New Cave!

Last Sunday, a crew of seven explored a small cave below Point Disappointment. A narrow passageway led to a spacious room and we explored two passages leading from this room, squeezing through narrow tunnels. The crew found two bats, two slimy salamanders, assorted spiders, and cave crickets.

Want to check it out? Park at the old waste water treatment plant and walk down Depot Branch about a mile till you find a cave opening on your right. For you geologically minded folks, the cave opening is 50 meters downstream from the disconformity between the Mississippian Limestone and Pennsylvanian sandstone.

-Elspeth

Dearest Bio-geeks,
 It is an honor to announce the results from a nigh-spontaneous herping
 quest that occurred yestereve.

 Locale:  Ephemeral Pond, end'o'Brakefield
 Questers:  EM Keen, DA McCoy, EM Iralu
 Query:  Caudata.

 RESULTS:
 106 Marbled Salamanders (Ambystoma opacum).
 106.   M a r b l e d - freaking - s a l a m a n d e r s .
 In a single ephemeral pond.
 In a 40-minute search window.
 Most were in mating pairs.

 CONCLUSION:
 The plateau is teeming.         t      e       e       m      i      n        g    .

Fuersalamander aus dem Odenwald

Hellö naturalisches historianisen!

Here in the fame forests of Southwestern Germany, sick sick sick animals abound. I must say that it is a lovely place to be, this Odin's forest. I must tell you of a salamander, the Feursalamander of legend. This is a most astonishing beast, beyond all doubt. It is fire elemental, it is poisonous, it is on coats of arms, and it is ovoviviparous. The thing discharges little salamander pollywogs without laying eggs at all. The poison glands behind its eyes can blind you if squirted sharply, and the poison inhibits mold and fungus from growing on the burning skin of the knave.
I encountered this specimen while taking a casual garden stroll. One of only two salamander species in the area, it survives here because it is made of magic thread that never burns.
I considered brewing a potion of invinceability with this juicy ingredient, but I couldn't bring myself to remove any of his adorable toes.
best to you all

Herr B.L:Pädgett, Patron-at-Large.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamander_%28legendary_creature%29

Society Meeting Dates, Fall Semester 2007

The Society will rendezvous in Gailor 202 every other Tuesday of this semester.
These dates include:

September 25
October 9
October 23
November 6
November 20
December 4

These meetings will be used to share current events in natural history on the plateau, disclose financial information and fiscal activity of the Society, plan upcoming trips, bathe in the glory of recently completed outings, and highlight scientists and/or phenomena of the natural sciences.
Everyone and anything is welcome to attend.

Yours,
EM Keen, Patrician

Natural History of the Cross

In the late summer, masses of moths and other flying insects rendeszvous under the scorching spotlights of the University Memorial Cross to partake in a nightly frenzy of nocturnal feeding and sexing. The Society converged on this entomobananza earlier this week under a waxing crescent moon. Geometridae aside, fellows reported findings of lacewings galore, as well as a phenomenal close relative: the spectacular wasp mantisfly (Climaciella spp.), a Neuropteran also related to ant lions. Ground-dwelling coleopterans, featuring a unprecedented turnout of weevils of every sort, as well as hemipterans and arachnids congregated along the grass near the iron fencing of the memorial. The stars, featuring Jupiter rising abovethe Western horizon, were magnificent. Large members of both Orthoptera's Tettigoniidae and Acrididae were huge hits, especially when one particularly adventurous hopper tried to climb inside Carey Donald's ear.

THE FEATURE PRESENTATION OF THIS NATURAL HISTORY EVENT: Chiroptera. Bats. These placental fighter jets were patrolling the Cross lights on the hunt for inattentive bugs. When hunting, these bats dove and dipped in spectacular showcases of aggressive attack maneuveurs- stunning rolling vortexes as they killed in cold blood - truly formidable displays of derring doo. When we could quiet the jubilated cries of the fellows, we were able to hear the bats clicking their internal sonar-guns over our heads as the raced by.

What a night for Natural History.

Yours,

EM Keen, Patrician

Pictures by Kate Cummings

The Voyage of the Starling

Greetings, naturalists.
It is indeed a new semester, chock-full of time and opportunity. Thus begins a historic several months in the celebration of the natural history of Tennessee's tableland and all other things jaw-dropping.
The Society kicked off this school year's exploits with a rendezvous on the windy waters of Woods Reservoir for a sunset voyage of paddle and binocular. We intrepidly canoed out to a small nitrogen-waylaid island of ambitious trees that serve as a rookery for the noisiest and most farty of wading birds and their swarming tagalong passerine friends. Bird count for the expedition includes, but is not limited to:
Yellow-crowned night heron
Cattle Egret galore
Little Blue Heron
Great Egret
The notorious Mr. Mallard
Red-Winged Blackbird
Osprey (displaying fabulous diving skills)
Double-crested cormorants
Starlings, thousands of starlings.

