Meandering Thoughts on Science and Discovery

I occasionally refer to myself as a scientist, but I am not really a scientist. I do not practice science. I do not perform that non-dogmatic, self-correcting investigatory process; who has the time or the funding for that? When I'm being more honest, I call  myself an ecologist, but I am not really an ecologist, either. An ecologist is a variant of a scientist, a subclass, an offshoot. I am not a scientist, ipso facto bingo bango, I am not an ecologist. When I'm even more honest, I think of myself as a naturalist, a delighted observer, a watcher, a person who enjoys stories and finding connections. I have the interest in becoming a scientist, and more than the average amount of scientific literacy, but I don't know if I have the patience or temperament to make it a vocation. No, I love learning about science, and applying scientific practices and knowledge in all kinds of ways, and sharing that knowledge, but I am not a scientist.

But this is why I have such a wide range of interests. There is never a lack of interesting things to learn, or of incredible stories to hear or tell. In the last couple years, I've picked up a moderate fluency in American Sign Language, I've studied sociology and a little bit of gender studies, I've learned a ton about the Pacific Northwest in its ecology and history. The world is full of stories and connections, networks, systems, economies, and ecologies. Any subject of inquiry can be broken down into an infinite variety of Venn Diagrams, tables, timelines, outlines, and charts, and if you just find the right connections and present the data the right way, you can tell a really great story about any human endeavor, any aspect of the physical world around us or the motivations that drive the great river of human history.

Sure, the slow grind of learning or explaining the math behind astrophysics is a challenge, but once humanity reached the point of exploring in that direction, we realized we are made of the stuff of stars, we are sparks of life born from the exploded carcasses of celestial furnaces that burned hot enough to make the old alchemical goal of turning lead into gold look like the most pitiable child's play. Sure, practicing your scales on a musical instrument is a rote task of questionable value when looked at as a single repetition, but the way music can chill my bones and make me gasp or shed a tear is an undeniably transcendent experience. And sure, memorizing names and dates from history texts is boring, but when laid out the right way, one can see the rise and fall of empires, the messy business of murder, intrigue, betrayal, and greed interplaying with every possible variant of human nobility, on both political and personal scales, and the small decisions and accidents that changed everything.

I once was told that if you get down into the math and science of higher-level Einsteinian physics, you can see that causality and free will are very possibly a lie. If, when traveling at the speed of light, you can see a person catch a ball before you see it being thrown, then the throwing was written in stone, was meant to be and inescapable. Apparently, you can envision a person in spacetime as a worm-like creature formed of a baby at one end, and an adult at the other, with each cross section representing a moment of awareness in the creature during which it is unable to see what lies ahead of it, and only dimly aware of what was behind.
    
Now, I am not scientist enough, nor smart enough, to truly understand these concepts, but if a man is a worm, or a thread of some kind, then humanity, human experience, the human family tree, is a matrix of these, all tangled and interwoven. Our offspring are forks off of our own threads, our time with our lovers is a place where two threads join and merge briefly before continuing on in parallel or apart, our dearest friends are those threads we gravitate towards and run alongside, and twins are threads that forked at conception.

My mind fills with images of such a structure. I imagine it to be some kind of an intricately layered algal bloom swirling in all directions, with patches of different consistency, color, density, all of which varies with the condition, the demographics, and the spirit of humanity at any moment in history. Can you imagine that we might be part of such a felt mat of living fibers, all so unaware of themselves, so unaware of the structure of which the length and breadth of their experience is simply the smallest part?

This may all be pointless philosophizing, but that's one of the things I find myself loving about it. If you push out to the frontiers of human understanding of our universe, whether on the scale of galaxies or DNA, you begin to see just how little we may actually understand. And that is an incredibly beautiful, captivating thought.

Modern Physics impresses us particularly with the truth of the old doctrine which teaches that there are realities existing apart from our sense-perceptions, and that there are problems and conflicts where these realities are of greater value for us than the richest treasures of the world of experience.
---Max Planck

ZOMG SCIENCE

Nice.

My wife is in love with Lydia Callis because that woman is an ASL badass, and, well, you know how I am about science. I'll keep this short because not-the-point, but we started using ASL at home for my son, my wife's ASL classes became a couple concurrent ASL careers, and I at one time in the last year had as many as four Deaf housemates under age 24. All of which means, in short, I'm conversationally fluent in ASL, I can see what a badass Lydia Callis is, and I have some idea of the state of Deaf education.

This is amazing. Please watch the whole video, explore the ASL video samples of science terms below that, read whe whole article, and share. I'm in HEAVEN seeing the intersection of two huge parts of my life.

