Bluebird

March 19, 2012, 7:45 AM

A Spring Sprung Too Soon Is a Death Blow to Butterfly

By JOSIE GARTHWAITE

Carol L. BoggsAn early snow melt can cause a cascade of negative effects on the Mormon fritillary butterfly.

Early snow melts caused by climate change could deliver a mighty one-two punch to the delicate Mormon fritillary butterfly, shrinking the insect’s favored nectar supply, killing caterpillars and causing a steep population decline, a new studyin the journal Ecology Letters finds.

In all, the researchers report, the combined effects of two consecutive years of early snow melt explained as much as 84 percent of the variation seen in the fritillary’s population growth rate between 1980 and 2005.

“It is very unusual for research to uncover such a simple mechanism that can explain almost all of the variation in growth rate of an insect population,” one of the study’s co-authors, David W. Inouye, a biology professor at the University of Maryland, said in a statement.

The deadly power of an early snow melt has to do with the particulars of the butterfly’s life cycle. During the first summer of a female fritillary butterfly’s life, she lays eggs and dies. Caterpillars from these eggs spend the winter without food and become adult butterflies the following summer.

The adult butterflies eat nectar, mostly from the aspen fleabane, which blooms from mid-late July to mid-late August — the peak of the fritillary flight season. The number of eggs laid has been found to depend upon how much nectar the fritillary consumes, according to laboratory experiments cited in the journal paper.

By analyzing decades of data on fritillary populations, aspen fleabane blooms and snow melt dates in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, scientists discovered that one early snow melt can throw these phases out of whack. Working out of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Dr. Inouye and the the study’s other author, Carol L. Boggs, found that two consecutive years of early snow melt and frosts at the beginning of the growing season make matters worse for the fritillary.

That is because early season frosts can kill both young caterpillars and aspen fleabane buds. As snow begins to melt, signaling winter’s end, the caterpillars and fleabanes enter a development stage in which they are poorly equipped to survive frost. If flower buds are killed off early in the season, that means less nectar will be on tap for each butterfly come summer, which in turn leads to fewer eggs. So the adults are eating less and laying fewer eggs, while the next generation is being struck down by frost.

Dr. Boggs and Dr. Inouye considered more than 30 years of records on the first day of bare ground, and the number of aspen fleabane flowers blooming in seven wildflower plots in the Elk Mountains of Colorado. They analyzed the annual population density of male fritillaries during nine pairs of sequential years between 1980 and 2005.

Estimated population densities during that time spanned two orders of magnitude, ranging from just 28 males per hectare (2.47 acres) in 1985, apparently due to a severe snowstorm in late June, to nearly 4,500 males per hectare in 1980. More often, the researchers found fewer than 2,000 fritillary males per hectare.

The road is not getting any easier for the Mormon fritillary, said Dr. Boggs, a professor of biology at Stanford.

“We already can predict that this coming summer will be a difficult one for the butterflies,” she said in a statement, “because the very low snowpack in the mountains this winter makes it likely that there will be significant frost damage.”

 

The umbrella was originally invented to protect people from the hot sun...

Indeed a brilliant multi-tasking invention, especially on a day like today.  It's been coming down at a steady pace all day long. No boot camp for me. I am a weenie for sure.

 

 

 



Sun in front of fog

The sun is out, but the fog is covering the canyon. The air temperature too has a split personality. Depending where I stand, it's warm and cool at the same time.

Weather here

Last week-mukluks. This week-flip flops. Schizophrenic as it is lately, you gotta love the Cali weather.

Ice Bar

October 11, 2011, 2:40 pm

A Glacial Ice Bar in Patagonia

By PAOLA SINGER

Courtesy of Glaciarium

The first ice bar in Patagonia, Argentina, opened last week just outside the town of El Calafate. GlacioBar, billed as the only bar in the world made out of glacial ice, is the latest addition to Glaciarium, a new science museum dedicated to the region’s hundreds of glaciers.

Visitors to the bar receive futuristic-looking capes, gloves and boots for warmth. Still, the maximum allowed stay is 20 minutes, just enough time to try the house cocktail: Fernet con Coca, a bitter, aromatic digestive served with Coca-Cola.

