Escaping the Flames

By: | January 22, 2025


I had tickets to fly to LA at the end of the week for mountain lion research where I’d meet with wildlife biologists, follow cats in the Santa Monica mountains by radio collar telemetry, and take a tour of the nearly complete Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101. That plan went out the window with these horrific fires. Contacts dropped out to deal with on the ground emergencies and I quickly found that couches I’d been hoping to sleep on were already taken. None of the collared cats were caught in the fires, but their already fragmented urban-edge habitats are further fractured and reduced. 

For a manuscript I’m writing on mountain lions, this is a week I can’t afford to lose. I changed flights to Miami where another marginal population lives in southern Florida. In the Southeast they are called panthers, same species as the ones in LA, as the ones that still exist anywhere in the Americas. Unlike the cats of LA who get infusions of genes from surrounding mountain ranges in Mexico and the US, panthers in Florida are completely isolated. Fifty years ago they were down to between ten and thirty individuals living in the swamplands and savanna grasses of the southern part of the state. They are now up to a couple hundred, still located in the bottom of the sock of Florida, still dangerously endangered, and still more isolated than any other Puma concolor population in the world.

Meanwhile in LA, mountain lions are taking it hard, pushed out by fires, killed frequently while crossing interstates. Those with collars respond to fires by being out more during the day with nocturnal habits upended. Their patterns change as territories are reorganized and new ground is explored, which includes unfamiliar streets and backyards. Cats that got out of the way of fires have to keep going. 

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Forest gardens are the coolest gardens

By: | January 20, 2025

I could never hack it as a farmer, and the thought of living as a hunter-gatherer evokes for me the feeling of being locked out of your house. But in the ancient and abandoned indigenous villages on the coast of British Columbia, there was a mode of food cultivation that really strikes a chord with me: the forest garden.

Next to archeological village sites that, until 150 years ago, were continuously occupied for at least 2,000 years, paleobotanist Chelsey Geralda Armstrong and others have found patches of forest where the plants were transplanted from distant sites and selectively managed.

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Orchid Care for the Uncertain

By: | January 17, 2025

I wrote this post in 2019, when I was feeling prickly and uncertain–not too different than how I’m feeling these days. We do have a few more orchids now, although I still am not quite sure how to care for them.

*

I wake up this morning on the prickly side—or at least, I’m prickly once I look at my phone. There are a series of misunderstood texts, frail disjointed things that have good intentions but poor phrasing, or lack the perfect emoji.

My phone is sitting right next to an orchid. It’s a new type of orchid for me—a miltonia, with narrow leaves that point upward and a sweet, pansy-like flower. But now the orchid’s flowers have withered and some of its leaves are yellowing. It may be getting too much light. It may be getting too much water, or not enough.

I thought I was doing so well with my orchids. We had received several plants as gifts; a few months ago, I decided I needed to start taking better care of the plants if I ever wanted them to flower again. I bought pots with holes to let their roots breathe. I researched the right potting mix, I unwound roots that had grown soggy. There is now a special spray bottle that I take around the house to give them a tropical misting.

The ones I’ve re-potted have been growing new leaves. But this morning, the straw-colored tips of the miltonia leaves reminded me that I must keep taking care of things, keep learning how to take care in new ways.

Sometimes taking care of things makes me exhausted. That’s was the problem with all of those texts. And then my middle son wakes up prickly because we are going to church. We don’t even go to church unless we’re visiting a grandmother or, some years, on Christmas Eve. We’ve been talking about Martin Luther King Jr. Day and we don’t really have a tradition to celebrate it, I tell him. Maybe going to church will be a way to do that.

He cries.

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So Long, and Thanks for All the Canids

By: | January 15, 2025

Lately I’ve been a bit lax about my camera trapping — dead batteries, neglected cameras, etcetera — but, last month, I did manage to check the rig I’d had set up for a while at our county’s friendly neighborhood carcass pile, where highway crews and hunters dump the sorry detritus of elk and deer, and scavengers come to feast. I’d been hoping for an elusive mountain lion or late-season bear, but no sooner did the videos upload than I realized it was going to be a rodent-dominated set. I’d unwittingly placed the camera right in the middle of a squirrel’s territory, whose frantic scurrying had triggered its electronic eye every few minutes and drained the battery in about ten days. 

