I have been getting heaps of requests for advice on where to hike, what gear to take, how to pack for overnight, etc. so I have decided to start a non-regular thread of blog posts on the goings on of getting out of town (just in time for winter, I know). I have been slowly updating my backpacking gear, so I am testing some newer things as I go, and will put up why I invested in them and what I think of them as it occurs to me. I agonized over the choice, so if I can save you the hassle... Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink (safely) This last weekends backpacking trip was in an area somewhat famous for having an oversupply of water, so I decided to bite the bullet and invest in a water filter to reduce my dependency on hauling in all I required (I still humped plenty just in case). Usually I tuck a few water purifying tablets in my pack, but the taste and time-to-work has always bothered me, so I decided to sacrifice a little weight for a filter. As always, I agonized over which system (of the dozens out there - comparisons of which are across the hiking-web), and settled on the Sawyer Squeeze over the Platypus GravityWorks for the following reasons: The Squeeze is more versatile (it can be used in-line as part of your in-pack water bladder, filtering water as you suck it), you can drink directly from the dirty water bag via the filter with a pop valve like a regular vapor bottle, or even as a gravity fed system for supervision free basecamp use - the primary domain of the GravityWorks. However it's work-horse function is as a quick-stop squeeze-through filter from water just scooped from the river, into your bottle of choice.
Sawyer Squeeze TLDR:
- Lightweight (3 ounces), well regarded, backcountry water filter - Highly adaptable (inline, direct-to-mouth, gravity, to container) - Almost idiot proof (luckily for me!) - Fast set up, filtering, and disassembly - Ridiculous lifetime capacity (tho how ridiculous is under debate) - Cheaper than other reusable options - Greater flow rate than others in Sawyer family allows gravity filtering at basecamp - Super easy to maintain (backwash with included syringe in field if flow slows, and after trip). - Provided bags can be difficult to fill and have been known to burst, use a disposable water bottle (same thread size) Other notes: - Cannot freeze (damages filaments), store deep in pack and sleep with it in a pinch if you get caught in the cold. Alternative filters recommended for regular high-alpine or four season use. - Blowing back water in the filter directly after use has been suggested as a way to help keep filter clean and reduce frequency of backwashing in field if handling high-sediment water. Also reduces pack weight and leakage. - Not for weight fiends and true ultra-light hiking, but pretty close - Closest competition, Platypus GravityWorks would be an admirable alternative, tho slightly heavier, bulky, and more geared toward basecamp gravity work.
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Trout lily - Erythronium americanum Named for their purple-brown mottled leaves which do somewhat resemble the green and white spotted colors of a brook trout, trout lilies are common on forest floors across eastern north America. Their flowers are quite bold and distinctive, but are often hard to spot, growing scattered, low to the ground, and with their faces turned down. Often it takes a minute stopped beside a likely looking spot on the trail to get your eye in, and then they start to pop out of the background like magic.
For whatever reason, instead of adding more true petals, lilies have co-opted their sepals to stand-in as extra petals instead, and when this happens the petals and sepals combined are collectively called “tepals”.
