natural history – Page 3 – The Boreal Beetle

7 May 2015

Wharf borers

Some of the nicest things about the older entomological literature are the short papers that record interesting observations. To some extent these almost seem like the blog posts of that era – reasonably short and pithy with some useful information as well. I really enjoy reading these short accounts, in part because of the interesting natural history information that they contain, and in part because they are often rife with potential research questions. The reality, of course, is that I have neither the budget nor the time to follow up on 99.9% of what can be found in these accounts. Nobody does. But, if nothing else, reading these short notes is a good exercise in brain stretching.

I recently came across one of these notes in the Journal of the Entomological Society of British Columbia. Since I edit this journal, I often end up browsing its pages, and this note by G.J. Spencer (1946) on wharf borers found in pilings in Vancouver caught my eye. It seems that Spencer was asked to take a look at some creatures that were found at the BC Sugar Refinery at the Port of Vancouver. The enquirer was worried that they were Teredo navalis, the naval shipworm. The shipworm is a mollusk, so undoubtedly Spencer was able to immediately identify that the samples were not shipworms but were, in fact, insect larvae. He identified them as Nacerdes melanura, the wharf borer.

Spencer, however, “(found) it hard to believe the details that accompanied (the specimens)”, and he indicates that he went immediately to the wharf. What were these details that initially had Spencer so incredulous? Well it seems that construction work was being done at the site, and the workers had uncovered some old pilings that had been driven about thirty years before. Prior to the pilings being driven, that part of the seafloor was filled with ash and soil. After the pilings were in place more fill was dumped on top of them, concrete was poured over that, and then some buildings were built on top of that foundation. The workers who Spencer encountered had been in the process of demolishing those buildings when they uncovered the old pilings and found the larvae. Spencer himself also dug larvae out of a “…thoroughly soggy piling in which the centre only was of firm though very wet wood.”

Assuming that the historical account received by Spencer at the worksite was correct, that means that the infestation had been in place for some decades with no possibility of later infestation once the concrete was poured. In way of further corroboration of this phenomenon Morris (1980) cites Laing (1936) who observed larvae in wood that had been encased in concrete for seven years. Spencer indicates two logical hypotheses that flow from observations such as these. First, that it is possible that the larvae were introduced to the pilings during initial construction, and the insects were able to complete multiple generations in the same material. Or, second, that it is possible that the larvae of this species can undergo very long diapause or at least very lengthy development when trapped in such a situation.

Either of these possibilities is, of course, interesting. So I dug around a bit more to find out about these strange creatures. However it turns out that the literature is rather sparse. They don’t seem to be major structural pests – which likely explains the rather low amount of research – although they do get mention as pests of wooden archeological artifacts. It seems that people mainly notice them (and call pest control professionals) when large numbers of adults occasionally burst onto the scene, often in damp basements or, interestingly, in the vicinity of toilets. There is no doubt that they like seawater-saturated wood, and saltiness may explain their association with urine as well.

Wharf borers have been documented just about anywhere that humans live. Because they seem to prefer saltwater-soaked timber, they usually are found at marine port cities. But that is not always the case as they have also been found far inland, and a substantial distance from seaports. Their seemingly ubiquitous presence associated with human activity has led to some debate about where they originate, and it is fair to say that centuries of shipping them all over the world have certainly tangled up that problem. But perhaps it is the sort of problem that could be worked out by some population genetics sleuthing.

Some recent work has shown that the larvae maintain enzymes that enable them to break down some components of wood. However it was not clear if those enzymes were from the insect itself or derived from fungi or other microorganisms associated with the larvae. Other papers that I’ve linked in this blog post speculate on whether the insect is digesting wood directly or if it is relying on, or even ingesting, associated microorganisms. That same recent study established that the larval period of the lifecycle is at least reasonable substantial and went some way to determining that temperature may signal the maturing insect to move from one stage to the next.

So it seems that we are dealing with some extremely hardy insects. They can live in the undoubtedly hypoxic environment of water-saturated and rotting wood. Besides that, the water that they prefer to soak their surroundings also has a high salt content. Somehow they are able to make a nutritional living in rotting wood that has undoubtedly has most of its easily available nutrients flushed out of it. And to top it all off, there is good evidence that they can spend at least a few years, if not decades, trapped inside of rotting timbers without further access to the outside world. It’s no wonder that these creatures have found ways to hitch rides with humans all over the world and then have settled in with us – usually mainly hidden from our sight – for the long haul.

