Quarantine entry #57 - May 17

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometimes it isn’t so bad, as yesterday we went on a nature trail, and-?

And nothing, and everything, and all things in between. The nature trail, (actually, plural, as there were three of them, of which we completed one, and half-completed another), isn’t that different from the park back home… the park has just a paved path and as such, it is easier to get through.

…But what about the authenticity! – one can just hear the cry. True, but what authenticity? The nature trail may look real – as in wet, swampy, hard to get through, (especially for younger children), but it is largely safe, (provided that parents are there to prevent the children from getting too far into the water, period).

To elaborate: the wildlife there is safe – there are songbirds, (a cage bald eagle, raised in captivity, or two), chipmunks, (also squirrels, probably), waterfowl, (at this time of the year it were ducks), frogs, and snakes – as in garter and water snakes, naturally. The trail itself was peppered with children-friendly log piles, teepees, what else have you, so that the children wouldn’t get bored – and I doubt that there were any poisonous plants either, because children tend to put everything into their mouths, so poisonous plants are a no-no, parent supervision or not. What else?

Enter honeybees. I do not know if the Asian giant hornets were involved – we are on East coast right now, and so far, the giant hornets were found only on West coast instead – but the local honeybees were swarming, or doing something similar: a swarm of theirs was buzzing and flying around a hollow in a conifer tree.

…Honeybees, in particular North American honeybees, are not as aggressive as the Asian giant hornets, let alone the Africanized ‘killer’ bees, but when they are riled up, they can be quite aggressive on their own, especially when children are involved – hence I reckon that they won’t be around that nature trail for too long… or they will be, as the buildings were closed, and the staff appeared to be gone, period. The nature trails remain currently unsupervised, which raises, (for me), a question – how long until life finds a way and the nature trails will need to be reset? I have no idea… and this brings me back to our own park. It’s actually more dangerous than this nature trail complex, because aside from waterfowl, songbirds, squirrels and rabbits, our park also has hawks, (ok, they will never attack humans, unless the latter are bothering their nests, which is unlikely, given a number of factors), red foxes, (which can attack people, if provoked, cornered, or sick), and coyotes, (same as red foxes, but as larger animals that are more dangerous to humans, proportionally). Is it bad? Yes, but this is how nature is – it is not always safe for humans, period. What next?

Today I actually wanted to talk about pandas instead. There are two species of them – the giant panda, which is a ‘true’ bear, just the most ancient one of the modern species, and the red panda, which is a bear cousin, but has its’ own family. It is the size of a small racoon or a large marten, but just as the giant panda, it feeds on bamboo, and has false thumbs on its’ forepaws to better grip and handle the bamboo.

Pandas are not the only mammals that have false thumbs – so have the ‘true’ moles, for example, only their false thumbs have evolved to make their forepaws better digging shovels instead.

…The latest edition of Luke Hunter’s guide to the ‘true’ carnivorous mammals of the world that I had access to claimed that there are two species of the red panda rather than one, but most other sources id them as subspecies instead. There are also two subspecies of the giant panda, (aka the panda bear) – the well-known black-and-white one, and the more obscure cinnamon-brown-and-white one, which is found only in China. Isn’t real life surprising? In addition, sometimes, it does not even suck!..

…Well, this is it for now, I think. See you all soon!

Quarantine entry #46 - May 6

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, though the Asian giant hornets have certainly lived it up, recently.

What is the buzz about them, again? Firstly, they are some of the biggest wasps of the modern time, about 2 inches in length (aka 5 cm), and have a quarter inch stinger (0.625 cm or 62.5 mm, more than half a centimeter long) with venom glands to match. Their stingers can penetrate a standard bee-keeper’s suit and according to Coyote Peterson, the main host of the ‘Brave Wilderness’ show, their sting is second only to the executioner wasp; since Coyote was stung by both the giant hornet and the executioner wasp personally, he knows what he’s talking about.

Secondly, the worst thing about the giant hornets is that they kill honeybees – all that they come across and can devastate a full hive in a matter of hours. The Asian subspecies of honeybees has developed an ingenious way of killing giant hornet scouts, as we’ve talked about it the last time – they envelop the giant wasps in ‘bee balls’ and cook them alive, but the European and North American subspecies of honeybee haven’t evolved this method of anti-hornet defense yet, so their fates are up in the air. What next?

…Well, the fact that Canada, i.e. the province of British Columbia had had an Asian giant hornet problem since last year, (2019), is. Somehow, the rest of Canada as well as USA had blithely ignored it, and this was before COVID-19, so real life sucks, see the disclaimer. Until the thunder rumbles, the peasant shall not cross himself, goes the Russian proverb and it looks as if North America is proving this saying right.

…Of course it can be pointed out that if the giant hornets have existed in North America for several months now and hadn’t brought its’ ecosystems to a crashing halt, (it isn’t admitted very regularly, but the collapse of the honeybee population world-wide is one of recurring nightmares of the Western scientists), it means… exactly what?