Flowering for any plant is an expensive exercise requiring a lot of energy. Some annual plants blow all their resources on a single flowering season, relying on some of their seed to make it to the next year. Other longer lived plants, typically shrubs and trees will often take their time, concentrating on growing bigger and stronger before thinking about throwing any resources at reproducing. Trout lilies, although small, grow from bulbs under the ground, each of which can live for many years, and so like other longer-living plants they get well settled before flowering. An individual trout lily will not flower at all for the first 5-7 years of its life, and even then not very often, such that only 0.5% of any population will be in bloom in any particular year. There are 20-30 species in the trout lily group, spread across North America and Europe, and their closest relatives are – Tulips! Wild blue phlox - Phlox divaricata Phlox is a flower that you may have seen in bunches at the store, or growing in gardens, as they throw up very attractive heads of blazingly colorful flowers with a sweet scent. Problem is, many plants have hit upon a similar cunning plan to attract pollinators and so it is easily to confuse between them, especially Phlox and a the quite unrelated Dianthus. Adding to, and maybe because of, the confusion members of both sometimes go by the name "sweet William" including Phlox divaricata which is known in some parts of North America as "wild sweet William". Garden Phlox left and Dianthus right. Sadly and ironically, like many garden varieties of flowers, cultivated sweet Williams are commonly found without their scent as they have been bred for larger, brighter, longer lasting flowers. Happily, delicately perfumed wild relatives of Phlox can still be found across the woodlands of North America where there are ~70 species (a single species is from Siberia). Phlox divaricata is easy to recognize by the width of its flowers and habit of growing in straggling patches. These are formed as plants send roots out across the ground that sprout new stems and eventually become independent plants. This habit is called “divaricate” and gave it its species name. Relatively common in woodlands across the majority of the eastern half of the United States, there are two subspecies: ssp. divaricata, with petals notched at the tip, and the one below, ssp. laphamii, without a notch. The leaves and stems are covered in sticky hairs (also grow in other species) which presumably act as a defense against insects. Phlox in general tend to be taller with larger flowers in the lowland wooded country, while the many species found in alpine meadows grow as lower clumpy plants with smaller flowers. Colors range from white, through pink, purples and blues. “Phlox” comes from the Greek for flame due to the bright blazing colors of some species, but on a clear spring day P. divaricata looks like a reflection of the sky. *Phlox divaricata pictures from the C & O Canal National Historic Park, credits: Bort Edwards
Virginia bluebell (Mertensia Virginica)One of the loveliest first signs of spring here in the eastern United States are Virginia bluebells. Their leaves bring the first green to the muddy forest floor and their early buds are a gorgeous powdered pink even when everything else is still cold and grey. Bluebells thrive in the dappled sunlight of deciduous forests and along river banks, and can form colonies that stretch out in rich blue carpets when they flower. The flowers themselves are an important food source for bumblebees, especially the females who are the first to venture out after winter. However bees struggle to land on the wide petals and the most common pollinators are butterflies, with longer legs that allow them to settle more comfortably. If you look closely you can see a long, thin, white filament or thread poking out past the mouth of the flower - this is the stigma. The stigma is the female part of the flower and its sticky tip brushes the underside any butterfly when it lands, to catch pollen picked up at another plant. Unlike many other plants, the petals of bluebells fall away once they are pollinated, leaving just the stigma behind, with older plants waving wispy white stigmas in the breeze where the flowers used to be. While the buds and flowers are a pale pink before they open, they typically turn a vivid blue, except for two uncommon forms: one that stays pink, and another that is white. These can appear scattered throughout otherwise blue populations and are presumably the result of random mutations. There are two closely related species, Mertensia paniculata which is found mostly in the north west of the US, has been recorded as overlapping with M. virginica in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, but can be told apart by having smaller bell-shaped flowers; and M. maritima which is found north from Massachusetts into Canada and north western Europe and grows as a low spreading plant with fleshier leaves and smaller flowers. *All pictures from the C & O Canal National Historic Park, credits: Bort Edwards
Eastern Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) Skunk cabbages are from the arum family, and thus related to Jack-in-the-pulpit, with similar construction of an inflorescence of smaller flowers combined into a spadix and surrounded by a modified leaf (spathe). "Skunk" refers to the rank smell of the leaves when crushed, while “foetidus” comes from the word fetid, meaning unpleasant smelling, and likely refers to flowers which smell like rotting meat to attract flies. The inflorescences of this plant are hard to find as they sit on the ground, and the spathe is camouflaged brown and green (seen here at the base of the plant). It is purse-shaped, with only a small opening to let potential pollinators in or out, and is often present when there is still snow on the ground. The spathe/inflorescence/flowers grow before the leaves, which when they do arrive are very noticeable, being large, flat, bright glossy green, and forming thick knee-high emerald seas of vegetation that spruces up the drab late winter forest floor. If you push through a colony of skunk cabbage the leaves feel rubbery and squeak as they rub together. In order to produce flowers so early, skunk cabbages have evolved a neat trick: they make their own heat, keeping themselves at ~60-70 degrees F which can be 27–63 °F (15–35 °C) hotter than the temperature of the air around them! This allows them to melt snow, protect themselves from frost damage, with the added advantage of attracting insects who shelter inside the flowers to stay warm, while becoming pollinators in return. Skunk cabbages grow in bogs and flooded river-edges across eastern North America and have adapted to these slippery conditions by contracting their roots after they grow downwards. This pulls their stems deeper into the ground, making it incredibly difficult for them to be pulled up or swept away.
