Search results matching tags 'life' and 'biology'

An afternoon on the dredge spoils

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 20:10:00 GMT

It's silly season--a pope getting beatified, royalty getting married. We need costumes for these, lots of costumes. And music! And, oh, isn't it all so grand!

And under the Delaware Bay stir the ancient longings of ancient critters, crawling up from the cool, dark muck, to dance under the moon again, as they have for millions of years.

I spent the afternoon atop a mountain of dredge fill, surrounded by the skeletal remains of horseshoe crabs and scallops, fish and whelk. Tiny flies congregated in the cracks, worshiping the death that keeps them alive. A hawk hovered a hundred yards away, eying the last moments of its prey below.

In the garden sits a robin's egg, intact but fading under two weeks of sun. A few volunteer basil plants erupted a few feet away. Last year's Brussels sprouts are now a riotous yellow.

Each time I wander outside, I am reminded how the story ends, as I am reminded how the story starts, a story without fine linen or fine music, and a story without end.

Every day I share pieces of the story with my students, and every day it surprises them, as every day, it surprises me.

Photos by us, use them as you will. Another beautiful day.

Science snob

Anonymous — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 21:44:00 GMT

This one's for me. No need to read it, nothing to see. Move along, move along....

Everywhere plants
Flourish among graves,

Sinking their roots
In all the dynasties
Of the dead.

Seamus Heaney, from "A Herbal"

I believe, truly believe, that if you pay attention, real attention, to anything, you cannot help but be smitten by Seamus Heaney, soil, or horseshoe crabs.

Or smitten by any number of the seemingly infinite variety of life and circumstance around us.

So call me a snob. A science snob.

***

Yesterday I found two new "wasps" in my roly-poly terrarium. Then I stumbled upon Seamus Heaney's latest book, Human Chain, while warming up in the Montclair Book ~~Store~~ Center. I bought it.

Last night I saw Michael Franti. Hugged him, even. He reminds me why this human thing rocks.

Stared at morning glories at noon, flared open in the dying October light. Our brains tell us that daylight is daylight. The morning glories say otherwise.

Today I got to kick leaves with my toes on the Green.

I chatted with a new security guard at school--turns out I was her doc way back when when the big blue bus visited her neighborhood.

Then I learned that my black wasps were really harmless soldier flies--I got this from The Dirt on Soil, one of my favorite blogs.

All in 24 hours. None of this expected, none of it earned.

The soldier fly on the finger photo from Rock Hill High School, via The Dirt on Soil blog.
The morning glory is mine.

Leslie babysat Seamus' kids over 30 years ago.
Funny how that goes.

A dandelion's life

Anonymous — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:08:00 GMT

Here's a question I would love to pose to my sophomores:

Is the spark of human life more valuable than a dandelion's?

I am not asking which organism is more valuable, more productive, more useful, or more sacred....though you might be surprised at how I answer those.

Is the flame of life, whatever that happens to be, identical for humans and dandelions?

***

Life, once gone, is gone for good. A chain that extends back more than 3 billion years, millions upon millions of millions of generations, has broken. The flame of life within you, that is you, has been lit since before the dinosaurs, before life came onto land, before oxygen filled the air.

Like fire, you can pass your life onto new creatures, who can spread the flame further and further again and again long after you have gone.

If you go back far enough, you and the dandelion sitting in your yard come from a common ancestral species. Everything alive comes from prior organisms that were alive. You and the dandelion are related. Literally.

Like fire, so long as even a small flame exists, it can spread, and remain the same fire, even as the original source of the flames is snuffed out. We deify the Olympic flame for a reason.

***

Witnessing the death of a human under your hands is rarely clean. Death happens in errant steps, but the final break is startling. I have seen more than my share fair of human deaths, and every one of them startled me. I have lost a few close people. Each death changes me. One nearly destroyed me.

Still, I think nothing of digging up a dandelion and tossing it in the compost bin.

Is there anything substantially different between the flame of the dandelion and the flame within me?

***

What's the point of the exercise, why should I use it for class?

We are studying biology, we are studying life, we are studying something that gets to the core of our existence. My lambs are at a wonderful age--young adolescents start to question pretty much everything as their bodies betray childhood.

Just about all of my students (and the rest of us as well) see life as discrete units--organisms. We grieve when we grieve because we lose organisms we love, not because the universe suddenly has a smidgeon less living mass.

The spark of life of my parents, dead as both are, still exists in me and my siblings. In me and my cousins. In me and all the descendants of those lives that first arose from the soup that existed when tides were violent and the Earth still quite warm.

The spark of life that was in my parents came from the same source that spark the dandelion.

We are all cousins.

***

Eye rolls:

OK, enough philosophy crap, Dr. D, what does this have to do with anything?
And will it be on the test?

We teach children that the DNA of the bacteria in their poop codes exactly the same way ours does. Indeed, human insulin today come from engineered E. coli. Yes, that E. coli.

We share many proteins with plants, coded with similar sequences of DNA, because we come from the same ancestors.

This is a big deal if you take time to think about it. We rarely take the time, because, well, the state test is coming, we still have to cover a few dozen more standards.

Still, if I can get the kids to see, really see, life as a messy web with all kinds of tentacles emerging from some common events a long time ago, then maybe, just maybe, I can get them to see plants as alive us we are.