If you'll excuse me, I have to go send this as a thank you to Lydia Callis and the New York Times, and then go prance through the ASL-STEM Forum like a giddy child.

SCIENCE!

Gills

Simple question: What do you think of when you think of gills? Probably, the image you get is that flap of hard, cartilaginous flesh right behind the mouth of a fish, am I right?

That's what I thought, too, as a kid. But I was wrong. The gills are actually the tissues behind that flap, and that flap is just a protective cover known as the operculum, which sorta helps control the rate of flow over the gills, thus matching the gas exchange rate to the fish's metabolic need. And another thing I didn't know about gills as a kid: non-fish creatures have gills, too!

Oh, I suppose I knew that bugs and other non-fish creatures in the water had to breathe somehow, but even with this knowledge, the gills I picture in my head are that flap of moving flesh, like Kevin Costner's neck in Water World, not the bloody, fibrous stuff underneath. The thing on the outside of a fish's head looks like it's helping the fish breathe water, right? Well, can you spot the gills on this little guy?

Tiny Dancer

Does that look like breathing? 50 points if you guessed that this bug's gills are the "hairy" growths in the many armpits and joints on the little guy's underside. 50 more points if you can tell whether this is a stonefly, caddisfly, or mayfly. So yeah, that little jig he was dancing is him breathing. He's in a little display case, so the water stagnates a bit, and he has to shuffle side to side like that to get enough water passing over his gills. In his stream the water flows over him pretty consistently, and he can just walk to wherever is more comfortable, but not here. Don't worry, we returned him to his proper habitat not long after I took the video.

Gills are just the water-life equivalent of the alveoli in our lungs. They're extremely delicate, blood-rich tissues that allow for gas exchange with the surrounding environment. Blood gets brought so close to the outside surfaces of the tissues that Oxygen gets taken into the blood, Carbon Dioxide gets pushed out, and the blood just keeps moving right on through, refreshed for another go-round through the whole body. There's a great graphic and short explanation of how it works at this site here, if you're interested.

Can you imagine your breathing apparatus being practically outside your body? The sensitivity of these structures is incredible. In order to function properly, they need to be in the environment they're adapted for. This means the pH of the water (how acidic it is or isn't), how much bacteria and algae are in the water, how much mud or silt is suspended in the water, all have to be juuuust right in order for aquatic creatures to breathe. All these factors, even the amount of dissolved Oxygen that exists in the water, the excess that's floating about for the fish to breathe, can fluctuate dramatically based on temperature, which is why one of the biggest problem contaminants we introduce into streams is actually just heat. After a factory draws water from a stream, uses it, and discharges it back into the stream, even if they clean it perfectly and there's no contaminants or traces of their process left, it can still be a big problem for aquatic life if it gets returned 10 degrees warmer than it got taken out. More on stream temperatures in another post, another time.  

Ok, so fish gills are under the operculum, fairly well protected, but what about a breathing apparatus ENTIRELY outside the body? Is it just bugs like our friend above? Nope. When I first started working with the Endangered California Tiger Salamander (CTS) in various regions of California, I was really surprised at what their larval form's gills looked like. A little background: They breed and are born in water, but spend most of their lives hiding in small mammal burrows. While they're still young, before they leave the vernal pools they hatched in, they still have gills. External gills, which I'd never really seen before.

I don't have copyright permission for any of my favorite photos of this, so here's a short description, followed by a couple links to some really nice shots, and I DID find a photo attached to a public newspaper article, so I think I can use that at the bottom. Picture a tadpole, but leggier; this salamander has all four legs for its whole life cycle, but while it lives in the water it also has a tadpole-like tail coming off of much of its body. Now add six little trees that sprout from the back of its head, three on either side. The trunk of that tree is structural support for all the feathery tissues (leaves?) that do the gas exchange, the gills. Now, go check out these three shots, taken by a very talented photographer and archived on the California Herps website . . . isn't that adorable?

Totally not what you think of when someone says "gills," but there you have it. Fun fact: When you pull a baby CTS out of the water, the gills lie flat against the neck so you can't always really even tell they're there unless you look closely. At their smallest, they occasionally get mixed up with actual tadpoles if the person doesn't know what they're looking for.

When I have more time, maybe I'll do a post about the California Tiger Salamander's life cycle. It's really pretty interesting, and I loved learning about it. Let me know if you'd like to read it, and I'll get to work.

Seriously, ask questions, there is SO much more to write on any of these topics I touched on. 

