I look like this some mornings before my first glass of OJ.
As ace reader Janice correctly guessed, the red velvety patches — really galls, or abnormal plant growths caused by the invasion of a parasitic organism — from the last post were created by a tiny erineum mite (Aceria sp.). I’ve seen many a gall in my time, and I *never* suspected that the scarlet patches were the product of gall-making critters. After several years of seeing these scarlet patches and having no bloomin’ idea what they were, I had to consult my old pathology of trees and shrubs professor (and author of “Magical Mushrooms, Mischievious Molds“) Dr. George Hudler, who clued me in.
So what might a mite be, anyway? Well, like the bio-faux pas of calling a mosasaur a dinosaur (Paleontologists: “It’s a marine reptile, d***it!”), never call a mite an insect. It’s a greatly evolved arachnid, like spiders, ticks and most scorpions (excepting the ones with power ballads). Most arachnids have eight legs, plus two pairs of special mouthparts called chelicerae and pedipalps. Mites, which properly include the ticks, are among the most successful invertebrates on earth, and are the only arachnids that have been found in Antarctica. Some are completely self-reliant. But because mites are (as their name accurately implies) so tiny, many others specialize in freeloading, which they have elevated to an art form. They cause mange (sarcoptic mange mites); they live in dust and cause allergies (dust mites); wreak destruction on colonies of honeybees (varroa mites); chew holes in, and cause untold agony among witless, unprepared southerners (chiggers); decimate house plants, including many of the prized specimens of this author (spider mites); and they frolic about your eyelashes, follicles, face, pores and skin, eating dead skin cells and sebum, going out for evening constitutionals on your sleeping face and, I’m sorry to reveal, making more mites (demodex mites).
And they make galls. Though not all plant galls are mite-induced (tiny gall wasps being the other major cause), many are. An entire family of mites, the Eryiophyidae, have adopted this lifestyle, and these galls can take on all sorts of fantastical forms and colors. Erineum mites have a few quirks; they have only two pairs of legs, for example, as you can see above. And they are REALLY tiny. without a dissecting microscope, you are unlikely to be able to see them, even with a hand lens, as they are only .05 to .2 mm long (i.e. 50 – 200 microns long! The spores of the fungus I published my first master’s thesis on where in that range!).
So how do erineum mites coax the plant into making those crazy galls? After overwintering on the tree, the females jump on young leaves and start feeding on the underside. Chemicals in their saliva stimulate the growth of the velvet patch, or erineum (pl. erinea, whence the mites get their name, though whether the scarlet pigment is mite-produced or mite-induced I have not been able to discover). Then they crawl inside. And guess what? The velvet patch is both maternity ward and love shack. That’s right: if this gall’s a rockin’ . . .
The good news for maples (Acer sp., the major target of the aptly named Aceria sp.), is that the galls rarely harm the tree. Instead, think of them as hip, festive forest decor. Without erineum gall, that copse of trees just has no “pop”. : )
To find these suckers in the tree of life, look for Eriophyoidea here, and back out by the arrow on the left to get a sense of where you are.
Here in the Colorado Rockies we have few tree species compared to many other forests of the world. If you learn about 14 trees, you’ve learned 95% of the native trees in the state. Of those, only two are hardwoods — quaking aspen, and plains cottonwood. But we do have a maple — well, a mapley sort of shrub, anyway: Rocky Mountain Maple, Acer glabrum.
Many times in the last six years I’ve encountered examples of this shrub that look like they could use some Tucks Medicated Pads:
Here’s a close-up someone else took. So here’s your quiz for the week: What is this? Here’s a hint — It’s NOT a fungus, which was certainly my first guess. Good luck, team.
While it’s only a few centimeters long, this hallucinatory sea slug — Glaucus atlanticus — makes a living doing something few other organisms dare: snacking on the “Blue Fleet”, or collection of stinging, floating filter feeders found at the surface of oceans around the world. These wind-driven organisms (which will all be covered here at some point) include the by-the-wind sailor, blue buttons, the violet snail, and, most famously, Portuguese Men o’War, Physalia physalis.
The man o’ war floats on the surface like a plastic shipping cushion, dangling streamers of nematocyte-bearing and swimmer-irritating tentacles below (remember what those are?). G. atlanticus (also known quite poetically as the sea swallow) roams about the surface, trippy belly up and silvery top down, looking for its prey like pac-man pellets (though whether the sea swallow swims to its quarry or merely relies on bumping into it is still a point of contention among scientists). The sea slug, obviously, is immune to the stings and instead stores the venom at an even higher concentration at the tip of its feathery “cerata” (singular ceras), or body projections, for use in its own defense.
The sea swallow’s psychadellic cum mathematical coloration is allegedly a classic case of “countershading” camoflauge. From above, the blue and white confuses seabirds, while from below, the silvery top/bottom appears as just another section of sea.