Wharf borers are truly amazing little creatures, ones that deserve some further research attention. There are a lot of great questions here, and many of them represent some pretty low-hanging fruit.

2 April 2015

Of dictionaries, buttercups, and time

Perhaps it’s because I live in a small city that is variegated with forests and that is surrounded for hundreds or thousands of kilometers in each direction with wilderness.

Perhaps it’s because my own kids are fortunate enough – in this increasingly technology-cloistered time – to be able to spend large chunks of time outdoors, often with minimal adult supervision.

Perhaps it’s because I work at an institution whose founding vision was towards the natural world around us; and with immediate colleagues who all spend a great deal of their research time in the outdoors.

Perhaps it’s because I work in a field where my closest research colleagues nearby and abroad conduct much of their work in forests, fens, and farmyards.

Perhaps it’s because many of the scientists who have influenced me most – past and present – approach their craft with a view to nature in its full and complex glory.

Just look at my personal Twitter community and you will find entomologists, ecologists, zoologists, botanists, microbiologists, paleontologists, archeologists, geologists, astronomers… and the list goes on. These are all people who – while much of their work is necessarily indoors – cannot answer the questions that they ask of nature without also spending time in nature. And these are a partially representative sample of the people who have influenced me.

So I think that I am often a bit blind to the reality of much of the world where increasing detachment from nature is commonplace. A world where, to quote T.S. Eliot, we are all becoming more and more “distracted from distraction by distraction.” It’s pretty easy, but not excusable, in my situation to forget that the larger culture beyond my family, colleagues, and vocation is changing in ways that bode longterm ill.

This – perhaps subconsciously willful or wishful or wistful? – blindness on my part hit home a month or two ago when I bumped into this article by Robert MacFarlane in which he describes and eloquently comments on the removal of a variety of “nature” words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Some of those words are:

…acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.

New words have taken their place – words that are corporate-economic, screen-driven, and solitary-making.

(As an aside, I deeply shudder that “committee” is among those replacement words. Please, let children grow up without that abomination infesting them until they’re at least in high school.)

The reality, of course, is that removal of a few words by a dictionary is not the cause of the problem, it is merely a symptom. Dictionaries change over time, and they change in a way that reflects the culture in which they exist. If new words emerge and come into common usage, they may show up in a dictionary. If words become unused, they may disappear from the pages or at least be marked as archaic. So what do the recent changes to the Oxford Junior Dictionary mean? I think it’s fair to say that it means that school-aged children – the target audience of this dictionary – aren’t holding buttercups under chins. They aren’t catching amphibians. They aren’t listening to birds. They aren’t playing games among tangles of willows. They are, instead, being influenced toward corporatized indoor loneliness instead of towards a corporate outdoor solitude.

This is is not just happening to the younger generation. If each of us were honest with ourselves, I expect that many – most? all? – of us would also see a shift in our own behavior in fairly recent years. This shift is happening at a time when the conservation crisis is more dire than ever. I don’t imagine that the co-occurrence of detachment and mounting environmental crisis is merely a coincidence. A detached and consumer-driven culture is by definition concerned with distracted consuming, not mindful conserving. How could rampant consumerism, then, ever contribute to conservation of the uncommodifiable natural world? Why should we expect a commercialized, buy-and-dispose attitude to instill exuberant appreciation of nature in its citizens, young and old?

As my former Ph.D. supervisor often says (I’m paraphrasing here, and he may be quoting someone else, but I’m not aware of who that would be):

Nature always answers your question, but you need to know what your question is or you will misinterpret the answer.

My worry is that most of the people who we rub shoulders with each day are less and less equipped to even recognize that nature is speaking to us, let alone to know how to ask the correct questions. So I, along with others, interpret the unfortunate nature-stripping of the Oxford Junior Dictionary as a bellwether and a challenge. The challenge for those of us who are concerned with conservation is to step beyond our small communities, which are not representative of the rest of society, and to incrementally bring a conservation mindset to our own family, friends, and neighbors.

Our shifting culture is a reality, and it would be magical thinking to insist that things are going to change anytime soon, or ever. A few in our concerned community have larger megaphones than others, and we need to encourage and help them to get the word out. But nothing beats the influence that each of us has on our immediate community, and it is there where most of us can work effectively.

If*:

Persuasiveness ∝ (Closeness of a trusted relationship)(Efficacy of the message)

then either factor in the equation can work in our favor.