The modern, 25,000-square-foot Glaciarium, which stands alone on a vast stretch of land overlooking the mountaintops of Los Glaciares National Park, was designed to resemble a series of ice blocks.
Inside, there are multimedia exhibitions that explain the transformation of snow into ice, the behavior of glacial masses and how they can be affected by climate change, plus a convincingly human robot representing the 19th-century explorer Francisco Moreno, called El Perito Moreno. (Patagonia’s most famous glacier was named after him.)

There is also an auditorium for film festivals, recitals and other events.

warming trend continues

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September 28, 2011, 7:40 am

Arctic Shelves Have Lost Half Their Size in Six Years

By IAN AUSTEN

Denis Sarrazin/ReutersThe Ward Hunt ice shelf in Canada is rapidly disappearing.

 

Canada’s Arctic ice shelves, formations that date back thousands of years, have been almost halved in size over the last six years, Canadian researchers said on Tuesday.

Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, who regularly analyze satellite images from the region, also found that a major portion of the ice shelves split in half this summer and other pieces covering an area roughly one and a half times that of Manhattan have broken off since the end of July.

Consistently higher temperatures in Canada’s Arctic, the researchers said, were the main cause of the dramatic decline.

“It’s fascinating to bear witness to this as a scientist but it also saddens me as a general citizen of the planet to see this happen,” said Derek Mueller, a professor at the university’s school of geography and environmental studies. “We’ve seen this on timescale of six years yet these ice shelves are thought to have been in place for thousands of years.”
 
The ice shelves are as large as they are ancient. Professor Mueller said that they are commonly as thick as a 10 story building is high, although they are sometime more than twice that size.

While the increased Arctic temperatures decay the ice shelves by creating cracks, they are also undermining the formations by exposing them directly to the waters of the Arctic Ocean. Historically, Professor Mueller said, the shelves were buffered from the sea by a barrier of pack ice the age of which is measured in decades. Now that pack ice has disappeared in many areas, exposing the ice shelf to direct contact with waves causing destructive flexing and heaving of the ice.

In addition to reducing the only environment the supports some kinds of microbial life, the breaking apart of the ice shelves may hinder plans to exploit the warming Arctic as a shipping route and an offshore oil drilling basin.

While the eastern Canadian Arctic has long been plagued by icebergs that separated from glaciers, Professor Mueller said that had not been the case in the west. The pieces now breaking off the ice shelves, however, are now bringing massive icebergs in the Western Arctic Ocean as well.

“This is an area of the world where temperatures are rising very rapidly and the ice shelves are responding,” Professor Mueller said.

Devastation

Hurricane Irene Aftermath: The Story of Maple Downs Farm

Our Videos – By Liza de Guia on Sep 27, 2011

“I didn’t have time to think about being scared.”

On August 28th, hundreds of farms in upstate New York were destroyed by massive floods caused by Hurricane Irene. No one predicted the flood water would come as quickly as it did, nor the amount of water and force that accompanied it. This is one farmer’s story: Meet David and Denise Lloyd of Maple Downs Farm, a small dairy farm in Middleburgh, NY.

David & Denise have been farming all their life. They make a living raising heritage breed Holstein cattle to supply not just fresh local dairy to our markets, but prized genetics across the world. The day of the hurricane, they lost everything: crops, cattle, equipment, homes. Right now, they are just trying to survive.

Last week, I drove three and a half hours upstate to tell their story because I know that New York City wasn’t spared by the hurricane. When you think about it, this is farmland that feeds New York, farmers that work the land and tend to their animals so we all can eat locally. If these farms don’t recover, we will see direct implications on our plates. Again, this is just one story of hundreds out there. I’ll do my best to bring you more stories over the next few weeks. And if you’re interested in helping out in any way, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me. I’d love to help organize something.

**A big thanks to Dean Sparks (@OrganicNYmilk1) for helping me to get access to these farmers. Dean knows quite a bit about what has happened to farms in that area, so feel free to contact him too with any questions.