Here’s an interestingly-scored home-video* of a day when someone walking along the beach found the wind had driven in scores of these little beauties, and who decided to cast as many back to sea as he could find to continue their vicious (but ecologically useful) bouts of predation. Gold star for the wise use of safety sand.
Kudos to my friend Molly for passing on a note alerting me to this little gem. Thanks Molly!
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*Look for the bonus blue button toward the end!
A bit of cool news today . . . this blog was chosen as the second-best biodiversity blog by the Pimm Group, by (I presume) Dr. Stuart Pimm. According to the site, “Dr. Pimm is Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke and one of the most cited scientists working in the field of conservation biology.”
Fly fisher(wo)men everywhere are mourning the loss of a cherished piece of equipment: their felt-soled waders. All too often now, clinging to the felt fibers are the tenacious strands of Didymosphenia geminata (did-em-o-sfeen’-ee-a jem-i-na’-ta), or, for the rest of us, rock snot.
The stuff looks like pre-owned toilet paper and apparently feels like wet cotton, and it’s slowly taking over the freshwater streams of the temperate world, smothering fish, insects, and other aquatic life. It spreads by hitchhiking on the gear of flyfishers, challenging slime molds, dandelions, and jellyfish for the non-human Plans for World Domination Cup. You can read all the gory details in New York Times articles here and here. But hidden inside that slimy brown mass is a work of remarkable beauty.
This.
With the lines of a Stradivarius and the detailing of a Fabergé egg, this baby is a microscopic work of art. If only its macroscopic manifestations could be so beautiful. As you may have guessed, it is a diatom (as covered here), a microscopic glass house (literally (littorally?) made of silicon dioxide) enclosing a little photosynthesizing alga.
At left you see two interesting features: The two long slits, or raphes, through which the diatom can secrete mucilage (aka slime) with which it slides over surfaces, and the porefield, through which it can secrete a mucopolysaccharide (aka slime) stalk that attaches it to a surface. The secretion and aggregation of these stalks is what causes the brown mess of rock snot, not the beautiful fiddle-like head.
In beauty, destruction. In destruction, beauty. This particular destruction brought to you by the otherwise largely upstanding diatoms, conveniently located in this sector of the tree of life. For all the scientific, er, dirt, on rock snot, including a beautiful scanning electron micrograph of the trouble-causing stalks, check out this EPA White Paper.
This object is one of my mortal enemies -- and one of the most beautiful fungi I know. Creative commons vinconter
Oops! Note corrected time below. But come early to see the mushrooms that will be on display on the tables!
For those of you in the Denver/Boulder area, I’ll be giving a short free lecture tonight at the Colorado Mycological Society meeting on fungal biodiversity called “A Fungal Family Album” in honor of the International Year of Biodiversity. It’ll be like this blog, but with me standing in front of the screen talking. Plus you can come see lots of fresh mushroom specimens before the meeting!
7 7:30p.m. at The Sanctuary Downtown (formally – last year – the Asbury Event Center) at 3011 Vallejo Street in historic North Denver (map).
An event of tremendous biological import took place in my life last weekend. And no, it wasn’t the 300 lb. black bear that wandered through our camp (although that was of tremendous import in that particular moment). No, an event I’ve been hoping and waiting for for many long years took place. I finally found the twinflower, Linnaea borealis.
Examine the buttonhole.
I have been looking for this flower for years, not least because it was Linnaeus’s (as in Carolus “Father of Taxonomy” Linnaeus) favorite flower in the world. Nearly every painting you see of him shows him clasping or otherwise displaying a pair of the dainty blossoms. They were on his coat of arms.
For years I’ve gazed at them in my flower books, hoping and waiting and trying to be patient for the day. That day was Saturday. My mushrooming buddy Johnny was there to see it, and he patiently endured five minutes of me exclaiming over the low mat of little pink flowers. I tried to sniff for the “light vanilla scent” one of my books advised me they would have, but I could detect nothing. I don’t care. They are awesome.
Twinflowers are in the Honeysuckle family, the Caprifoliaceae (Kap’-ri-fo-lee-ase’-ee-ay). The Honeysuckle family is notorious for producing flowers in . . . you guessed it . . . pairs. The sweet honeysuckle blossoms of southeast Tennessee I remember from my youth came in pairs; the kids used to say you could pluck them and suck the nectar, though I don’t recall ever being successful at that. At the foray this weekend, someone came up to me to ask me about another plant he’d found with glossy twin black berries mounted on shiny red bracts; it was the bracted honeysuckle, or black twinberry, yet another member of the family. It was a Caprifoliaceae kind of weekend.
Twinflower is unusual because it grows in a low green mat rather than a woody shrub, like most honeysuckle. I even found a clump this weekend growing right on top of a tree stump (pictured above. You can also see the pixie stick form of Cladonia lichen mingling with the twinflower as if they were at a cross-kingdom cocktail party). Twinflower is, as its name implies, circumpolar in the northern hemisphere, which is why both Linnaeus and I can enjoy them, despite the fact that I’ve never been to Sweden, and he never experienced the Rocky Mountain High.