We should each do our best with efficacy, of course. But we can also take comfort in the fact that however effective our message is, its impact is going to be multiplied by by our relationships. In other words, don’t worry about how loud your megaphone is. Whispering to a close friend still has more impact than shouting in a crowded room of near-strangers.

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*Addendum:

Time spent in relationship is a factor in the development of close trust in a relationship.

Practice is a factor in increasing the efficacy of a message, and time is a factor in practice.

So one can argue that time is a factor in persuasiveness. If that is the case, then it behooves us to dispense with looking for insta-fixes and instead buck the culture of the here-and-now for approaches in which we take time deeply into consideration.

17 October 2014

Conservation basic training

I’m always a good several months behind in reading my National Geographic subscription. Recently I was working my way through the August 2014 issue and got to a fantastic article (I can’t remember very many National Geographic articles that aren’t fantastic) about Franz Josef Land – an isolated archipelago in Russia’s region of the Arctic Circle.

I enjoyed the entire article, of course. But a particular quote that caught me quite off guard and has caused me to ruminate for the past few days. Digesting that glossy cellulose can be difficult for gut microbes. Here’s what I read:

(National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala) was a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, teaching grad students about food webs and marine conservation but dissatisfied with his contribution to the world. “I saw myself as refining the obituary of nature, with increased precision,” he tells me during a conversation aboard the Polaris. His distress at the continuing trends of ecosystem degradation and species loss, in marine as well as terrestrial realms, led him out of academia. “I wanted to try to fix the problem,” he says. So in 2005 he assembled a SWAT team of scientists, including experts on marine microbes, algae, invertebrates, and fish, and sailed for the northern Line Islands, a remote cluster of coral outcrops in the Pacific about a thousand nautical miles south of Hawaii.

Oftentimes there is a disconnect somewhere between what a person thinks, what they say, what a journalist thinks they said, what an editor decides, and what ends up being printed on paper. I’ve experienced that, as has anyone who has been interviewed by the media for just about anything. So I’ll give Dr. Sala the benefit of the doubt here, but will comment on the way that this has been presented by National Geographic.

The implication in this clip of text, intentional or not, is that the job of teaching biology and natural history is task that does not have important conservation implications. I beg to differ.

In fact, I would argue that teaching is at least as important as data collection. Yes, there are the more obvious conservation roles that are more easily noticed than a professor in front of a lecture hall or guiding a group in the field or the lab. These include conservation officers, engaged politicians, park rangers, environment/agriculture/forestry/parks ministry employees, thoughtful farmers and foresters, academic/industry/government scientists, environmental consultants, NGO employees, public health nurses and physicians, and National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence. Those individuals are analogous to the soldiers fighting the battle on the front lines. But, as with any army, those front line soldiers would not do well if they were just dumped in front of the enemy with a loaded rifle and a “good luck.”

Winning battles, and ultimately winning a war, requires that soldiers be trained. Trained to operate independently. Trained to work in teams. Trained to understand the terrain. Trained to work with the equipment. Trained to get results. Academic teaching done correctly and enthusiastically – and with a focus on natural history and conservation – is a vital part of the basic training that conservation professions require in order for efficacy. Dr. Sala is undoubtedly the engaged conservationist and excellent scientist that he is in some very large part due to that basic training in an academic setting.

Beyond that, those of us who collect and synthesize data have not done our jobs completely if we do not also bring those results and their implications to a wider scientific and lay public. By participating in this National Geographic feature (indeed, by working for National Geographic) Dr. Sala has simply exchanged his teaching role from a classroom to the pages of a magazine. When we conduct research and then present it at a conference, in a scientific paper, in a classroom or field course, in a textbook, in a magazine, or on a radio or television program, we are teaching. Teaching, in whatever context, goes hand-in-hand with the scientific endeavor. I am taught when I read a colleague’s paper, even if I am reading her paper decades after she wrote it. She wrote it to teach me and others about phenomena that she had observed. When I take what I have learned from her study into the classroom and present it well, my students, I would hope, are better off for it and are better prepared as engaged conservationists as they prepare to work to protect habitats, species, ecosystems, and societies.