Perhaps the most glorious sight of this sunset-drenched canoeing trip was the morphous amoeba-like swarms of flying starlings that would darken certain blocks of sky with staggering flock-shapes and derring-doo.

On a non-ornithological note, the entirety of the drive back took place within the usual summer-mist of lepidopterans (most notably of the geometridae), neuropterans, and other nocturnal pterogytes of the warm August fields. The insects are out in full force, especially after our recent rains. The SNH Society has begun to respond in kind to the climatic and ecological events at hand. Now is the time to spread wings and fly, to empathize with bird and moth and get OUT THERE. Here's to a new semester!
Yours,
EMKeen, Patrician

Fiji: Volcanoes & Chelicerates!

Island Biogeography: a fascinating subject, and what better place to study it than in the archipelago of the Republic of Fiji?
Cohort BL Padgett and I took the Subduction Recon Team out of the frosty subantarctic to the sea-breezed equatorial isles of the South Pacific this last week. Fiji is a collection of volcanic islands, calcareous paleo-reef mounds and subducted & uplifted oceanic crust.

It truly is another world.

Pumice, a not-at-all dense igneousvolcanic rock, FLOATS between volcanic and reef-born islands that are so young and rumbly that their flora are still dominated by early successional shade intolerant species. Being an archipelago of isles that vary in origin, size and topography, it perfectly elucidates the principles & mysteries of island biogeography...plus, it's tropical paradise.
Most islands have no standing fresh water and the resources and living space are of such paucity that dispersal and establishment of biota on these isles is a rare event, but there is one phylum of Animalia that has perfected such acts of dispersal heroism: Arthropods. Namely, the Insecta, Chelicerates and Myriapods. Flocks of Lepidoptera, man-eating spiders, and centipedes that tunnel through the sand and bite Luke's feet. Here are a few pics of some specimens we encountered.
The Fiji isles are also an example of another phenomenon associated with biogeography on small islands: the trend towards gigantism. Both these spider species were the size of my palm. We found a web spun by the species with the white abdomen that measured literally 20 ft across! Perhaps the best example of this trend towards gigantism is the Fiji Walking Stick, one of the largest insects in the world (over a foot long!!!). Sadly, we didn't encounter this fella. Oh well, it's just an excuse to go back and find it.
Oh, Padgett and I also made a raft (see bottom pic).

This concludes the Oceania posts. Oceania is truly a mystery, and it holds the key to much that we do not yet understand about our natural world. Here's to Wombats, Moas and Giant Walking Sticks, and all things historically natural!

EM

"To live would be an awfully big adventure"

Ummm... G L A C I E R S

Glaciers. Glaciers. O my God, Glaciers.

OK. Imagine hiking up a steep, rocky trail, so steep the trail is switchbacking to and fro as it writhes up the treacherous landscape, so steep that you wonder if this trail wasn't built for mountain goats 'n' snow leopards instead of mere mortal men, so steep that you look up and it looks like the trail is doing a back flip. OK. When - IF - you get to the top, imagine looking around you and realizing: THIS IS A MORRAINE. It all makes sense, it all comes together: why these weird scoured rocks? Why this abundance of serpentine everywhere? why does it looks like what you just hiked up was a long skinny pile of rocks bulldozed together by a 1,000 ft high BIG CAT?!? the answers can be attributed to one word, one global force beyond human comprehension - the overachieving construction workers of the natural world, the carving spork of the gods, the tantrum-throwing 3-year olds of geology.........G L A C I E R S (so huge a bignes!)

Phew. Just thinking about these puppies pumps me up. My colleagues Laura and Richard Candler (SNHS Curator-elect and brother of, respectfully) and Luke Padgett (Patrician Emeritus and co-Captain of the 2007 SNHS Subduction & Volcanism Reconnaisance Team: Oceania Division) shared with me the privilege of bathing in the immense glory of these bad boys under the shadow of Mt. Cook, the largest mountain in NZ and the pride of the 6-million-year-old Southern Alp Orogeny. The Tasman Glacier, pictured below, is 29km long, and the ice you see in these pictures is over 400m deep. 400m deep. 400m deeeeeeeeeep. The largest glacier remaining from the last glacier age in new zealand (ending about 18,000 years ag), this river of ice moves at a rate of 200 meters a year (!!!!!!!) and bulldozes the landscape, piling helpless rocks into kilometer-long morraines and scouring the mountain ranges, leaving miles-wide glacier valleys in its wake. It was indeed glaciers just like Ole Tasman here that carved the world-famous vistas of Fiordland (see bottom pic).

What I am trying to say is, I wouldn't want to run into a glacier in a dark alley at night. 'Nuff said.