Thanks so much for watching food. curated.! Support our area farmers by shopping at the greenmarkets!

Chicken-scat bingo for a good cause

In Which Flooded Farmers Learn to Be Creative

By PETE WELLS

Published: September 27, 2011

NEW PALTZ, N.Y.

Enlarge This Image

Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

Ray Bradley

 

Howard Yarme

Mr. Bradley's flooded farm.

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Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

Mr. Bradley's annual fall party was recast as a fund-raiser, where barbecue dinners were sold.

Enlarge This Image

Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

A photo opportunity with a tractor.

RAY BRADLEY has always earned money from his laying hens, but until Sunday he’d never enlisted one to work in a fund-raiser.

Each fall Mr. Bradley holds a big party at his farm here, always with a raffle of some kind. This year he had an enormous bingo card made from sheets of cardboard, marked with squares from 1 to 20. A chance on a number cost $5. When all the numbers were taken, one of Mr. Bradley’s neighbors carried a white hen through the cheering crowd and set it down on square No. 18.

“Wherever the chicken goes to the bathroom, that number wins,” Mr. Bradley had explained.

Chicken-scat bingo is not how Mr. Bradley normally earns his income at this time of year. His fat and heavy heirloom tomatoes are his biggest moneymaker, the crop that helps him pay off his credit card debt until bills for the next year’s seeds and equipment start to accrue. He lost nearly all his vegetables, though, after Tropical Storm Irene tore through the area in August.

Most of Bradley Farm sat beneath water so deep, he navigated it in a canoe, surveying fields whose sodden potatoes and carrots, Etna shell beans, delicata squash and squat cheese pumpkins would never come to the market.

“This year is going to be a total loss,” Mr. Bradley said. “All that effort, all that money, the labor to weed it, fertilize it, irrigate it, and then to get nothing from it, that’s what kills you.”

So he recast his annual fall party as a way to bring in a few extra dollars. For $20, around 200 people ate roast pork shoulder, venison kebabs, grilled corn, baked beans and fluffy pirogi made with Mr. Bradley’s Carola potatoes, dug up just before the Wallkill River overran its banks. The farm sold photo ops around a tractor and did a brisk business in T-shirts.

Like Mr. Bradley, other farmers whose livelihood was swallowed by the storm have had to use their ingenuity and draw on the good will of their customers.

Some state and federal assistance is available for flooded farmers, but not everybody will qualify, and even those who do may have trouble threading through the bureaucracy, said Teresa Rusinek, an agriculture educator for the Cornell cooperative extension.

“All of this is very complex and it’s very hard for farmers to get through this process,” she said. “Some of the farmers are going to need to rely on the community and these local fund-raising events to help pull them out of the financial situation they’re in.”

Down the road from Bradley Farm is Evolutionary Organics, where Kira Kinney grows cucumbers, squash, tomatoes and greens in a fantastic variety of shapes and colors. She, too, lost almost all her crops to the flood. She has knocked on the door of every agency she could think of, but so far nothing has come of it, apart from a successful application for unemployment.

“I’m having a difficult time figuring out if there is any direct aid other than a loan,” she said. “I have enough debt that a loan doesn’t really help me at all.”

To keep the business going, she has filled her stall at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket with pictures of her farm in drier days, for $3 each. Customers can also pre-pay for next year’s eggs and vegetables. But her most original tactic may be the page she built on myregistry.com, a registry site commonly used for wedding gifts. Instead of table linens, though, Ms. Kinney’s supporters can buy organic chicken feed, packets of heirloom seeds or fuel to heat the greenhouse.

It’s a great leap into the online world from somebody who spends so little time on the Web that she had to tell somebody recently that, no, she couldn’t paste a URL into an e-mail because she didn’t know how.

David Siegel, a grower in nearby Stone Ridge, N.Y., noted sardonically that his operation’s name, Muddy Farm, has a new and unwelcome resonance. It wasn’t flooded, but the storms and a succession of rainy days have kept the soil saturated since August. Nearly all his plants are dead or diseased.