If they get that, then evolution becomes interesting.

If a student passes the state exam without knowing that, then the state exam isn't worth the student's time.

OK, a few things:

Yes, I am aware that the Hadean period may have been a
lot cooler than earlier believed, the sun's output lower, etc.--
here's a nice summary of recent thinking on that from the New York Times.

No, we do not share 50% of our DNA with bananas--another topic for another day.

The dandelion is from Wikimedia, by Loyna

Vats of human insulin lifted from Scott's Web Log: January 2008. Credit attached.

Know your place

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:39:00 GMT

I once knew an educated lady, banded by Phi Beta Kappa, who told me that she had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year proclaim the revolving seasons to her well-insulated roof. Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?

Aldo Leopold, 1949
Sand County Almanac

I caught a few fluke today. I picked a few beans. I saw jellyfish under my paddle, black-backed gulls over it.

The yellowlegs are already heading south for the winter--the sun blazed today, but not quite as long as yesterday. The days are shortening.

And in September I'll have over a hundred kids who know nothing, who have been trained to know nothing, and most will know nothing when they leave.

They take biology because the state says they must, if they plan to graduate.
They take biology because that's what follows physical science.
They take biology because it's what sophomores are expected to do.

I teach biology because I, even (or especially) as I age, marveling more each moment I breathe. I am drunk in July with sunshine and sea water, staggering around the garden in the late hot sun, trying to see every creature I can see.

I have never regretted a minute under the open sky. (Oh, I've regretted stepping on bees, getting caught in storms, swimming through jellyfish, but never being outside.) You cannot teach biology under fluorescent lights.

What am I doing? What are any of us doing?

That's Leslie a couple of evenings ago--we play a lot on the bay.
We all need to play. even high school sophomores.
Especially high school sophomores.

Our horseshoe crab trip

Anonymous — Sat, 22 May 2010 12:47:00 GMT

What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?

from Why regret?
Galway Kinnell

Yesterday we took over 160 high school students to Sandy Hook to see horseshoe crabs.

A few had never seen the ocean before.
A few dared let a fiddler crab tickle their palms.
A few touched a live striped bass, a yard long and just pulled from the ocean.
A few saw an osprey glide of the bay.
A few held comb jellies in a sea water puddle in their cupped hands.
One lost his flip flop to the muck.

I have no idea how much "biology" my lambs learn in the classroom. I suppose they learn as much as anyone else required to sit for the New Jersey EOC Biology Exam, and after 10 years of mandatory schooling, they're pretty good at taking tests about things they do not get (as no one does) to please folks they never met (as we all do).

I have no idea how to test what a child learns as his foot gets caught in the muck, a gray cloud now hiding his footprint, the sweet smell of life and death mingling in mud.

I do know this. The children were as alive as I have ever seen them. I suspect that many of them will carry vivid moments tucked between their amygdalas and their cortical gyri.

We are trained to keep the mulch and the muck hidden from the children, the classroom is safer (and much easier) that way. It was fun to teach real ~~biology~~ life for a day.

I bet even Arne might get it if he spent some time mucking around....

Yep, same photo--I love it. Look at the twists and turns, decisions made
by a chilled tiny horseshoe crab on a late February morning.

Androcles and the green crab

Anonymous — Sun, 09 May 2010 00:13:00 GMT

My son and I went to Sandy Hook today to scout for our multi-class horseshoe crab trip scheduled later this month. We solved the more pressing issues (a Park Ranger will open the latrines, we'll bring the toilet paper), then meandered around the park.

Today a congregation's worth of fiddler crabs appeared to synchronously wave their claws at my son as he stared at them from a small wooden bridge, an osprey eyed us from her nest, and I felt a hermit crab tickle my hand as it made its escape. I have gone to the shore's edge thousands of times, and every time I see something unexpected.

Today's story, though, is not mine--it belongs to a U.S. Park Ranger, and he trusted me enough to share it with me.

The Sandy Hook Park Rangers regularly schedule walks along the beach. At this particular walk, only one person showed up, a woman in heels carrying a large black purse. One person is enough for a tour, so the two made their way to the shore's edge.

While the blue claw crab gets all the glory around here, the green crab occasionally shows its snippy smaller self around here. The few times I have found one, it was quick to scurry away, though one did nip me pretty good when I tried to grab it.

As the Ranger and his tourist stood by the water's edge, a green crab crept out of the bay, unusual enough. Even more remarkable, though, was what followed--the crab walked right up to the Ranger and the woman.

The Ranger stopped down to pick it up, well aware of the green crab's penchant for pinching. This one did not even try. While showing the crab to the woman, the ranger noticed that a tiny mussel was nestled in the apron (underside) of the crab. To the ranger, it appeared that the crab was in pain.

(No, I do not know how a ranger knows this--but if anyone would, a U.S. Park Ranger would.)

Using the woman's purse as the operating table and his knife as a scalpel, the ranger gently scraped at the byssal threads holding the mussel to the crab, finally freeing the crab from its tormentor.

The crab returned to the water.

We really know nothing about what other critters know. Nothing.

No, I did not make this up--and I doubt the Ranger did either.
The photo is indirectly via wikimedia,

Yes, I know, the Androcles analogy does not work well. I just like the title.