=1189
Northern Wilds: northernwilds.com
Birkhead, Tim R. Sperm Competition in Birds. 1998. Reviews of Reproduction 3, 123-129. (ror.reproduction-online.org/cgi/reprint/3/2/123.pdf)

It's Still Winter Here...

Today I was introduced to a couple of the residents here - they live in the Annex and sleep from the ceiling!

These are Little Brown Bats - that's really their name (or, Myotis lucifugus). 1 As long as we're quiet, they don't mind a quick visit.
Check out those adorable toes they are holding themselves up with.

In a beautiful patch of old-growth forest, we settled on the wet moss to watch a newt lumber like the slowest wind-up toy, like a dinosaur, through the undergrowth.

Looking up to 80-meter trees, I see white sleet hanging from the sky. It has been a strange winter this year - first an early thaw, then, after several days of warm sunshine, and shortly before I arrived, a snowstorm that has stayed, and stayed, and stayed. It will be interesting to compare this to other years - although since I have never been here for more than a few days at a time, I have no sense of normality.


Everything here is new to me! The chance to get to know this place on a more intimate level is something for which I will be thankful forever. Already I am learning to look at the world in a different way. <>

1. Peterson Field Guide to Mammals

Late Winter

Rain today, and snow up higher. Varied thrushes singing from the old hemlocks. Startled two deer going into the woods, footprints in the mud showing their haste.

Then home – a door, a step, a light, and warmth – as if the house itself has been keeping for me.

Bucking up fallen logs across the road, my breath steams in front of me, as my clothes steam in the cold, as the saw steams as Jay melts it through red rotted Doug Fir.

Home, and curry powder on my potatoes, meat, onions. Sweet-spicy smell of my hearth.

Giving my thanks the best I can, bow drawn slowly across strings, I compose a
thrush-song on the fiddle. <>

Phenology

Phenology: I didn't know what the word meant until I had to apply for my current job. Even still, I didn't understand the full meaning of it until I began working here.

Phenology is the study of the timing of periodic changes in biology, as they relate to climate. Migration, breeding, flowering, root growth and leaf growth, metamorphosis - all of these are studied by phenologists. The research I am helping with involves plants, insects, and songbirds - a nice collection of trophic levels that might show some measurable interaction. My job is to look at the plants, and to collect the insect traps. I thought that I would be measuring stem lengths with a little ruler, or counting leaves. In retrospect I was quite naive. And here I was with a college degree in biology!

Fading bloom of Coptis laciniata,
called "cut-leaved goldthread".

Instead, I am grading each plant on two different scales of 1 to 6: 1 being no growth activity, and 6 being a mature stage. One scale is for vegetative growth; i.e., leaves, and the other scale is for reproductive growth: flowers or cones. Each classification is clearly defined; for example, vegetative 4 is "unfolding leaves" and vegetative 5 is "leaves unfolded, less than 75% full size". There are 16 different sites that we visit, in a variety of habitat types: north slopes, south slopes, old-growth, new growth, 3,000 feet, and 5,000 feet. An interesting idea, based off of previous work in these woods, is that micro-climate may have a profound affect upon phenology. In an attempt to factor that variable into the experiment, each site has a temperature and photoperiod sensor, and all of the study plants are located within 30 meter radius of that sensor. At each site, there are about 50 individually tagged and numbered plants. Some of the studied plants include the little yellow violet, Douglas fir, vine maple, rhododendron, and trillium. The species to be studied have been chosen for their relative ubiquity among sites, their ease of studying, their supposed importance to the forest, and their time range of growth activity. For instance, Snowqueen blooms very early, allowing a measure taken in April to be more than just all 1's ("no bud activity"). Vine maple is found at almost every site. And Oregon grape, which was used in the study last year, has been dropped because of its seemingly random flower activity.