You may have noticed I’ve been a bit more . . . MIA than usual. That’s because it’s summer and I’ve been out in the field! One of my latest finds, er . . . popped up this week in very nearly my own back yard: my first-ever stinkhorn. Yes, it took me 32 long years to finally catch one in flagrante delicto.
Sad Stinkhorn. If only it had access to the little blue pill!
I covered a new species of African Lacy Stinkhorn in a post here before, but let’s face it: there’s no such thing as too many stinkhorn posts. For those of you who need a refresher, stinkhorns are fungi that hatch from “eggs” enveloped by a peridium (you can see the remains of the peridium at the tip of the head, or receptacle, and at the base of the stalk, above). Some brave souls profess to enjoy eating the eggs. Once the mushrooms hatch and reveal that they are, in fact, quite happy to see the world, they spread their spores by giving them that special odeur de corpse, thereby attracting flies who do the two-step in the sticky, slimy mass of spores at the tip. The flies eat some of the mess; some of the rest clings to their feet. When the flies land elsewhere (i.e. nearby soil, a garbage can, or your sleeping forehead) the spores are deposited in a new, hopefully stinkhorn-friendly place. Then the spore germinates, and microscopic filaments called hyphae spread out through the soil to . . . I’m not exactly sure what. The one thing I cannot discover is whether stinkhorn fungi are wood rotters or symbionts (partners) with the roots of trees or other plants, the two chief fungal m.o.s.
They’re in the same general group as the gilled mushrooms, but in a special family all their own called the Phallaceae. (Fal-ace’-ee-ay) Some of their brethren are among the most striking fungi on the planet: the earth stars, earth cages, and the lacy stinkhorns, which have a demure, delicate skirt jarringly draped around the obscene fungus. This group, in turn, is in the Agaricomycetes (the mushrooms and friends) which is in turn in the Basidiomycota, which those of you who are *really* good will remember are the fungi that make their spores on club-shaped cells called basidia. Basidiomycota are one of the basic, top-level groups of fungi.
When I first spotted this particular specimen on Wednesday, it was standing tall and proud. But alas, by yesterday, it had toppled over into this sorry state. That wasn’t discouraging to a nearby retinue of flies, so perhaps the stinkhorn wasn’t so sad as I’m making out . . .
To see how the stinkhorns, et al, fit into to the life family tree, look for Phallomycetidae here. Click the arrow at left to back out, or follow the link of the group’s name to see a bit more about who they’re related to.
Fractofusus, vintage 600 million years ago give or take. Salp ancestors? Shark tooth kebabs? Early Surf-board Peeps(TM)? If you can figure out what the heck this is, you get a gold star -- and a paper in Nature! Photo by Dr. S.B. Misra
No time for a long post tonight or likely over the weekend, but just wanted to give you guys a heads-up on a don’t-miss article. The grand story of life on Earth has a rather extended bacterial prologue (or a fairly short multicellular epilogue, depending on how you look at it). In fact, the story of bacteria is almost the story of the entire book. Multicellular life only came along in the last 600 million years or so, and life is posited to have existed on Earth almost since its formation 4.6 <pinky to mouth>billion</pinky to mouth> years ago, and certainly since at least 4 billion years ago (doing the math, that means bacteria have been around 8 times longer than us “higher” organisms).
Anywho, one of the Big Questions is why it took so long for multicellular life to show up, and once it did, why the first draft was *so frickin’ weird* compared to what exists today. The Ediacaran fauna is that first draft, and it bears little resemblance to the life that came afterward in the Cambrian Explosion. You’ve heard me mention the Ediacaran fauna before, notably on my visit to the Sant Ocean Hall last fall in which I was utterly ecstatic to get to see some of the original Ediacaran fossils in person. This article in the New York Times tackles scientists’ current thinking on the Big Questions — and has a lovely slide show that helps explain why I get so excited about Ediacara (only disadvantage: no scale bars. Some of these guys are way smaller than photos would leave you to believe — and some are larger).
Even I was stunned to discover a few fossils in the show I’d never seen before — particularly Fractofusus, above. I had a big WOW moment when I saw it. By far, it is the most beautiful Ediacaran I’ve seen. It comes from an Ediacaran locality I hadn’t been aware of previously: the gloriously named “Mistaken Point” on the south shore of Newfoundland. The photo above doesn’t quite do justice to the photo in the NYT slideshow, so make sure you check it out.
What the heck was it? How was it making a living? What did it look like in real life? Was it brightly colored? Was it an evolutionary dead end or is it a secret ancestor of some totally common form today? If secret ancestor, was it of plant, animal, or “other”? If only, if only, if only I could climb in a phone booth time machine with Keanu and So-crates and take a peak in those early oceans(ok, that’s multicellularist. Late oceans.). That would be most excellent.