He said he will teach English at a nearby college this winter. He is quadrupling the size of his greenhouse so he can protect more plants from nature’s worst moods.

“Every year there’s these extremes of weather, and it seems like that’s the new normal,” he said. “So it seems like a greenhouse could possibly help with that.”

For farmers who run Community Supported Agriculture programs, the last month has been a hard test of an arrangement that is supposed to let customers share both the benefits and the risks of farming. Another New Paltz farmer, Sylvester (Pete) Taliaferro, provides boxes of vegetables all summer and fall to 300 families that buy either a whole share ($900) or half-share ($475).

When he suspended deliveries, announcing that there would be no Asian eggplants, broccoli or salad greens this fall, Taliaferro Farm shareholders did not rebel. Mr. Taliaferro said some offered to pay early for next year’s membership, or to come cook for the farm workers. One offered the use of a spare truck and another came to drive a tractor.

“The only reason I’m not curled up in the fetal position crying is because our C.S.A. really stepped up to the plate,” he said. “If I owed the bank, I’d be in trouble. I’d be selling a couple of tractors right now to get to the end of the year.”

Mr. Bradley’s party raised about $4,000 for Bradley Farm, with about $10,000 coming in from other efforts.

As for government assistance, a few days ago, he said, a busload of “big shots” had stopped at the farm. “They were doing a tour of everybody who got wiped out,” he said. “They come up to you like they’re dealing drugs. ‘Let me give you a card.’ They ain’t going to help you.”

He said that he had applied for some aid, but he was not waiting for the phone to ring. In fact, the line has been out since the storm, provoking him to buy his first mobile phone.

“Nah, I don’t think they’re going to do nothing,” he said of the government.

Pumkin ALert!

Northeast Pumpkin Shortage

(CBS Boston)

If you live in the Northeast you'll want to buy your pumpkins early this year because they're going to run out fast, as farmers predicted last week. A rainy summer and flooding from Irene have ruined many pumpkin crops. Now that the official harvest has come in, it looks like instead of hunting for The Great Pumpkin, most people will just be hunting for "a" pumpkin.

"I'm getting a lot of calls from other pumpkin retailers asking if I might have some pumpkins I'll be able to wholesale to them, but my response is 'sorry. I barely have enough for myself,'" David Dumaresq of Farmer Dave's told CBS Boston.

If you do find a pumpkin, you'll have to pay the piper. Reader Nugatory said that at the HEB last week, 1-foot in diameter pumpkins were going for $9.99 per. "Guess I'm not going to be carving any this year," Nugatory said.

Some may choose to forgo pumpkins entirely. There's those gnobbly little gourds that you can try instead. For a crafty and frugal approach, reader lim says, "It isn't quite the same, but draw ghosts on milk jugs. The white jugs (as opposed to the more translucent ones) look great at night. Just cut a hole in the back to put the candle in."

For others, fewer pumpkins on the shelves just mean fewer pumpkins that end up in the streets. "I dont' like to put punkins outside anyway," said reader HogwartsProfessor, "Someone always smashes them."

But if you do want a pumpkin, get it soon, because there's not going to be many left at the stores after this initial wave.

Rain makers

The business and culture of our digital lives,
from the L.A. Times

Scientists experimenting with laser beams to create rain

September 8, 2011 |  3:24 pm

Man used to dance and sacrifice to the gods in hopes of rain. Now scientists at the University of Geneva have shown that shooting laser beams might do the trick.

The Geneva team found that shooting short pulses of laser light into the air, both in the laboratory and into the skies over the Rhone River near Lake Geneva, converted particles to act as seeds that attract water droplets.

The results, published in the science journal Nature Communications, is the second successful test of the laser technique for creating clouds. Last year, the same team managed to make clouds in Berlin.

The Swiss scientists said the technique was a promising way to create rain on command, although only small clouds and no actual rain have resulted from the experiments so far.

Experiments to control rain -- by seeding the sky with compounds such as silver iodide to form water droplets -- have been around for decades. For years, the Chinese government has used weather control to bring showers to parched areas of the country and, memorably, to ensure clear skies during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.