For my day job I study daisies. There are an awful lot of them - close to 1 in 10 flowering plants on earth belongs to the family, but for all that diversity, a lot of them look pretty similar and familiar. This is despite growing on all habitable continents (and even the one continent that is no longer habitable, Antarctica, has the worlds oldest daisy fossils dating from about 70 million years ago!). They can be small herbs or chunky trees, are happy hanging out in deserts or on mountain tops, and are just about everywhere. Which is really not such bad thing - most are quite pretty, and people have been growing them for decoration for more than 4,000 years. Sunflowers and dandelions are daisies, and species and varieties of all colors spill out of gardens everywhere. The shades might be different, sizes vary, the number of petals on a flower might be more or less, and how many flowers each plant has may be different, but many many daisies all over the world look suspiciously similar. This can be frustrating when you are trying to work out which, of the more than 24,000 species, the one in your neighbors garden might be - and the phrase "ugh, not another DYD" is something passed on down from botanist to botanist - Damn Yellow Daisy!
But why *do* so many of them look alike? Do daisies just lack imagination? There are plenty of possible shapes out there, why not experiment? Well, many species have, but there are reason that a nice open, flat, happy flower might be advantageous: they are very pollinator friendly. The big flat bright flower with a yellow center makes a very easy target for any passing insect. The wide petals make a handy perch for landing on. And the way daisies assemble their flowers makes this the easiest template - more on daisy architecture another day! This is just one of many things daisies have done to help themselves get by very well in the world, and if numbers are your measure of success then daisies really are one of the most over-achieving groups of plants on the planet. And the fact that they have managed to wander all around the world is a testament to how resilient and adaptable they are. So next time you walk past a daisy smiling up at you, maybe give it a smile back :) *Top pictures, left to right: Grindelia paludosa (North America), Brachyscome scapigera (Australia), Madia elegans (North America), Stephanomeria cichoriaceae (North America) - all credits: Bort Edwards Drosera burmanii (Tropical Sundew) Northern Territory, Australia When I worked in a plant nursery, there was one corner of the yard that got more attention from almost all the children, as well as many of the not-so-children - the carnivorous plant section. And really, it's hard not to be fascinated by these unusual sneaky predators, plants that can seem to reach out, grab a passing insect, and eat it. All plants move in the sense that they bow with the wind, or twine up a fence post, and some even move across the ground (some trees can "walk" up to 20m in a lifetime!), but generally these things happen muuuuch sloooower than what we can see.
So, if speed is your thing, then the rock-stars of the carnivorous plant world are Venus fly traps, which can snap shut quickly enough to snag their prey before they fly away, but if you are after something slightly less flashy, but no less fascinating, then sundews (Drosera) might be more your speed. These carnivorous plants are a little more relaxed. They casually lure their prey to land on their leaves by covering them with droplets on the end of long hairs, luring thirsty insects to them with the promise of a refreshing drink (hence "sundew" and the Latin "Drosera" from drosos = dew drops). Instead they find the droplets are a sticky gluey trap and the more they struggle, the more they become stuck. As soon as the insect is stuck, the plant then leisurely starts to fold the leaf together, adding more sticky droplets, and covering the insect. Even worse for the victim, the droplets aren't just sticky, they are a made up of a soup of enzymes (like the digestive liquid in your stomach) that slowly set about digesting the animal from the outside in. The yummy insect juice is then absorbed by the plant and the leaf reopens. So you might wonder what the point of this is, other than to provide nightmare fuel to small baby bugs cuddling with their parents at night. Why go to this trouble when other plants don't? The reason is that sundews grow in places where many other plants can't: sandy dunes, bogs, swamps, places where nutrients are harder to come by. By snatching passing insects they can supplement their diet (especially Nitrogen) letting them thrive and grow in tough places. With this advantage they have found homes on every continent except Antarctica (although somehow there are only three species in all of Europe). The picture at the top of the page is Drosera burmannii which I found growing in a sandy creek-side, south of Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory. It has one of the fastest closing leaves for a sundew- you can actually watch the leaf curl around a newly caught insect! This species also has a rather unusual distribution for plants in the region, being found from sub-tropical India, through Southeast Asia, Japan and northern Australia. With very small seeds, sundews may be able to travel further than many other plants, allowing it to spread out across these large areas. Another interesting thought is how do these plants manage to get insects to pollinate them without just eating them? The flower stalks for almost all species are very long, sticking way up above the leaves, so it seems that the plant hopes that insects visiting the flowers will not get distracted by the yummy looking dew, and do the job of pollination without getting liquefied. This is a risk as the plants definitely trap the same insects that pollinate them, but so far, they seem to be doing ok at getting the best of the insects both ways! Often