There is no doubt that the work of conservation in the face of massive, global anthropogenic influence is a vital and growing concern. Looking at the data, it sure seems that we are too often losing important battles. Dr. Sala is correct to be concerned about being caught up in “…refining the obituary of nature…” But the best way to stop writing that obituary is to bring the wonder and amazement and necessity of our natural world into the metaphorical “classroom” by bringing relevant research results (our own and those of others) to students. This is one of the best ways to create authentic, engaged, and active young conservationists who will fill traditional conservation roles or who will be conservation vocationists and ambassadors in whatever profession they ultimately choose.

Teaching is the hard and often unnoticed basic training work of conservation. And that’s why I choose to do it.

17 September 2014

Finding something new

It seems that, with this post, I have inadvertently blogged a three-part series on why field work matters. In part 1 I wrote about the value of getting out, rather than being stuck behind a desk. In part 2 I wrote about the idea of place and how regular field work in one discrete location is important in terms of both understanding a system and for developing a conservation mindset. In this final (I think) part, I would like to write about the importance of novel experiences in the field.

In July I accompanied Dr. Aynsley Thielman, a postdoctoral associate in my lab, on her first visit to some high elevation, coastal field sites. Our particular task was to spend a couple of days intensively surveying the arthropod fauna in various habitats, and we were set to access the sites by helicopter. I’ve flown in helicopters on a number of occasions prior to this, but only for general reconnaissance purposes. This was the first time that I was going to be dropped off in a remote location. While the pilot was planning to stay with us, the reality in these mountainous situations is rapid shifts in weather and visibility. That meant that the pilot would give us very little notice before starting up the machine and leaving if he thought there was a safety risk. That, in turn, meant that besides efficient packing of field gear, we had to be prepared to potentially survive a night or two on the mountain before we could be flown down again. This was an interesting challenge, and one that I had never encountered before as most of the work that I have ever done is in locations accessible by well-traversed logging roads. I was, to be honest, a bit nervous leading up to the trip.

Those nerves dissipated rapidly, however, as soon as we were in the chopper and flying over the phenomenal landscapes of British Columbia’s central coastal mountains. And if just getting there was great, being there was doubly great. It’s hard to fully express in words how beautiful this place is. On the first day, we were beset by banks of clouds that meant that our pilot had to keep us moving quite quickly from site to site. But even so, the sight of clouds all around, the wind-stunted trees, the heather meadows, and the strange soil crusts kept us continually fascinated. The second day was as warm and sunny-beautiful a day as you can imagine – a complete reversal from the first day – and we were able to spend many hours in two discrete sites, looking under rocks for spiders, poking in the heather, sweeping trees, and waiting near flowers for pollinators.

By the end of two days of glorious collecting, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go back to my desk. I was certainly jealous of Aynsley and the summer students who were going to be going up there several more times over the course of the summer.

This was a unique experience in my career as a biologist. Most of my field work experience has been in the, relatively speaking, lower elevation forests of the interior of British Columbia. On the mountain, on the other hand, I was taller than most of the trees at one of the sites; and the “canopy” at the other site was the heather and wildflowers. And we were dealing with a whole host of arthropods, and none of them were bark beetles (although I do need to get in closer to inspect the boles of some of those trees next time I’m up there). I found that being in a unique field site – one that is beyond my normal travels – helped to prod my brain towards fresh thinking. It is easy, I think, to lose some degree of that freshness when doing the same thing repeatedly in the same type of situation. An entirely new ecosystem, a different mode of transportation, and the challenges that go with this kind of field work stimulate the mind or, perhaps, rouse it from potential lethargy.

It might also be worth noting that some of the noted naturalists of bygone eras – think Darwin on the Beagle or Wallace in the Malay Archipelago, for instance – spent some part of their careers in fairly continuous motion to new and vastly different areas. I could never hope to accomplish what either of these preeminent scientists did in terms of turning the study of biology upside down. But I think it would be fair to say that getting out of what they were used to on the British Isles to new contexts allowed them to see patterns that they may have never noticed if they had stayed put. In Darwin’s case, the experience took some time to set in, but was instrumental in the development of the idea. In Wallace’s case, the idea came to him in the context of his experience. In either case one might argue that experiencing a unique field situation can help to make a scientist alert to new ideas. And this may be an outcome of the mind being stimulated toward fresh thinking.

Finally, new experiences like this can serve to remind us about the bigger picture. It is easy to get complacent about the “known” when we travel to our regular sites that we think that we understand so well. But how much do we really know, even of those sites? Spending time in a place that is unique to you – and where almost everything that you see is new – is a good reminder of how little we actually know. It should stimulate a researcher to return to their regular field locations with fresh eyes and a new realization about how much we still have to learn.

