Sunday, March 28, 2010

Happy Spring!





I've been feeling pretty guilty for not writing so long. It's not quite that I wanted this blog to languish. Mostly just that I got distracted by somewhat less-important matters. This time around, I'm going to avoid making promises about consistent updating, but I do hope to write more often.






Okay, so to get right to it. My friend Carhenge (for the fantastically tacky Nebraska sculptural monument) has recently gotten into the swing of blogging. She's focusing on her fresh commitment to living car-free in a pedestrian-unfriendly city (our hometown of Omaha, Nebraska). Check out OmahaBePretty here.



Also! I just watched two very upbeat and invigorating videos, pep-talk style, and I wanted desperately to share them with you. (You can watch them in higher quality here at Eight Principles and here at Five Big Questions.) Welcome to 2010, brothers and sisters! Or, if you're more of a live-in-the-moment kind of person: Welcome to MARCH 28, 2010!









Thursday, November 5, 2009

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Monday, November 2, 2009

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Sunday, October 25, 2009

A Bit of Beauty: Installment #2

As personal as academic writing should be!

"In Earth Muse: Feminism, Nature, and Art, Carol Bigwood defines home as 'a nomadic place, an unfinished place of variable historical and geographical boundaries, but a belonging-place nonetheless.' I can list the conscious reasons why Nebraska is now my belonging place. When I was four and five, my father worked at the CB&Q railroad shops in Havelock, Nebraska. Consequently, I began the first of twenty-some years of schooling at Hartley Elementary in Lincoln, Nebraska. Fresh out of college I was hired to teach English at Westside High School in Omaha. After three years of teaching, I returned to southeastern Iowa, where my son, Ian, was born (though he was conceived in Nebraska) and I attended graduate school in Western Illinois. Four years later, Ian and I moved to Lincoln. During the seven-year period that followed, I published my writing, married, bore a daughter, Meredith, earned a Ph.D., and divorced. And during that time, I became aware of the natural world in a way that I had not been before. Thus, the first and only landscape I've known both objectively and intimately is Nebraska's grasslands.

"Perhaps like monarch butterflies who migrate north from Mexican forests in relays each spring and summer, the females laying their eggs along the way, new generations replacing the old, I too was driven to this place by a memory older than me. When I returned to Lincoln for graduate school, I rented an apartment and later a house in the Russian Bottoms north of the train yards, a neighborhood settled by Germans from Russia in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Each evening I walked this neighborhood, learning its history from the buildings, the residents, and later, from books. Upon hearing my last name, some of the elderly residents asked if they could heft my long, hay-colored braid to see if it was as heavy as a mother's, grandmother's, sister's, wife's. An old man who lived across the alley often tried to converse with me in a language that resembled German. Several years later my brother showed me what he had collected about Knopp family history. He discovered that our paternal great-grandparents' first attempt at homemaking following their arrival in America in the 1890s was not in Burlington, Iowa, but in Hastings, Nebraska.

"These Knopps (pronounced Kuh-nop) already knew something of exile. When the German government demanded military service of their men in the eighteenth century, they moved to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, a German. For over a century, my father's father's people lived in insular German communities and farmed the Ukrainian steppes during their sojourn until again military service was demanded of them, this time by the czar. My father's family did not leave soon enough. Knopp males were conscripted into the Russian army or the Russian navy. In Nebraska, my grandfather's people were neither Germans nor Russians, but Germans from Russia or 'Roosians.' A few years after their arrival in Hastings, Nebraska, years made difficult by a long, severe drought, my Knopp ancestors settled in Iowa, where rain was more plentiful and the Mississippi ran its banks most springs. There they were simply Germans.

"Perhaps other reasons that I neither know nor can name bind me to this place, not a place in which I sojourn, but a place to which I belong and that belongs to me."

- The Nature of Home, Lisa Knopp (pgs. 4-5)

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

A Bit of Beauty

Passage of the Day

(Section) 36.

"Picture an island that's totally empty of life. It's just a mound of bare rock, surrounded by water.

Why would this island be empty? One possible reason: because it's volcanic and newborn, a mountain of lava lately rise from a vent on the ocean floor. Steaming and sterile, it might be a recent addition to the Hawaiian chain, forty or fifty miles southeast of Mauna Loa. It might be the island of Surtsey, freshly erected near Iceland in November of 1963. It might be one of the Galápagos group, which were young and uninhabited just a few million years ago.

There's another possibility: It might be Krakatau, an old island newly sterilized.

Krakatau is a shrine to island biogeographers because its ecosystem was obliterated and founded anew within scientific memory. This gave it the significance of a vast natural experiment on the dynamics of recolonization. Of course, Krakatau's recolonization wasn't so carefully controlled or so thoroughly monitored as experimentalism ideally demands. But since evolutionary biology and island biogeography are both descriptive sciences more than experimental ones, and since even descriptive scientists covet the hard validation that experimentalism seems to provide, the Krakatau case has been extremely valuable.

similar rafts with trees growing on them have been seen after
hurricanes; and it is easy to understand how, if the sea
were tolerably calm, such a raft might be carried along by a
current, aided by the wind acting on the trees, till after a
passage of several weeks it might arrive safely on the shores
of some land hundreds of miles away from its starting
point. Such small animals as squirrels and field-mice might
have been carried away on the trees which formed part of
such a raft, and might thus colonise a new island; though,
as it would require a pair of the same species to be thus
conveyed at the same time, such accidents would not doubt
be rare.