the most frustrating questions as an advisor are those that are not asked. Maybe because people are too shy, or because it seems like a silly question, but the most frustrating to all concerned are those questions that you don't even know are there. Which means that everyone ignores them until they quietly creep up and wallop you between the shoulder blades. The following is a short survival guide I wrote a while ago for an undergraduate class on one such question. The problem is that on the surface of it, it seems like a non-question: "in experimental science, what do you do when you get no result?" The problem is in the premise of the question, that there is such a thing as a 'no-result'. Which is false. Dealing with ‘no results’ is something everyone in science has to come to terms with. Contrary to popular opinion, few experiments end with the researcher discovering some grand epiphany and scarpering down the streets naked yelling ‘Eureka!” More often than not, some poor fool having been sitting in front of a computer for weeks, suddenly starts banging their head against the monitor, and swearing at the data. Things seldom go smoothly, or as planned, and often the results of even the most meticulously designed experiment leave you wondering what the outcome actually is, and why something is not as expected. The worst of these is when your data appear to be telling you, well, nothing. Here is a short survival guide to navigating “no result”: There are generally three types of "No Result": • Lack of data • Failed experimental design (really a subset of 'Lack of Data’) • Data doesn't show conclusive results one way or the other (non-significant results) Lack of Data Likely to happen especially when time/money etc are short, you are reporting on trial/pilot experiments or are presenting data from an experiment that is still underway or in early stages. There is no shame in these results. Small scale or pilot studies are the basis from which more elaborate and grand-scale experiments are born. Outstanding significant results, or even enough data to properly analyze are not expected, instead you are looking for trends in the data, general directions that it is going that might be worth following up, or that suggest your hypotheses are correct and it is worth pursuing more thoroughly. Failed Experimental Design It sucks, but it happens. Sometimes it may be for embarrassing reasons you didn't think of beforehand, but even so it is very rare for scientists to sink the boot into a genuinely failed experiment. 1. because sometimes it just happens, that's what makes biology so unpredictably interesting and 2. because it has probably 'just happened' to them too some time. So don't focus on the negatives. The audience doesn't want to hear all the whys and what could have beens, and it just makes everyone feel awkward. Honestly, they probably don't care (unless it was for some really exciting reason that presents more questions). Admit what went wrong, but move on to 1. how you will fix it in the future, and 2. what you DID find. Seldom is an experiment such a complete bust that you cant even pull some general trends or even observations out of your time. What did you see while setting up or running it that was interesting? Were there things that you saw that will change your hypotheses, or created new questions? Go through what your hypotheses still are, how you arrived at them, and how they are supported from the evidence of other studies (see 'Reporting' below for more). Non-Significant Results There are several flavors of non-significant results. The first, vanilla flavor is from above: Lack of data. Again, get the best out of what you have, stress trends and what you are seeing against what you expected. Emphasize your hypotheses and why you stated them, how they are supported by other data. The second flavor of non-significant results is much nuttier: Genuinely middle of the road data. This can be one of the most irritating situation a scientist can find themselves in. A great idea, months of work and when all the data is in, it appears to say nothing. No significant yes, no significant no. Just noise. How do you write up a non-result? Often such data is treated as a 'failure' however this is not true. You have probably found 'no result' for a reason, it is telling you something about your system. It's not what you expected, but it may be no less interesting. The trick is to spin the finding to make it interesting to an audience: 1. look for trends. Ok, they aren't significant, but you can build a story out of them - as above, what is it, how does it fit with other work and hypotheses? 2. find other ways or questions to look at the data you already have. This can hurt your brain and take a lot of time, especially if you start blindly prodding your data hoping something falls out. Try to go back to square one, construct new focused hypotheses, then you can follow the right paths for analysis and a (hopefully) clear answer. 3. what does 'no result' actually MEAN? As mentioned above, a 'no-result' has probably occurred for a reason. For example, say all the sequences for the gene I was looking at across hundreds of humans are the same. There is no variation. My hypothesis that I could look at differences in this gene between continents is gone, but it raises the interesting question, WHY is there no variation in this gene? Maybe it is a very important gene and cant afford to change... maybe it is a recent viral insertion... etc. So instead of boring the audience with why I saw nothing, (scientifically) suggest some stories (again, learn to love the word 'hypotheses') about why this might be the case, and how you could test each possibility. Your audience will give you much greater credit for showing you can think (especially under difficult situations) and for your initiative, than for rolling out how bad the methods were and why it was bound to fail for x, y and z reasons.