I know that it has done that for me. And I can’t wait to get back.

5 September 2014

Place and rhythm

In “The Dry Salvages,” part of his Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot wrote the following*:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

A large part of my field work over the past summer was taken up by weekly trips to a river near Prince George for work on a project with Dr. Daniel Erasmus and an intrepid NSERC summer student, Claire. On each trip we visited a number of locations along the length of the river and sampled mayfly nymphs and adults, along with whatever else came up in our sampling efforts. Once a week from May until August, rain or shine, two or three of us would set out from UNBC and would spend the day on the river. I was fortunate to be in on most of those trips, and my regular visits to the river’s “strong brown god” reminded me of the importance of not just getting out to do field work, but also getting out to the same location on a regular basis.

My regular trips meant I was able to watch and experience-via-chest-waders the seasonal ebb and flow of the river. We saw the exploding emergence and seeming imploding disappearance of one fascinating insect species after another. Some weeks we would find a few larvae or nymphs on the vegetation. In following weeks we’d find more. And then even more suddenly than they had appeared on the reeds, they were gone. Asters were not blooming, and then they were blooming, and then they were setting seed. Some days were spent mingling with the scent of wild roses on the bank while we worked, and other days the roses were gone. We could watch the bumblebees focus on one flower species, and then another, and then another as the summer progressed. We were greeted many weeks at one site by a loud family of ravens and sometimes a bald eagle as well. Northern pike minnows spawned at our feet while we sampled a site on one afternoon. Some days were blazing hot, on others we shivered in our rain gear.

And the whole time I got to know the river in a way that I could not have if I had only spent a day or two there. Over the course of the summer, the winding course of the river became a place to me. That is, the river is a geographical location that I now know in a way that makes it more than another spot on a map. And even more than that, it has become a spot that I care about in more than just an abstract way.

I have had other “places” like this in my life, as have we all. A stretch of the Bow River right in downtown Calgary that I have fished and walked along more times than I can count. A hillside called McHugh Bluff, across the street from the house that I grew up in in Calgary and where I spent much of my childhood wandering and hunting magpies with a slingshot (for those concerned, I was always unsuccessful, which is either a testament to my aim or to the intelligence of corvids). A nondescript site on the side of a mountain outside of Lytton, British Columbia where I spent many of my Ph.D. spring field seasons trapping Douglas-fir beetles.

The thing that each of these places have in common is the fact that I have not only spent some time in them, but I have spent large amounts of time there, across a season or seasons, being actively engaged in the landscape. I have been to many, many locations in my life. I have only had the time to develop a small number of places.

In his essay, “The Sense of Place,” Wallace Stegner writes about placed and displaced individuals:

To the placed person (the displaced person) seems hasty, shallow, and restless. He has a current like the Platte, a mile wide and inch deep. As a species, he is non-territorial, he lacks a stamping ground. Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none. Culturally he is a discarder or transplanter, not a builder or conserver. He even seems to like and value his rootlessness, though to the placed person he shows the symptoms of nutritional deficiency, as if he suffered from some obscure scurvy or pellagra of the soul.

And this takes us back to the snippet from the Eliot poem. Eliot identifies the way that we often interact with nature. That is, we either find it “useful… as a conveyor of commerce” or we cloister ourselves into cities, become “worshippers of the machine.” Then, cloistered in concrete, we not only forget about the river, but we also “unhonour” and “unpropitiate” it and all that it represents.

But Eliot subtly also seems to provide a remedy for the growth of detachment in the several lines that follow. Specifically:

His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

That is, the river’s seasonal rhythm continues to call, even after it has been tamed by bridges. Those who are consumed with technology and modernity in general have the opportunity to listen, or to ignore. Biologists and other naturalists have a unique opportunity to be listeners, to move with the river’s rhythm, and then to carry that rhythm back to those who have not yet responded to it. This, of course, requires that we take the time for regular contemplation of the river, the forest, the soil, the pinned or pressed specimens, and the wise written words of those who have studied these things in times past.

So take some time out of your day or week to hear the rhythm that is calling. And then, once you have listened to it, make the effort to relate it to those who have not yet found the time or inclination to do so. Only then, one place at time, will others also deeply understand the need for conservation of the places that they come love.

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*Yes, I’m aware that the “river god” in Eliot’s Four Quartets has larger implications relating to what is knowable and what is unknowable. But I believe that this passage also works in this context. Opinions may vary.