Lecture Series in Salem

Hey, all. This Thursday, I'm going to attend a lecture by Travis Williams, head of Willamette Riverkeeper and a guy who knows the ENTIRE Willamette River better than I know the street in front of my house. This is just one lecture in a series hosted by the Friends of Straub Environmental Learning Center. I wanted to give you all a heads up about this series, because anyone who reads and enjoys my blog will very much enjoy the science and perspectives presented there, and I was extremely bummed to have missed the recent wolf ecology lecture, which, as readers know, is something I'm very interested in.

Here's the introduction to Travis' lecture, according to the Friends of Straub Environmental Learning Center:

Willamette River Greenways, Restoration or Field Guide

November 29, 2012

Travis Williams

Travis Williams will cover a range of topics related to the Willamette River. He will focus on the Clean Water Act, and the status of the Willamette River's water quality and habitat. He will provide a brief update on the Portland Harbor Superfund site and the likelihood of a comprehensive and timely cleanup. He will also provide a focus on the Willamette River Greenway Program, a fantastic public lands vision for the Willamette that was created back in the late 1960s by Governor Straub. The Greenway was hatched near the same time as the Beach Bill, originally envisioned with the same notion of public trust values, yet this program did not reach the same heights.

The Straubs, after whom the Environmental Learning Center was named, are actually part of Oregon History, a former Governor and his wife, who had a deep love of Oregon's natural beauty. Visit the Friends of Straub ELC site and you'll encounter really cool links and events like this one, a film screening in Salem I'm hoping to make it to, a documentary about one of my heroes, Aldo Leopold. Friends of Straub Environmental Learning Center is a great organization, you can learn a lot visiting their site or any of the events they promote, and they're worthy of your support. They have childrens programs, teen programs, and adult programs like this lecture series and others. Go kick a few bucks into their donation bucket, will ya?

I promise to give a short summary of the lecture afterward, but if anyone would like to join me, you're more than welcome.

Streetwise

The first time I visited Portland, probably 5 or 6 years ago, I came across a very nicely designed bioswale at St. Philip Neri Parish in South East. A bioswale is a specially designed stormwater catch basin with plants in it that collects and helps manage runoff. They're nice landscape features in urban places. Most people have never given it much thought, but cleaning and managing stormwater runoff with bioswales is a good idea for a few reasons.


Ok, now ignore the picture above. Picture an urban hardscape. When it rains, what happens to the water that hits your house, your sidewalks, your streets, and your parking lots? It runs off the hardscape into the gutter, right? And from there, the ordinary approaches are pretty simple. Gutters send the runoff into the city's stormwater systems, and those tend to either lead to a part of the sewage system or to simply direct the water away. "Away" tends to mean roadside ditches in less developed areas, rivers, lakes, beaches, whatever. These approaches have significant problems.

First, just directing it away doesn't slow it down. In your picture of an urban hardscape, I imagine there wasn't a lot of grass or wetlands. Part of that may be because I used the word "hardscape," but even suburban lawns don't really do the trick when so much area is covered by houses, streets, and sidewalks. Water flows over urban spaces in gravity-powered sheets of erosive energy. All the stormwater system does is gather it all into one narrow space where it can do an incredible amount of harm. 

When all that unnaturally fast-flowing water finally makes it to an outfall, out to daylight again, if it isn't straight into a body of water, it cuts through the topography like a knife. Any vegetation, native or otherwise, that might slow down or benefit from normal water flow gets torn away. What you end up with often looks like Paul Bunyan took his axe to the side of a hill, or gouged it across a meadow. Trees can't stabilize an area against that energy; they get undercut and they fall in.

If the outfall does lead directly to a body of water, you still have problems. That runoff isn't just water, it's motor oil, dirt, silt, windshield wiper fluid, dripped gasoline, soap residue from washing your car in the driveway, and a hundred other chemicals. Testing has shown that our highway system is a network of thoroughly lead-contaminated corridors. The weights your mechanic puts on your rims to balance your wheels are lead, the paint on old white-wall tires was lead-based for decades, and that nastiness (plus a whole lot more) has built up in roadside dust since the beginning of American car culture. And every time it rains, a portion of that filth gets directed right to where you, your neighbor, your uncle, or your co-worker likes to go fishing.

Where I grew up, they tended to use the sewage route tactic. So whenever it rained enough, the sewage treatment system got a huge load of extra water, often more than it could handle, and it sometimes overflowed the sewage treatment facilities. This overflow was just directed out to the beach. There were annual blooms of fecal coliform bacteria in the coastal waters, and yes, that is exactly what it sounds like. And then they still had erosion problems at the outfalls a lot of the time.