Occasionally there is even eyewitness evidence of animal transport. Wallace went on to mention the case of a large boa constrictor that rafted its way to the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies, almost two hundred miles off the South American coast. The snake arrived 'twisted round the trunk of a cedar tree, and was so little injured by its voyage that it captured some sheep before it was killed'--an instance of successful dispersal followed by failed establishment.

And sometimes the natural flotsam might even be mineral, not vegetable--which brings us back to Krakatau. Among the various types of geological debris ejected during the explosions was pumice, a lightweight and sponge-structured volcanic glass. In its frothier form, pumice will float, and rafts of the stuff littered southern seas for as long as two years after the Krakatau eruption. Some of those pumice rafts drifted together into jams, clogging inlets on the coast of Sumatra; some washed ashore in South Africa, five thousand miles to the west; some floated eastward beyond Guam. One traveler described the concentration of floating pumice offshore from Java, with individual lumps clustered together over acres of ocean, each lump as big as a sack of coal. Another man, a ship's captain named Charles Reeves who encountered pumice on the Indian Ocean, lowered a boat for a closer look. 'It was curious and interesting to note how it had bee utilized by animals and low types of life as habitations and breeding places,' he reported. 'There were creeping thing innumerable on each piece.' Although Reeves confessed himself insufficiently learned to list them all by name, he did notice crabs and barnacles, and he saw small fish gathered underneath for feeding. Obviously the crabs, barnacles, and other 'low types of life' had climbed aboard after these lumps of ballistic pumice achieved splashdown; seeds, eggs, and adults of various terrestrial creatures had no doubt gotten onto them too, carried short distances by wind or wing or else picked up when the rafts made passing contact with a shoreline. A modern study of the Krakatau event suggests that similar eruptions over the centuries, tossing out huge quantities of floating pumice, have been important factors in the dispersal of species.

A more obvious mode of dispersal is long-distance flying. But even this isn't so straightforward as it might seem. Many species of bird and insect are reluctant to cross even modest stretches of sea. They will fly anywhere in a forest, but they won't commit themselves offshore. In the Solomon archipelago east of New Guinea, for instance, three species and several subspecies of white-eye (the genus is Zosterops) remain isolated from one another on closely neighboring islands. Likewise on Salawati and Batanta, two small islands off the western tip of New Guinea--they stand less than two miles apart, but the gap seems to have been wide enough to forestall the dispersal of seventeen bird species from one to the other. The gap between mainland New Guinea and the large island of New Britain is somewhat wider, forty-five miles. That has been distance enough to keep about 180 species of New Guinea birds from colonizing New Britain. And there's the case of Bali and Lombok, where Wallace noticed that some bird species had made the short crossing while many others had not.

It's not simply that the strong-flying species travel and the weak-flying species remain sedentary. Ecological or behavioral factors are also involved. Sea birds such as albatrosses, shearwaters, frigate birds, and pelicans make long ocean journeys, of course; since they can soar effortlessly for miles and rest on the water's surface, those species aren't much dependent on terra firma. Among land birds it's a trickier matter. Some species and groups of species are more inclined than others toward reckless or accidental ocean transits. High on the list of good travelers is the pigeon family.

The typical pigeon is a slightly plump bird with a small head and strong wings, adapted to a diet of seeds and fruit, for which it might be accustomed to make seasonal migrations. Those traits seems to predispose it toward transoceanic journeys. True pigeons and pigeon descendants are disproportionately well represented on some of the most remote islands. Sâo Thomé, a small nub of land offshore from West Africa, supports five species of pigeon. Anjouan, in the Indian Ocean north of Madagascar, also claims five different pigeons. Samoa has the tooth-billed pigeon and the white-throated pigeon. Palau has the Nicobar pigeon and the Palau ground-dove. New Guinea and its surrounding islands harbor forty-five pigeon species, roughly one-sixth of the world's total. And the Mascarene Islands have known their own generous share of pigeons and pigeon-like birds, among which the dodo is only the most famous. On Mauritius, a beautiful red-white-and-blue creature called the pigeon Hollandais (Alectroenas nitidissima) had followed the dodo into extinction by about 1835, and the pink pigeon (Nesoenas mayeri) is in jeopardy of extinction at this moment. The other Mascarenes,Réunion and Rodrigues, each harbored a large, flightless species of solitaire (Ornithaptera solitaria on Réunion, Pezophaps solitaria on Rodrigues) that, like the dodo, had pigeon affinities.

What's unusual about this roster of endemic pigeons is not just the breadth of dispersal but the breadth of diversity. The pigeon ancestors traveled commonly enough to colonize many islands--but they traveled rarely enough that, once they had colonized, they were likely to be sufficiently isolated for evolutionary divergence. In many cases, the divergence entailed loss of their ability to disperse.

The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth--that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but extinct. It's our reminder that insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom.
- David Quammen,The Song of the Dodo:
Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction
(pgs. 141-147)


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