When we went to our local frog hangout this week, Pamelia took this gorgeous photo of newly laid eggs.

Illuminated Frogs' Eggs, Duck "Teeth" and More on that Boston Photo

April 19, 2013

Each starts as one cell, then divides into two cells and then four cells and then eight cells and on and on in a beautiful illustration of nature performing mathematics: 2 raised to the umpteenth power. Frog's eggs usually look like a dark, globular mass (or, if you will, dark, globular math), but the other day they shimmered and sparkled with clarity in the late-afternoon sunlight striking our local vernal pool. Pamelia preserved the moment in these photos. I think they're cool.

We knew that the eggs were freshly laid because they hadn't been there the day before.

This is a close-up from one of the pictures. Note that the eggs have slots on top, as if they're meant to be split into four. The also resemble chocolate morsels.

Other Bird News This was a first: I received an email request yesterday asking for permission to use one of my photos in a nature video about ducks. We'll let you know when the video (which is going to be a humorous but educational one for kids) is available. The picture, which ran with a 2012 blog post about the death of a duck by our house, is below.

This is the shot being used in the nature video. The duck had been attacked by a goshawk by our house and had just died. Those aren't teeth; they are lamellae, which are used for filtering food from the water.

Buffleheads arrived two days ago. That's a male on the left and a female on the right. They're quite small and dive for crustaceans. They nest in holes in trees—yet another reason why it's animal-friendly to leave old, and even dead, trees standing … — Buffleheads arrived two days ago. That's a male on the left and a female on the right. They're quite small and dive for crustaceans. They nest in holes in trees—yet another reason why it's animal-friendly to leave old, and even dead, trees standing unless they're a danger.

The first purple finch of the season just showed up.

The Boston Photo (and Afterwards) Those of you who follow The Naturalist's Notebook's Facebook page—or read the Mount DesertIslander newspaper—know that Pamelia and I experienced a freaky coincidence last Monday, the day of the Boston Marathon. At about 3 p.m., as we walked along the shore of Maine's Western Bay, she found an unusual shard of sea glass with BOSTON embossed on it. It made us think happily of our recent trip to that city, and made me think of the marathon. The piece was beautiful, so I photographed it against the sky.

Back home about an hour later, I turned the computer on to download my photos and learned the horrific, almost unbelievable news from the marathon. I checked to make sure no one from SI had been hurt. When I put the photo and story on our Facebook page, it was clear that people needed to express their shock and sadness over the bombings. Many of them shared or commented on the photo. One suggested that we see it as a symbol of Boston's resilience in the face of tragedy. I liked that perspective. The sea glass (which has 1850 embossed on it as well) had survived many years of battering by the ocean and had come through it looking beautiful. In the end, more than 26,000 people viewed the photo on Facebook, and the editor of the Islander emailed and asked if the newspaper could run it. The picture appeared on the front page.

The Boston tragedy and the story of the perpetrators continues to dominate the news and to strike a personal note with the two of us. In November we were in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia; on the other side of those mountains is Chechnya, home to the two brothers' ethnic roots. One of the brothers shot a policeman at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by the school's Stata Center, where Pamelia took my photo last month (below). I didn't even know the name of the architecturally distinctive building until I read a news account of the shooting.

Pamelia took my photo in front of the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Building at MIT.

The decisions made inside human brains are fascinating and, in cases like this, horrifying. We're currently creating a brain room at The Naturalist's Notebook because we're among the many people eager to explore and understand the human brain. What neural connections or malfunctions make a person kill? What brain mechanism makes a person love? What makes a person rational or irrational, or even able to define what it is rational? What leads us to perceive a shard of old glass as a symbol of life, death, sports, terror, humanity, inhumanity and an entire city? The answers lie inside our heads, inside a five-pound organ that is more mysterious than the entire universe.

The Sun Room at The Naturalist's Notebook is still evolving, but it keep looks cooler (and hotter)...

Answer to the Last Puzzler 1) Sir Francis Bacon died from pneumonia he developed while studying how freezing of meat can help preserve it.

2) The two cones in the photo are from a white pine and a white spruce.

Today's Puzzler Match the quote to the naturalist who said it: a) Jane Goodall b) John Muir c) David Attenborough

1) "In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks." 2) "My mission is to create a world in which we can live in harmony with nature." 3) "I don't run a car, have never run a car. I could say that this is because I have this extremely tender environmentalist conscience, but the fact is I hate driving."

If you drilled a hole from Seal Harbor, Maine, straight through the planet, you'd come out in the Indian Ocean, off the southwestern corner of Australia (marked in the photo by a plus sign).

What's On the Other Side of the Earth?

April 23, 2011

Before the ancient Greeks, many humans thought of the Earth as flat—perhaps pancake-shaped, with oceans, land, people and fluffy whipped-cream clouds sitting on top. You didn't want to flip that flapjack. The bottom side of it (some thought) was a fiery, hellish, blackened cinder of death.

Never mind that my homemade pancakes often fit that description. As we celebrate Earth Day Weekend (perhaps with waffles), we should think about the beautiful blue orb we call home. It's not a perfect sphere—our 4.5-billion-year-old mama has a bit of a bulge around her equatorial belly—but it's definitely not flat. That said, it's intriguing to think that even as we walk on one side of the Earth, people are walking on the exact opposite side, upside down to us. The soles of their shoes are facing the soles of ours.

How might we find the size-8 sole mate who is walking upside down in our footsteps? By digging a tunnel all the way through the Earth, of course. And we know, because it's the only place ever mentioned in discussions of tunnels through the Earth, that such a mega-hole would break through to the surface in China. We'd climb out, stand wrong-side up, shake our sole mate's hand and go visit the Great Wall together.