But the study of phenology is giving me something more than a page of numbers, even something more than the beginning of what is, hopefully, a long-term study. As I have been watching individual plants, visiting them at least once a week, making notes of their growth, I feel that I have become aware of a pattern of the forest that I have never truly understood, in two ways. The first is the timing - if you had asked me when maples put out their leaves, I would say, "springtime". But I would not have realized that Douglas fir put out pollen cones before new needles, or been able to tell you that trilliums turn purple before their petals wither. I would have no idea when huckleberries started flowering. The second is in details - I had never paid attention to the way that vine maple leaves emerge, first from their reddish buds, encased in a thin green sheath, and then, elongating, suddenly pop out of their stockings and spend several days unfolding to flatness.

This is movement in the plant world! Here I can see plants as never before; I am beginning to know their changes in an intimate way. The only other growth of a biological organism that I have really consciously observed is in a puppy. I realize that this is the sort of thing "real naturalists" always write about - Thoreau, Leopold, authors like Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig, people who are somehow (so it always seemed to me) magically aware of this aspect of the living world around them. I had never known how to begin in my self-imposed naturalist studies - now, the mechanism has fallen into my lap and focused my yearning eyes. What was missing from my earlier attempts at phenology - though I wouldn't have known what to call it, before?



Above: vegetative buds of Douglas-fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii. The buds on the right are close to breaking open.

Many of the key attributes of the study can be simplified and applied to almost any backyard.

1. Identification of species
2. Comparison of different species
3. Note-taking

Those are the most important ideas, but there are a couple more that have helped me to really develop an understanding for what is going on throughout the area:

4. Comparison across elevation gradients
5. Multiple individuals of the same species

The future of these plants is entirely unknown to me, and I feel like I am unraveling a mystery - what will bud break look like? When will the flowers open? How will the rhododendron leaves unfold themselves? Only time will tell...
<>

Welcome to the Woods!

Greetings, Readers!

This is Abner writing to you from deep in the Cascade Mountains. I have recently accepted a position here assisting with research, and I hope that as well as paying my bills, it will provide inspiration and insight into this small, yet vast, facet of the incredible ecosystem that we call Earth.



The Cascade Mountains reach from southern Canada to Northern California. As part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, which here consists of the Juan de Fuca plate subducting underneath the North American Plate, the range includes such notables as Lassen, Mt. Rainer, the Three Sisters, and Mt. Saint Helens, which last erupted (albeit, in a minor way) in 2006. My work, however, is not in these high eastern mountains, which are well-known for their dramatic size and incredible views. Instead, I am on the western slope of the Cascades, surrounded by a different sort of size scale that defies attempts to see much further than even 50 yards away. Here, watered by coastal rainstorms and fed by an intensely interconnected flow of nutrients, 500-year old forests boast 300-foot tall trees living intimately with an amazing diversity of life. Yet while it is the hemlock, Douglas fir, and redcedar that dominate the initial perspective and limit the view to what is immediately reachable, all it takes is a second glance to guess at the discoveries that might await an astute observer. And that often involves an even closer view - from, for example, 5 inches away.

Trientalis latifolia

At this scale, we may begin to understand what it is that has kept researchers from all the natural sciences studying this particular watershed for over 60 years. In seeking to understand the whole ecosystem, they must understand each part of it - and there are very many parts. If "the devil is in the details", then what a delightful devil must animate these deep, dark woods! Here there are over 500 species of vascular plants, matched by 500 species of non-vascular plants (mosses, lichens, and algaes), 180 different species of birds, 50 mammal species, 20 amphibians and reptiles, and over 3,200 invertebrates - a grand total of over 4,450 details! And yet, identifying them is only one step; understanding their ecology, their interactions, and the changes associated therewith, is another.

Leucanthemum vulgare with bee pollinator

Not only do we seek to know the interactions among living organisms. It is the non-biotic factors that make up all of life - adenine and thymine, nitrogen and carbon, water, sunlight, and oxygen. How are living creatures influenced by genes, nutrients, and climate? The work I am participating in is phenological in nature: it is concerned with the timing of changes in development and behavior. And as I write, Schmuel is booking tickets for a conference which will augment understanding of how climate drives soil arthropod communities. Neither of us can photograph primary productivity, DNA, or photons, but we recognize that each organism we observe is a product, expression, and active participant in its ecosystem. I look forward to exploring this place. Welcome to the woods! <>