A river full of poo-slime

Bioswales, though, catch that water and slow it down by design; they're shaped for retention and slow discharge. While the water sits there, the sediments and a good deal of the contaminants can drop out in a confined, maintained, cleanable space, rather than getting sent "away." The hardy, native plant species adapted to the region, also slow water flow, and get something like an inundated wetland habitat for a time. In addition, the plants themselves are chosen for their ability to take up and/or filter out a lot of contaminants, including oil. Once all this has happened, the water flows into the stormwater system clean and slow.

So bioswales are important because they lighten and spread out the load on stormwater and sewage systems over time to reduce overflows, they recharge the groundwater, and they clean the runoff before it even gets into the system. All of that is aside from the fact that they can also be very pretty, and make me feel proud of my town for its forward-thinking development. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go volunteer at a planting in a rather large bioswale adjacent to the Willamette Park boat ramp, recently, and got a few really nice photos.

Me & the kiddos volunteering

Yes, this is another "I love Portland" post. See, Portland has these things all over the place. They're outside my grocery store, in front of houses, and on major thoroughfares. There's actually a suggested bicycle route you can take to check out a large number of them on the east side of town. Portland even has a volunteer group that goes around taking care of these things, picking up trash that gets washed into them, raking up leaves that'd otherwise clog the drain, or even watering the plants in the dry season to help them thrive.

The volunteer Green Street Stewards program has a maintenance guide and formal training events. There are two trainings left this season (one morning session on the 29th of this month in SE, one evening session on the 3rd of next month in NE), and they need all the help they can get. Go sign up. Do some good for your wonderful City, and feel good about investing in your town.

Lords of Nature

Lords of Nature is a great documentary I got to watch for a grad school class once.I really thought it was worth sharing, but it apparently isn't free, so all I can do is tell you about it.

Now, many of you may be aware of the idea that predators regulate the food chain. For example, if for some reason the rabbit population booms, rabbits become easy to catch, so the fox population booms, too, with a slight delay. The boom in foxes causes the rabbits to decline and crash, which means rabbits are harder to catch, so the foxes decline in turn. This is pretty well established ecological theory nowadays.

The Basics.

 

Another well-established facet of ecology, only slightly more advanced, is the Keystone Species idea. Keystone species are those that have a super strong influence not just on a single species, but on whole systems they occupy. Like an arch, if you remove the keystone, everything crumbles. This theory was born from the work of Robert Paine in 1966. What Paine did was remove sea stars from small patches of tidal habitat that were full of life. In these areas, sea stars were the top predator of all the different limpets, bivalves, barnacles, and other critters there. When the sea stars were removed, the diversity of species in those patches plummeted. The presence of the predator opportunistically picking off prey allowed many species to flourish, and its removal allowed certain species to out-compete others and basically take over.

Lords of Nature is about that dynamic, with wolves as the main case study. See, for decades, wolves had been gone from Yellowstone Park. They were hunted down and run almost entirely out of the country under the theory that wolves are bad, so we don't need 'em. They're "bad for agriculture," "bad for ranching," and keep populations of big game hunting species like elk and bison down. So, like mountain lions elsewhere, wolves got hunted down and killed en masse, with government bounties for carcasses. In the 1870's the wolf population of Yellowstone was around 300-400 wolves. In 1924, it became zero, and it stayed that way for decades.

In those decades, Yellowstone stopped . . . working. The elk population exploded, naturally, but the consequence of that was that they were eating, eating, eating. Riparian vegetation, usually not overgrazed because deer are cautious when going out into the open, pretty much vanished. This has major consequences for how rivers work, how banks are stabilized, how other species can use the river, and everything in the riparian systems began to degrade. Young trees got overgrazed, too, and couldn't grow to adulthood, so the famous Yellowstone forests just aged, and mature trees died without propagating.

Biologists were concerned about this and unable to understand why the forest was aging and why the riparian systems were degrading, until a couple of them, Bob Beschta and Bill Ripple of OSU (Go BEAVERS!) did a little thinking and figured out the connection: Yellowstone ecology started going sideways when the wolves were extirpated. They got in one of the coolest academic article titles I've ever seen. Wolves and the Ecology of Fear: Can Predation Risk Structure Ecosystems? Their 2004 paper suggests the answer to that question is yes. Wolves got reintroduced in 1995, and since then everything has begun to recover in very cool ways. There's a good writeup on the whole case study and relevant concepts here, for those who are curious.