Reporting
Each type of no result has particular avenues to finding something to write about, as touched on above. But broadly across all of these there are some general themes. In all cases you can be left stranded with a good idea that you are frustratingly unable to prove. But rather than throw the baby out with the bath-water and depressing the audience with what didn't go right, concentrate on the positives. What were your hypotheses?? Why did you make them, and what did you *expect* your data to show that would prove them. The greatest credit people will give you is for the interesting, novel or clever idea you had in the first place. If it is a truly sound idea and you can present evidence as to why you expect the hypotheses you propose, collecting the data is *almost* irrelevant. If there has been past work done on a similar theme, or that you are building upon, convince the audience that the result you didn't quiet were almost inevitable. This is a quality skill in science, and is used time and again when convincing people to give you money for experiments you have not yet done. And don't forget to: - reference your work. Not only does this show that you have actually read about what you are doing, but it will automatically allow you to include new ideas, other results and begin to use the language and thinking needed to present scientific data. - state your hypotheses, what you expect to find and WHY. - for papers AND talks, read, re-read, proof read, give-to-your-housemates-to-read, read and read again. Bad data looks even worse when it's sloppily written! Smithsonian Featured Fellow Bort Edwards Status: Postdoctoral Researcher Advisor: Vicky Funk Department Affiliations: Botany Out in the desert southwest of the United States, against extremes in aridity, salinity and acidity that would leave most North American organisms desiccated and decayed, thrives a family whose common name typically evokes connotations of delicacy and refinement: daisies. The particular range of niches which daisies have managed to occupy within the more extreme climes of the continental U.S. find themselves the subject of a Big Data survey known as Eco-Evo-Geo (Ecology, Evolution and Geology). Funded by the Powell Fellowship from the United States Geological Survey, the project pulls together individuals from a host of research bodies, including the Smithsonian, the National Science Foundation, the USGS, The US Department of Agriculture and CSIRO—the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, the government scientific body in Australia. At the center of this web stands Bort Edwards, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of Natural History. “I’m the spider in the middle pulling everyone together,” said Edwards. “The different organizations [in Eco-Evo-Geo] provide the data sources for the project, and I’m responsible for consolidating the data.” Edwards and his advisor, Vicki Funk, a senior research botanist and curator at NMNH, met with the group in Colorado to assemble an outline of the data survey needed to complete the project. From there, Edwards and Funk spent two weeks traveling through Nevada, Arizona and California collecting daisies. “We’re interested in the role that the environment plays in diversification and speciation, specifically in extreme climates,” said Edwards. “It’s known that if a particular organism is able to adapt to an extreme environment, then an entire suite of niches is opened up into which that organism can expand.” According to Edwards, desert environments like those found in the southwest US and Mexico are characterized by high aridity and soil salinity, which often prevents water from leeching out. Because of this excessive dryness, most plants are unable to grow there, leaving most unoccupied space available for those that can withstand the conditions—including, among others, daisies. “The novelty of our project is that previous work has been limited to people’s ‘pet groups,’” said Edwards. “But over the last few years, the availability of large, publically available databases has allowed for Big Data approaches. We’re leveraging databases across a range of different data types.” The group draws phylogenetic data for their different species of study from NCBI’s ever-ubiquitous GenBank. Spacial data, including records of localities where different species are observed, come from the various government organizations involved. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) provides yet another level of data: records of all organisms collected by museum, herbaria and similar organizations. Still more information on geochemical soil characteristics—such as ion levels or electrical conductivity—is provided by the USDA and USGS. “The plan is to pick another plant group once we’ve got the pipeline down and push through the data,” said Edwards. “Plants lend themselves to a relationship with the soil in a way that not many animals would.” That particular relationship influences the way in which plants evolve and differentiate into species over time. Edwards and his team hypothesize that if an organism adapts to one or more limiting factors in their environment—say, some chemical property of the soil—then that organism may expand into the full range of niches that bear that characteristic. “There is still plenty of potential for this project to continue,” said Edwards. “It would be nice to incorporate morphology and physiology in our results. We would ask not only, ‘have plants adapted to their environment,’ but ‘how have they done it?’” - Tyler Stigall
Helianthus annuus (Common Sunflower) Arizona, 2015
I have seen sunflowers in glorious rows in fields in Australia, Europe, and the USA, but in Arizona I got to see the original wild sunflower. Well, maybe... Sunflowers are large daisies that have been bred and grown by humans for their nutritious seeds for at least 4,000 years (Blackman et. al., 2013) and more recently for their potential as biofuel alternatives. Originally native to Southern and central USA and Northern/Central Mexico, they are now cultivated across the world, and are grown as specially bred crop plants across the US, including in areas that were home to their original ancestors. Subsequently many plants have escaped from crop populations on numerous occasions making it hard to work out whether the populations you see along roadsides in Arizona, or other southern states, are natural populations still persisting, plants that have jumped the fence from nearby farms, or natural populations that have been interbreeding with domesticated sisters in the next field (Kane & Rieseberg, 2008). Sunflowers (of which there are about 70 species) are famous for this ability to share genes between species and for forming hybrids, populations that are part species A and part species B. Ongoing hybridization between otherwise distinct species can be an advantage where genes that evolve in and are good for one species, can be acquired by another species where they are also advantageous (e.g one species happens upon a gene that improves drought tolerance, a gene that would be of use to species B if it could capture it). Similarly, there are interesting, if relatively rare, cases where hybrids may find a niche of their own in which they grow better than either parent plant. This has been found to be the case with Helianthus petiolaris and H. annuus where a hybrid of the two (H. anomalus) is able to thrive on sand dunes that are otherwise inhospitable to either parent species (Rieseberg et. al., 1995; Rieseberg et. al., 2003). However such shuffling and trading of genes and the generation of harlequin species makes using genes as a method to identify species, or differentiate between natural and escapee populations, quite problematic. To add to this difficulty is the huge plasticity of sunflowers: their ability to modify their shape and form depending on the conditions they find themselves growing in. Undomesticated plants are typically straggly, multiply branched, and have several flowers, seldom larger than a palm-span across. This is in comparison to cultivated plants that have desirable traits for farming: tall and straight (space efficient) with a single large flowerhead, yielding plenty of large seeds. Yet domesticated plants that escape soon return to something resembling their wild relatives and ancestral form. Quite how this plasticity is held in the genes of these plants (and indeed other plants and animals that respond in similar ways to their environments) is of ongoing interest to scientists. Thus, quite what the family history and immigration story of the plants that I saw in Arizona is, I will probably never know, but every year, the shuffle of genes between plants, across populations, between species, across landscapes will continue, and allow bright splashes of yellow to light up the fields and roadsides. Blackman et. al., 2013; Sunflower domestication alleles support single domestication center in eastern North America; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 108 (34) Kane & Rieseberg, 2008. Genetics and evolution of weedy Helianthus annuus populations: adaptation of an agricultural weed. Molecular Ecology, 17 (1) Rieseberg et. al., 1995; Hybrid speciation accompanied by genomic reorganization in wild sunflowers; Nature, 375 Rieseberg et. al., 2003; Major Ecological Transitions in Wild Sunflowers Facilitated by Hybridization; Science, 301 (5637) |