Postcards from the Planet

The Space Shuttle Atlantis was launched on November 16, carrying not only spare parts for the International Space Station but also two kinds of butterfly larvae — Painted Lady and Monarch caterpillars. The butterflies are going to live in special habitats on the Space Station, and they’re part of an experiment in finding out how living in different gravity affects the development of the larvae. Students across the US will be raising butterflies and comparing them to the ones in space. For updates, photos or video, visit Butterflies in Space.

Craters are clearly visible in this NASA photo of the Earth's Moon.

People have always said that the moon is dry and barren – no ice caps, no water. But recently scientists began to think that might not be true. So NASA researchers came up with the idea of crashing a spacecraft into a lunar crater and then analyzing the dust from the impact. The crash  took place October 9th, 2009. Now NASA has  announced that there is definitely water (in the form of ice) on the moon! Check out the story here: Water on the Moon!

International Space Station Using this link, you can figure out when the International Space Station will be passing over your area. Don’t miss the chance to see it go over you some dark evening! Then you can run back inside to your computer and see the live camera footage from the Space Station — just click here: Space Station camera.

Spiders are carnivores. We all know that. But a Mexican jumping spider turns out to be an omnivore that prefers leaf tips to meat. In an article in last week’s New York Times , Jumping Spider Prefers Green Leaves to Meat, scientists explain how the spider takes advantage of the mutualistic relationship between acacia trees and ants.

Acacia trees provide shelter and food for ants by secreting a sweet nectar that the ants eat; thorns protect the trees from most herbivores and the ants sting other herbivores that approach. But this particular spider–Bagheera kiplingi–dodges the ants and eats the leaf tips of the acacia.

Bagheera is the name of a black panther–a particularly stealthy predator–in Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories, part of The Jungle Book, first published in 1894. The person who first describes and names a new species of plant or animal gets to choose the name. The two people who named this spider–George and Elizabeth Peckham, who described the spider in 1896–must have liked the book!

Scientists  working in the Arctic have found evidence that climate changes – particularly ice coverage – are having effects on the walrus populations there. The retreat of the sea ice, and the fact that fewer ice floes are available as nurseries for walrus pups, are causing difficulties for walruses. Biologists are beginning to consider whether the Pacific walrus should be named an endangered species. This article details some of what the researchers report: Walrus .

Are we living in the Anthropocene age? That would be the time when humanity’s influence becomes the main geological influence on the earth. In this post, Andy Revkin of the New York Times, talks about a new study which seems to show how deeply human influences on the climate – including greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants – are affecting the Arctic. Check it out here: Humans may have ended long Arctic chill .

The New York Times recently reported that oysters, long in decline in Chesapeake Bay, are at long last recovering.
Oysters are on the Rebound in Chesapeake Bay reports that

After decades of overharvesting of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay and many fruitless efforts to replenish them, scientists have re-established a significant population of the shellfish along the Virginia shore.

In the never-ending quest to reduce our electricity bill and our overall carbon footprint, my husband and I have used compact fluorescent bulbs and high-output halogen bulbs for quite some time. We like the natural color of the halogen bulbs, and since most of the time we use dimmer switches, they last a very long time. A 50 watt bulb has a life expectancy of about 3500 hours of light.

But household lighting uses 12% of our electricity bill (according to this source: Wikipedia: Energy use in the US), so imagine my delight when I discovered this new lightbulb: Ushio’s New LED bulbwhich uses 4 watts to produce the same light at a 50 watt bulb. It even has a life expectancy of 50000 hours. It costs five times as much, lasts more than ten times as long (meaning fewer trips up and down ladders), and uses one-tenth of the electricity. I’ve been trying to calculate how much money you’d save over the course of the bulb’s life, and it’s a lot. First off, there’s half the cost of the bulbs (so, $30), and then one-tenth the electricity use. 50,000 hours at 50 watts (2500 kW) would cost another $30 or so (average US cost is $11/kW hour), so one tenth of that is $3. So each bulb would save you $60.