Or perhaps not. To reach China via a tunnel straight through the Earth's core, you'd need to start in either Chile or Argentina, because those are the only countries that are directly opposite from China on the globe. The hole would have to be nearly 8,000 miles deep. The deepest hole ever made by humans—the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia, drilled in the 1970s and '80s in the name of scientific research—goes into the ground only about 7.5 miles (40,230 feet, to be exact).

The Kola Superdeep Borehole. Perhaps you've encountered him at a cocktail party.

I'm skipping the part about the tunnel having to bore through rock, molten magma and, at the very center of the planet, a solid iron core that is nearly 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the same temperature as the surface of the Sun. There's probably a guy in Texas who could handle that. The bigger question is, what's actually on the opposite side of any particular place on Earth? Let's take Seal Harbor, Maine, home of The Naturalist's Notebook. As noted above, it's directly opposite a spot in the Indian Ocean off the southwestern corner of Australia. Turns out that pretty much the entire United States is directly opposite from...ocean. There are a couple of exceptions. One is far northern Alaska, which is exactly halfway around the world from Antarctica, at a spot directly south of Africa. The other is Hawaii, which is opposite from the African country of Botswana.

Because three-quarters of the Earth is covered with water, there aren't a lot of great tunneling options anywhere. If you dig a hole from certain portions of Portugal or Spain, you'll end up in New Zealand. If you're anywhere else in Europe, don't bother picking up a shovel—you're almost certain to come up in the Pacific Ocean. Colombia and Venezuela connect nicely by trans-global tunnel with Indonesia, as do far northern Russia and Antarctica. But that's about it. You can do your own opposite-side-of-the-Earth searching at: http://www.freemaptools.com/tunnel-to-other-side-of-the-earth.htm

If you stay above the surface of the ground this weekend, you might think about what's overhead. All of those gorgeous Earth Day photos of the planet that you've been seeing come from cameras in space. Below is an image of some of NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites, which take photos as they monitor weather and planetary changes. They're a crucial tool in environmental studies. In all, nearly 2,500 human-made satellites of all types and functions are currently circling the planet, connecting our communications systems and showing us what no human had ever seen until 50 years ago.

These NASA satellites are the eyes that watch how the Earth's surface is changing.

Return of the Blue Starfish This week's ultra-low tides have offered a great opportunity for exploring the Maine shoreline. I found a lot of the small blue starfish (or sea stars) that few other Mainers seem to find in their waters. I'm guessing that these starfish change color at some point later in the spring or summer, because we don't find them in this color for much of the year. At this point most of them are no more than an inch from tip to tip.

Not a Pamelia-quality photo, but you get the idea.

GISS and the Buffleheads Our hundreds of American black ducks and common eiders have moved on from Western Bay to their breeding grounds, but some beautiful bufflehead ducks have been hanging around lately. Buffleheads are very small (they often nest in holes in trees carved out by Northern flickers, a type of woodpecker) and they constantly dive underwater to feed. The males have distinctive wedges of white plumage radiating back from their eyes. Birders have a useful term called GISS, which is pronounced jizz and stands for general impression of size and shape. It's a tool for identifying species that the birder sees only momentarily, or from a distance. In trying to judge from afar whether the dark-and-white ducks we're looking at are buffleheads, eiders or goldeneyes (or something else), Pamelia and I make use of our general impressions of how they behave, how large they are and where on their bodies their white plumage seems to be. Buffleheads are easy to I.D. if they're close enough; their name is short for "buffalo head" because when the male puffs up his feathers his head looks gigantic. That's a jizz clue that's hard to miss.

A few of our buffleheads enjoying yesterday's weather.

Llama Font I've never written "llama font" before. But it's an actual type style that I learned about this week. You can go to llamafont.com and type any message you want in these unusual letters.

Answer to the Last Puzzlers:
1) What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment but never in a thousand years? The letter M.

2) What holds water yet is full of holes? A sponge.

3) The young tree that doesn't shed its dead leaves in the winter is a beech tree.

Today's Puzzler:
No puzzle, just a joke that a young visitor told me this week: Why did the fungus go to the party?

Birthday:
Ray Tomlinson, the New York-born electrical engineer who invented the first true e-mail system back in 1971, turns 70 on Saturday. Tomlinson is posed with the @ symbol in the photo below because he's the one who first used it in e-mail addresses. That symbol doesn't even have a name in English (the Germans call it a "monkey ear"), and no one is sure how or when it was invented. But Tomlinson found it perfect for e-mail needs.

It's not his birthday, but 86 years ago this week John Scopes allegedly taught evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee. In hopes of challenging a state statute that banned the teaching of that subject, the American Civil Liberties Union had recruited Scopes to violate the law and get himself arrested. I say Scopes "allegedly" taught evolution because after his famous 1925 trial he told a newspaper reporter that he hadn't actually bothered to teach an evolution lesson. Scopes said that his side's lawyers had merely coached his students to testify that he had done so. That was but one of the many bizarre twists in his trial, in which he was found guilty and fined $100 before a higher court overturned the verdict on a technicality. Scopes went on to become a geologist and the Tennessee law stood, amazingly enough, until 1967. Even today, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence confirming the theory of evolution—a mountain of work done by tens of thousands of scientists around the world in fields from genetics to archaeology—25 percent of the Americans polled say they don't believe in evolution and 36 percent say they aren't sure.

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