E.M. Keen

The Royal Albatrosses

The Royal Albatross nests consistently in only a handful of places in the Southern hemisphere. The only colony with easy access and reliable albatross sightings is at the very tip of the Otago Peninsula. The following photographs depict the most ridiculous bird in the skies: the 747 of volant avians. These birds can only fly efficiently when it is EXTREMELY windy outside, and they have the largest wingspan of any bird living today.
To contrast this Boeing Bird, check out the birds in the other photo, some of the largest birds in evolutionary history. This scene depicts a Haast's eagle, the world's largest eagle EVER (about 12 ft wingspan) attacking 2 moas, the iconic extinct flightless bird that was endemic to new zealand. There were about 14 species of these guys, ranging from 4 ft high to over 12 ft high. These ratite birds went extinct when the Maori came over from Polynesia around 1000AD and began hunting these abundant grazers (population of between 5 and 12 million) in mass numbers. They went extinct 200 years after the Maori arrived. Before the Maori arrived, these Haast's eagle were the only predators of these Ostrich-Cows. Birds of all shapes and sizes!
Ornithologically,
E.M. Keen, Patrician-elect

Mayfly madness

From Sharpsburg, Georgia:

This mayfly hasn't budged from its spot on our porch wall for an entire day. From the order Ephemeroptera, mayflies spend a year as wingless aquatic larvae, then enjoy only hours as winged adults in the spring.

P-a-L R: New Zealand Forests: Beech, Moss & Fern

The immense micro-worlds of bryophytes, pterophytes, and the Gondwana-relic Nothofagus. Can't get enough!

The Southern Alps

Only 5 million years old, more or less, the "Southern Alps" is the mountain chain that runs longways nearly the entire length of the South Island of New Zealand. In the south, it spreads into an entire glacier-carved region lovingly called FIORDLAND. The Southern Alps run along the Alpine Fault between 2 tectonic plates, and nearly the entirety of the mountain chain is contained within several national parks. The most notably beautiful regions in the range can be found at Arthur's Pass in the north (pic 1), Mt. Cook/Aoraki in the central S.I. (pic 2), and Mt. Aspiring National Park (pic 3), just above the fiordland. For the geologic youth of the range, a evolutionarily ASTONISHING number of specially adapted alpine species roam the tussock grass above treeline on these mountains, including over 20 species of Alpine Cicada, alpine geckos, and the Kea (pic 4), the world's only alpine parrot. Also, there is the Upland moa (extinct, discovered in 1990s), a species of GIANT flightless bird, kind of like an Ostrich with "Cankles," which was hunted to extinction by the immigration of humans to the New Zealand islands from Polynesia.
A M A Z I N G

Yours,
E.M. Keen, lame-duck Prefect

P-a-L R: Down with Marsupials!

Down UNDER, that is. Ha! Australia is a world where the mammalian placentals (besides the higher primates that tend to congregate in the urban areas) are the minority, and the marsupial diversity isn't limited to the gruesome beady-eyed O-possum of North America - we're talking everything from sugar gliders and wombats to the macropods - the kangaroos and wallabies. I was fortunate enough to see 4 species of wallaby and the 3 largest species of kangaroo (the Easter and Western Grey and the infamous but ugly Red Kangaroo) in the wild and I even got to race a few of them down some running trails on Kangaroo Island.
But that was nothing compared to my 3 encounters with the short-beaked echidna, one of 3 species in the subclass Monotrema that are still extant in the world today. The above picture is of my first encounter, during possum patrol one night in Dandegong Ranges National Park in Victoria.
This is the Prefect's final entry on the subject of Australia, and subsequent posts will henceforth focus on the prehistorically mammal-less island nation of Aotearoa, "the Land of the Long White Cloud," or in the woods of its European discover Abel Tasman, Novae Seelandiae.

P-a-L R: Aussie Invertebrates

Funnel-webs...giant cockroaches...the most ant diversity in the world (purple ants with yellow mandibles, not joking, I saw them, but they moved too fast to photograph, sadly)...the snails...the spiders! By God! Enjoy the pics,

Prefect

P-a-L R: Endemic Australian Reptilia

Australia hosts more species of reptiles than any other country on earth. 89% - EIGHTY NINE PERCENT - of these species are endemic. 795 species of extant native reptiles. That means 708 endemic reptiles. This means one tenth of the world's reptiles live ONLY in Australia.
Australia is also host to some of the most outrageous and venomous snakes in the world, including the world's most venomous, the FIERCE snake (see picture of the late great Steve Irwin). In the top ten of this list is also the Tiger Snake, one of which was found trying to sneak into my Kangaroo Island trailer (see picture).
In contrast to the Australian mainland, Kangaroo Island only has 2 snake species, but it is host to an endemic species of the Goanna lizards (see picture).
Snakes really are everywhere in Australia; I can't tell you how many slithered over my feet in the bush or even on the streets of the Sydney suburbs.
Sadly for me, New Zealand is completely lacking in these legless wonders.
Until next time,
Da Prefect