In between the rodent captures, I did manage a few nocturnal glimpses of our region’s standard canids: coyote, red fox, gray fox. I love seeing this trio; I have boundless admiration for these carnivores’ stealth, pluck, and adaptability. Apparently a wolf has also recently wandered into our corner of Colorado; with luck, she’ll be next to appear at the elephant graveyard. 

And with that, I’m sorry to report that my tenure at LWON comes, for now, to an end; for a variety of reasons, I’ll be stepping away to focus on professional and personal duties. I’ve so enjoyed writing for and engaging with this community over these last years, and offer my deepest gratitude to all you readers and my fellow LWONians (LWONites? I could never get it straight) for making this such a vibrant hub of thoughtful, quirky science writing. See you in the comments! 

Science Metaphors (cont.): Touchstone

By: | January 13, 2025

Last Friday, Sarah used “touchstone” as a metaphor. I think she uses the metaphor — you touch a stone and see its landscape in time — in a way that’s poetically off-center from touchstone’s usual meaning. Which is a thing that’s solid, grounded, and reliable and which is the way I’ve used “touchstone,” because I have a long-standing issues around grounding and reliability. A touchstone is what you refer back to when you’ve become uncertain; it’s reliable certainty, isn’t it, a truth in which you can believe and by which everything can be judged.

But touchstones didn’t start out as metaphors, they’re real things, originally dark and fine-grained rocks, like slate. They’re used as a test for the type and purity of a metal. Specifically, gold — like, you’re paying for gold here, is it really gold? is it pure or has it been cut with baser metals? You draw a line, called a streak, on the touchstone with a piece of the metal, then look at the line’s color. If the streak is gold, the metal is gold and the gold is pure. If the streak is black, it’s pyrite, fool’s gold. If the streak is white, it’s silver; copper-colored, it’s copper. The more copper that’s alloyed with the gold, the redder the streak. Alloys of silver and copper, of silver, copper, and gold; and of tin and lead, all have their own streaks.

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Oh Wow: An Exercise in Certainty

By: | January 8, 2025
Watercolor painting of a tadpole-shaped prehistoric sea animal with no fins, staring round eyes, and a silly triangle mouth.
“Oh Wow!” (2024).

Key:
* = Pretty darn sure
** = Scientists are making some educated guesses here

Hundreds of millions of years ago during the Ordovician period, someone blorped and wiggled around in the shallow waters off Gondwana.*

This someone didn’t have jaws or fins,** nor did they have utility bills or shoelaces.* Their name—as assigned by strangers who never even met them—was Sacabambapsis. They had a big ol’ head, front-facing eyes, and a triangular mouth that never shut.** They looked, in short, like an incredibly goofy cartoon,** at least in this model that resides in the Finnish Museum of History.*

I love this someone, partly because I, too, look a bit like a cartoon, but also because they remind me how little true certainty there is in this world, even—or especially—when it comes to science. There’s a reason this blog isn’t called The Last Word on Everything.

Some things (anthropogenic climate change, the benefits of vaccines and pasteurization, the earth being round, bats being awesome) are pretty damn solid. But so many others are educated guesses, our sense-seeking minds drawing shapes in the dark. And man oh man, some of those shapes are hilarious.

*

Watercolor painting by me.

By the wind sailors

By: | January 6, 2025
Velella velella, or by-the-wind-sailor. Credit: Notafly, Wikimedia Commons

This post first appeared in March 2023. I can’t wait to go to the beach again.

Walking south along the beach towards Los Angeles this weekend, my friend and I were talking about all the arbitrary things that can alter a life’s trajectory, like where you’re born or if your parents went to college.

As we walked, we noticed hundreds of tiny sea creatures scattered like dark blue flower petals along the water’s edge. Some were as small as a baby’s fingernail. Others were as big as silver dollars. When we looked at them up close, we saw that each animal had a flat, blue oval disc for a body, joined to a transparent sail.

We prodded the stranded animals gently to see if they were alive or had any stinging venom, since they looked a lot like jellyfish. When nothing happened, we started arranging them in a line on the damp sand, from small to large. All the sails curved in a shallow S–shape, and were angled slightly to the left. They looked like a fleet of ships waiting for a general’s command to launch. Later, we learned that the strange blue discs were called Velella velella, or by-the-wind-sailors.

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