November 28, 2009

I noticed that all the leaves had finally fallen from the huge poplars at the corner of our property.
As Chelsea moved very slowly through them (the vet told me she's the dog equivalent of 90+)
I picked up a random sample and tried to estimate the biomass of Melampsora (a rust fungus) in the dead leaves.
Of course, I'm not being properly scientific about it.  To begin with I'm guessing that the trees had 100,000 leaves (at least)

Every leaf I picked up had at least a few black spots of the telial stage of the rust, and most had more than 100,
while some had about 1000 (see photograph).  My guess is that the average leaf has about 5% fungal biomass (some much less, some much more). I weighed ten randomly chosen leaves, and was pleased when they weighed in at 10 grams, or 1 gram each, which simplifies the arithmetic tremendously.  So - 100,000 grams = 100 kg of leaves 5% of that is 5Kg, or 11 pounds of fungal biomass.

It would take another more difficult process to work out how many basidiospores are likely to be released in Spring, but I know it would be astronomical, so I'll leave that for another day. 

November 27, 2009

Now for a land-based blog. I have taken responsibility for any alien plants
that invade the Park next to our house.
One of these is the leather-leafed Daphne, which grows in many places
along the hedgerow between the Park and the road.
(I have already extirpated the broom and ivy).
The Daphne looks a bit like a Rhododendron, with nice shiny leaves,
but it is very nasty, preventing native plants from growing near to it, and extremely vigorous,
and I am always surprised when I see how many people let it grow in their gardens,
assuming it is a garden plant.
I spent an hour cutting Daphne off at ground level with my loppers. 
Another 6 clumps, and I will have banished it from the Park, at least for now.

November 26, 2009

Most of the snail mail we get is totally useless
- essentially junk mail, trying to sell us something or
bills to pay.  So it was a real pleasure to open a letter from Japan this morning
and find an order for Nag Raj's big red masterpiece on Coelomycetes (over 1,000 pages). 
Of course I have the world supply in my basement, and am sure I'll never run out. 
But another one was dispatched across the Pacific Ocean today.
The postage was scary - over $60, even by surface.

Now we're thinking about fungi, let me turn to the local macromycota.
When I left for Virginia on 2nd November, the park next door was full of mushrooms:
literally tens of thousands of little Mycena all through the grass,
with a number of partial fairy rings of Marasmius oreades (the fairy ring mushroom)
scattered around, and occasional groups of meadow mushrooms
(Agaricus campestris), which we would eat if there weren't so many dogs
peeing and so on all over the place...At that time our lawn was devoid of fungi.

When I came back on 14th, things had changed, after several days of heavy rain.
In the park, no mushrooms were to be seen anywhere (I quartered the acreage looking for them).
But our back lawn, overlooking the ocean, was crowded with them. 
Many were of Armillaria, a genus that is often involved in killing trees.
Not all species are pathogens, and I'm hoping this is one of the harmless ones
- don't want to lose those lovely Douglas Firs along the edge of the cliff
which frame our view so beautifully. There were also some boletes, species of Suillus,
as well as the gilled Tricholoma and Cortinarius: all three genera are ectomycorrhizal symbionts
of those same trees.

It seems paradoxical that there should be such a reversal, but as usual there must be a reason for it.
The only one I can suggest off the top is that our soil under the lawn (imported by us)
is very sandy, and took much longer to become saturated than the clay in the park.
It is quite apparent that mushrooms do not like soil saturated with water.
I remember one of the years (probably 20 years ago) that I taught a field course in Algonquin Park, Ontario.
I drove up a day or so early, so I could walk a few of the trails and renew acquaintance with the fungi.
Well, it had been pouring for several days, some of the trails were flooded by the rivers,
and those I could access had very few fungi.  Fortunately, things gradually improved over the next two weeks,
but the students may have been happy they didn't have as many mushrooms to identify as in previous years.

Dedicated as usual to my young mentor!

November 22, 2009

After high tides, many logs are washed off our beaches, at least temporarily. Harlequin ducks, in my opinion the most beautiful ducks in the world, overwinter here, and like to sit on things often just large stones along the water's edge. But the floating logs, drifting slowly along on the tide, were apparently irresistible, and one of them carried three males and one female, all busily grooming themselves after the storm. The attached photo, taken from our back door, does not do their gorgeous plumage justice, since it was a very overcast day, so I have tacked another one on to show what they really look like close up (this picture by Mike Yip).

Cheers!

November 25, 2009

Our first Rhododendrons have weirdly decided to start flowering, even before we have picked this year's apples. I wanted to grow a Cox's Orange Pippin, a favourite apple from my youth in England. But the nursery suggested that Cox's doesn't do very well here, and sold me a Fiesta instead. They said it would taste rather similar, and they were right. It is having a bumper crop this year, as the photograph shows, and I pick up enough windfalls every day to keep us munching happily. Of course, good crops seem to happen only every other year, so we must enjoy this one while we can. The apples taste wonderful, but they don't keep well. Sorry I can't share them with you and your family!