Imagine if EVERYONE switched to these bulbs! One-tenth the bulbs in landfills, one-tenth the electricity use. And $60 more in your pocket for every single bulb you replaced.

It’s been a cool spring where I live in the Pacific Northwest. The cherry trees are late this year, and the tulips are so late that the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, scheduled for April 1st to April 30th, has been extended two weeks, well into May. The tulips weren’t really blooming this year until this week, I’m told by friends who went up last weekend.

The Northwest apricot trees are starting to bloom as well, and the growers are starting to move the bee hives into the field to pollinate the trees. Without bees, there would be very little fruit on the fruit trees here in the Northwest. We need bees to pollinate the apricots and peaches and (of course) the Washington apples for which we are famous. We need bees to pollinate the grapes that are made into Oregon’s wonderful pinot noir wines.

African Honeybees (Photo by Jay Torborg)

In fact, bees (and a few other insects) pollinate pretty much all of our fruits, vegetables, and nuts. (Grains are mostly pollinated by wind.) This link lists the plants that are pollinated by bees: Crop Plants Pollinated by Bees.

Pollination occurs when a bee picks up pollen (from the stamens of the flower) when visiting a flower for its nectar. Then, when the bee flies to the next flower, some of the pollen falls off onto the stigma (or stigmas) of the flower. The pollen is comparable to sperm–it is the male gametes of the flower–and the stigma is a tube that leads directly to the “egg” of the female flower. (Some flowers are both male and female; some are male; some are female. It depends on the kind of plant it is. Plant sex is complicated.)

When the pollen grain lands on the stigma, it sends down a tube to the egg, then sends the DNA down to the tube, and the egg is fertilized.

Once the egg is fertilized, the egg produces a seed and the fruit around the seed. Imagine an apple. The whole apple is there just to persuade an animal to eat the seeds inside the apple. There is all that sweet fruit surrounding the seeds. So the animal eats the apple, and swallows the seeds, and they travel through the digestive tract, and are eventually eliminated, along with a nice bit of fertilizer. (From a plant’s point of view, an animal is just a really good way to get your seeds spread around.)

But without bees, there’d be no fruit.

So when bees are threatened, it’s a really big deal. A few years back, beekeepers discovered that their bees were dying in large numbers. It was called Colony Collapse Disorder and of course scientists started studying it.

Unfortunately, we don’t really know a lot about Colony Collapse Disorder yet, but there are a lot of theories about what to do about making sure we have pollinators. The New York Times had a great column about it a while back: Treatment for Bee Plague.

And researchers at Washington State University say it might not be that bad: Bee experts say Colony Collapse Disorder might not be as bad as first thought. (I have to say that traces of seventy different pesticides sounds pretty awful to me, though.)

What can you do? Plant food for your local bees. Don’t use pesticides.

(Honeybees are actually not native to this country. They were brought here by the first colonists, because they were considered essential. There are native bees that pollinate our native fruits and vegetables, but they need to be encouraged. In the meantime, beekeeping–maintaining hives of honeybees–is a huge business here in the United States. Half a million hives are brought into California every spring just to pollinate the almond trees so that we can all have almonds.)

There are other great websites for more information on bees and how you can help them in your garden! This website will tell you good plants to plant at home for bees: Bee Gardens.

This is a good place to learn more about Colony Collapse Disorder: Plan Bee Central.

Bacteria have found a way to live in almost every environment on our planet. They live in near-boiling hot mud pools at Yellowstone Park; they eat crude oil; they even, says this article: Iron Will to Live for Antarctic Microbes, live under Antarctic glaciers, in environments with almost no oxygen and no carbon.

Most organisms on our planet use respiration to provide energy for their internal functioning. In respiration, oxygen is used to burn carbon compounds (like sugars) to provide energy. Not these bacteria, which use sulfur-based compounds called sulfates.

If you look at the periodic table, you will see that sulfur falls just below oxygen, in the same column. Like carbon, it readily forms complex compounds that store energy. The Antarctic bacteria use iron found in the local rock to react with the sulfur compounds (called sulfates) and obtain energy through a different biochemical method.