Anyway, the reason all this with the documentary and the paper from 6 months ago and the comes to mind is a recent news article in the Oregonian. Apparently, the Eagle Cap Wilderness around the Minam River in eastern Oregon is now home to a new pack of wolves, and the latest count is that 23 pups were born in Oregon this year alone! I'm pleased to say I have a small amount of familiarity with that part of Oregon. The work I did monitoring salmon habitat earlier this year was in the adjacent watershed. Though I never visited the Minam specifically, I was all up and down the Upper Grande Ronde and Little Catherine Creek, just a hop, a skip, and a jump from this new wolf pack, and from what I've heard of that watershed, it's one of the most pristine areas in the state.

I hope I've impressed on you why this is such good news. On levels we're just beginning to understand, wolves make forests and rivers . . . work.

My Tropical Rain Forest Canopy Walk

Yes, I can say I visited a tropical rain forest and walked through and out over the canopy. I didn't get to work in a tropical raindorest, studying nocturnal forest mammals or mapping the range of some endangered flower, but I DID hike and sweat. Let tell you about Kakum National Park, in Ghana.

I was in Ghana to support a school for the Deaf there. My wife is an interpreter and we've volunteered and worked for the Signing Time Foundation for over two years now. So after working with them for a while, we got invited to join STF on a trip they were making with Signs of Hope International (another incredible organization you really should consider supporting) to visit and support the first school for the Deaf established in Ghana.

The fundraising for the trip was a nightmare, but we raised enough to get to go, cover our transportation and room & board for the trip, AND cover the tuition and room & board costs for a two kids at the school for about 5 years each. I did all that fundraising not knowing I'd get to visit a genuine for-reals tropical rainforest, but I'd have done it just for that, honestly. My wife's travel journal for the trip is here, if you'd like to read and see some videos.

So anyway, the trip coordinator makes a point of having all Signs of Hope travelers swing by a few stops besides the Deaf school. One is the nearby outdoor marketplace, a maze of outdoor tented stalls selling everything from household staples to electronics to local artwork. Another is the Cape Coast Slave Castle Museum, a place where the weight of history threatens to crush your faith in humanity. And there's more, but my favorite is Kakum.




Ok, now, to understand the joygasm I had there, you have to get that I've been an environmentalist since I was a child. I had all the hippie talking points on rain forest clear-cutting down by middle school. I confused my parents to no end, but that was just me. Let me describe this a bit more.

We rolled into Kakum and then we hiked. Up. It was hot, it was sweaty, and it was gorgeous. The canopy was thick, cicadas were buzzing all around us, and the tour guide would stop periodically to tell us about this or that tree or historical feature, the time he and some tourists happened upon the rear end of a spitting cobra just laying there, front half in a burrow, alive and dangerous, but unmoving and unbothered by their presence, et cetera. We got to the top of this hill and found a structure that looked like the beginning of Disneyland's Jungle Cruise ride. The lower level was just a spot to sit while you wait your turn, and the top was the beginning of the rope-bridge canopy walk.

We stepped out onto this bridge, and began our horizontal trek outward, through the canopy. Because the rope bridge began at the top of the hill, every forward step brought us further out of the canopy as it descended with the terrain. Birds flew past us, insects the size of our hands just hung there in places, and the noise was incredible. And then, at some point, we were just out past and above the canopy, looking down on it, with no way to visually understand just how high up we were. I was in heaven, ladies and gentlemen. Heaven. My group was all busy taking pictures of each other on the rope bridge, amazed by the height, enjoying the beauty of the place, but somehow not entranced in the same way as I by the rain forest itself. I wanted to KNOW everything about how the ecology of the place worked from roots to leaves, eggs to bugs, nests to territories. Incidentally, if anyone knows of any particularly good reading material on the topic, I'd love to hear about it in the comments section.

I got back to our hotel that night after a 6 hour ride in an old, cramped, rickety passenger van they call a Tro-tro. We were fed the same food we'd been eating for the whole trip, the water in our hotel was shut off so we couldn't shower, and the power was out so we ate by candle light and hung out in the common room with a single flashlight upright on the table to see our companions by . . . and I was still exhilarated. I jokingly told the group that I wanted to go home and show my kids Fern Gully (not the finest moment for Robin Williams or Tim Curry, but fun, and set in a rain forest).

Here's another video with a little more perspective on the height and structures we were experiencing.


 
If I ever get to go back to Ghana, I'm going to spend more time there, and see if I can find a group to volunteer with for research or restoration purposes. So what about you? Have you ever walked through a rain forest? Or maybe arctic tundra was your coolest ecology experience? Deep sea diving? Share with me!