November 24, 2009

This was a grey day, and I used some of it to start packing up all the books in my office and lab downstairs, because I am going to have the outer wall insulated to R-24 (when we did the energy audit, we found that the wall had no insulation at all - zero), and gyproc-ed, as part of a campaign to use less energy to heat the house this winter. I believe there are about a tonne of books in there, but most of them will fit in the spare bedroom while the job is done. Later in the afternoon, I decided to go rowing, and found that I had to push and pull the boat into the water over a large barrier of bull kelp that had drifted inshore with the high tide. It looked like the revenge of the sea monsters, as the photograph shows.

Cheers!

November 21, 2009

Saturday is a big day for reading the papers in our house (I get the Globe and Mail first, Laurie gets the Times-Colonist first).  The Saturday Globe and Mail has lots of sections - rather like the Washington Post (another very fine newspaper). So I read and mull over the editorials, letters to the editor, and various columns.  This usually stimulates me to pen a letter myself, if I get excited enough about one of the issues they discuss.  Here is the one I sent on Saturday.  It was sparked by a debate on what leads to excellence - is it inborn talent, or just huge amounts of practice?  They did not publish it (I score about 250), but I keep all these letters on file.

"I was surprised to see that neither of the protagonists mentioned in Margaret Wente's article (Have you done your 10,000 hours?) took into account the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, first proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983. I had assumed that by now most well-educated people would have accepted the to some extent self-evident truth of the concept. For example, looking at the several categories: bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, verbal-linguistic, logical mathematical, intrapersonal, visual-spatial, musical and naturalistic, I can tell immediately that I have a few strengths - verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, and naturalistic, but that I am weaker in other areas, such as musical (I listen with intense enjoyment but don't play with any skill), and almost entirely lacking in bodily-kinaesthetic. To me, this unequivocally explains why I do certain things well, and why even 100,000 hours of practice would not make me into a dancer or a pianist.  The software is just not there!"

In the evening we went to Victoria to see see "Gypsy", a revival of a musical about a stage-struck mother and the divergent fates of her two daughters, in which the role of Rose, the mother, was originally sung (in 1959) by  the great Ethel Merman. It was pretty well done, and the singers/actors playing the roles of Rose and Louise were both outstanding. But it once again made me realize that unless a musical is absolutely top-notch in all details (Broadway standard) or done by my kids' high school, I do not find it a particularly satisfying art form, and I don't really like plays either (I am really a movie fan at heart).

More tomorrow!

On the topic...

This is a response to a three day run in the Globe and Mail (popular in Canada)... In Bryce's words;

 "It started last week with an editorial on Saturday Nov 14 - The Way Forward With Canada's Maple Crown, suggesting changes in the constitutional arrangements surrounding the Monarchy in Canada (new ways of electing, rather than having the Prime Minister appoint, the Governor General).  John Fraser, Master of Massey College, U of Toronto, was horrified that anything might change (Letter, Nov 16).  The Globe assumed that Canadians were either indifferent to the Monarchy (the majority) or, like Fraser, strongly supportive of it (a minority).  I wanted to point out that there is a third group, of which I am part.   I believe that the Monarchy in Canada will eventually wither away and become irrelevant, but I'd like to see it gone."

November 19, 2009

Pouring with rain and blowing hard. We found a very large mushroom growing near our compost pile.
I identified it as Chlorophyllum brunneum, a nice edible that used to be called Lepiota rachodes.
However, there is a rather nasty poisonous species called Chlorophyllum molybdites that looks almost exactly the same.So I had to do a spore print. The poisonous one has greenish spores, the edible one has white spores;
Fortunately, the spore print turned out to be white, so we enjoyed the mushroom with dinner (How's that for living on the edge?) Then I had to go to Trey's first swimming lesson at our new local pool (we couldn't get him out of the water afterward). This entailed some sacrifice for me, because I had been scheduled to attend a lecture about the salmon crisis on the west coast. Now I'll have to scrounge around among acquaintances to find out what was said.  Our resident killer whales eat mostly salmon (not seals as the transients do) so poor salmon returns are really bad for them, and for the bears.

On the bright side, the local Orca pods have just had two new babies.  Let's hope they don't starve to death.
I am not sure whether the steep decline in salmon returns is due to overfishing or to unknown events out in the ocean, and would like an informed opinion.  Will pass on what I learn.

November 20, 2009

Almost a week since I returned from Virginia, and the three grandkids were due for dinner around six.
So while there was still no-one around in the afternoon, I went out for a row. The sea was quite calm, and I saw our local seal. But while I was out in the middle of the bay, I noticed that the crab boats were all headed for harbour as fast as they could go. And a great black cloud (and I mean black) was moving in from the south. I could see the curtain of rain over the peninsula, so I headed for shore. I had just got the boat onto the cable and started to wind it up, when the storm hit with tropical force. Lightning, thunder, the works. I was surprised, because this hardly ever happens where we live.

But I abandoned the boat half way up the ramp and took refuge in the house until it was over (around 6 pm, I mean 18h00) This reminded us of the spectacular thunderstorms we used to get in Ontario, and our friend across the peninsula told me they had a hailstorm as well. So perhaps climate change really is coming...Further up the Island, wherever rivers flow into the sea, they had major flooding, Lots of houses in Duncan and Comox were inundated, and roads closed. Tofino, on the west coast of the Island had 300 mm of rain - that's a foot - in two days,so the 25 mm of water we had in our garage seemed hardly worth mentioning.

Cheers!