I won’t tell a lie – I have no idea just how bad the appearance of the Asian giant hornet will be in North America, but what else worried people about them, is that like the rest of social wasps, only the young queens, (aka breeding females) survive winters, and the rest of the nest perishes, regardless of what the weather is. Actually, this happens to most of honeybee cousins, including some other social bee species, such as the bumblebees; most species of ants, however, keep on living through the winter, even though their way of life is more similar to the wasps’ than the bees’… but we digress.

The point is that if Asian giant hornets arrived in Canada in 2019, they could have had several months to build a breeding nest, release new, fertilized and fertile females, and die during the last winter – but the new queens survived and started new colonies… in theory. So far, what I have seen between the lines of all the reports is that the evidence of an Asian giant hornet presence in North America in 2020 is kind of sketchy – yes, it’s bad, a couple of devastated bee hives at least – but proportionally? It is not that bad, praise Celestia (from the MLP: FiM franchise) for small miracles. 

...So far, no live Asian giant hornets were caught in Canada or the U.S. – not on camera and not literally, and these are big, colorful insects that don’t do subtlety, so surely if they’d established themselves in the New World someone would’ve seen them by now, (or get stung by them?)? Apparently not, which makes me wonder, again, if someone is not making a mountain out of a molehill instead. Anything else?

I admit that I wanted to talk about frogs today, because we have talked about newts (and salamanders earlier). However, then the Asian giant hornets sidetracked me again, but the truth is, they’re a part of Anurans, aka the tailless amphibians, (we’re talking about mature animals, their larvae, the tadpoles, don’t count), and as such, frogs and toads live all over the world, except for the Arctic, the Antarctic, and a few other places, such as northern Africa, (aka the Sahara desert). To a scientist, only the amphibians of the genus Rana are ‘true’ frogs, (and ‘true’ toads belong to the genus Bufo); to a layperson… well…

Let us specify by the fact that we are talking the Northern Hemisphere – Eurasia and North America – only. In the tropics, the anurans come in fully different colors and genera, but in the Northern Hemisphere, well… the frogs, as a rule, are smooth skinned, while the toads are bumpy, ‘warty’, and have a pair of parotid glands at the back of their head – they’re poisonous, while frogs aren’t. Well, the frogs of the genus Rana are not, (one of those species is officially called the edible frog), whereas the poison dart frogs are another matter, of course.

…The coloration is not a very reliable means of telling the two groups apart – there are green colored frogs, but there are also more mottled species, which live further away from the water’s edge, rather as how toads do, but they are shyer than the toads are, and out of the two groups, frogs are the better jumpers, because their hind legs are longer and stronger.

Finally, there’re are their eggs – both groups of tailless amphibians lay them in spring, but the frogs’ eggs just float in a big clump, while toads’ eggs are laid in sticky ribbons around underwater plants. Their tadpoles, ecologically speaking, are similar though, and, of course, the adults of both groups are quite similar too, (even though this group of amphibians have appeared back in Jurassic, featured in the second episode of ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’, for example – as allosaurs hunted sauropods, the first frogs and toads were already jumping away from their thundering tread. Puts things in perspective, you know). Hence the often confusion of the two amphibian groups by humans…

Well, this is it for now. I will see you all soon!

Boulanger's Tree Frog - April 4

…To be brief and to the point: I got my hands on April 2018’s issue of NG; a ‘special issue’, related to race – the human race in general and the various human races (‘colors’? Sorry, if this is the wrong word, but somehow it sounds so appropriate) as well. And?

It is a masterfully done piece of everything, doing its best to be politically correct, factually accurate, repentant of the past deeds and etc. And yet there is a pinch of tar in that jar of honey, and it concerns a frog.

The frog is this month’s endangered animal, featured in NG. It is named ‘Boulanger’s Tree Frog’, and I decided to look it up. The search engines produced nine major frog species that have the name, and one species of tree-dwelling lizards that is also associated with Boulanger – and yet none were a perfect fit to NG’s frog, (to say nothing of the lizard).

So, I looked up its’ Latin, scientific name – Rhacophorus lateralis – and this time I found the mysterious amphibian: it is known as Boulanger’s Tree Frog, but also as the small tree frog, and also – as the winged gliding frog. In other words, this frog doesn’t fly as birds, bats and insects do, but it, and the rest of its’ family, has evolved the webbing between its’ fingers into a parachute of some sort. Since the Boulanger’s Tree Frog in NG is a part of this family, it must be able to glide as well. But…

But none of this was mentioned, the focus here was on the amazing rediscovery of the frog, which fit with the determinedly cautiously optimistic tone of the NG issue. Between that tone and the way this frog got handled by NG – well, how its’ facts got handled – I am treating this NG issue with a grain of salt now. This is all.

Good luck to everyone, and see you all soon!