Archivos de Diario para diciembre 2016

domingo, 04 de diciembre de 2016

The Snail That Built A Mountain

Forgive me if I break into song as we commence our walk into this gully but it’s such a beautiful morning – Sweet painted lady, seems it’s always been the same, getting paid for being laid, guess that’s the name of the game - that’s better; nothing like a bit of Elton John to start the day. OK that was not a bit like Elton John.

The reason for this sudden burst of exuberance is the orange and brown butterflies that are accompanying us, Painted Ladies, which we saw a couple of weeks back pollinating the ivy (Life in the Uplands). The red and black butterflies that are also joining us are Red Admirals and the two are closely related. The Painted Lady is Vanessa cardui and the Red Admiral is Vanessa atalanta. I find it intriguing that one should be named after a lady of the night and the other after a high ranking naval officer, a sort of lepidopteran equivalent of the actress and the bishop I suppose.

Read on at http://bit.ly/2gvKv0n

Publicado el domingo, 04 de diciembre de 2016 a las 07:17 AM por stevedaniels stevedaniels | 4 observaciones | 0 comentarios | Deja un comentario

domingo, 11 de diciembre de 2016

Every Breath You Take

I thought that as we walk down the next part of the gully we’d have a look at air – there’s some, look, right in front of your nose. You can’t see, smell, taste or touch it so what exactly is it? Mainly it’s a mixture of two elements (not a compound – they don’t combine together). The two elements are Nitrogen (78%) and Oxygen (21%). The other 1% contains other elements, primarily Argon.

Every breath you take (don’t worry – I’m not going to start singing again) is for the most part Nitrogen, a vital element for us but the problem is; we can’t use it directly. We need plants to do a bit of work for us like this Rosularia serrata here. It can’t use Nitrogen from the air either, it needs help from special bacteria in the soil that use enzymes to convert the nitrogen into organic compounds that it takes up through its roots. We, and other animals, can then take the nitrogen that we need to produce things like essential amino acids from the plants that we eat. When it, and we, die we pass the nitrogen back into the soil for reprocessing by bacteria.

Read on at http://bit.ly/2hg9Wm5

Publicado el domingo, 11 de diciembre de 2016 a las 07:04 AM por stevedaniels stevedaniels | 4 observaciones | 0 comentarios | Deja un comentario

domingo, 18 de diciembre de 2016

The Village of Agios Ioannis

Welcome to the village of Agios Ioannis, or Saint John if you want a rough English translation. It’s a village very much in slow transition at the moment. Once an important hub of life in the area, over the past few decades people have gradually moved down to the seaside villages of Ferma and Koutsounari or the nearby town of Ierapetra. I read recently that in the last census the official population was somewhere in the region of eleven, all of them avid vehicle collectors judging by the number of cars I see parked around the place at times. However, the place seems to be coming back to life with newly refurbished dwellings standing cheek-by-jowl with tumbledown relics. This looks like the path down into the village so let’s follow it and see what we can find.

As you’ll notice it’s very steep but it affords wonderful views of the Lybian Sea and the lower part of the Milonas Valley that we’re going to explore (if you can see through the riot of flowers that seem to be taking over the village like triffids). The birds that are lined up along the wires with the pretty red faces are Goldfinches. They’re resident here, as they are in most of western Europe but tend to be more noticeable when they flock together in the winter. They’re particularly fond of thistle seeds and in Christianity they’re associated with the crown of thorns placed upon Jesus’ head at the crucifixion. A painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Barocci shows John the Baptist (after whom, presumably, this village is named) holding a goldfinch out of reach of a cat who is eyeing it up in a most unchristian manner.

Read on at http://bit.ly/2gJBRNS

Publicado el domingo, 18 de diciembre de 2016 a las 07:24 AM por stevedaniels stevedaniels | 2 observaciones | 0 comentarios | Deja un comentario

viernes, 23 de diciembre de 2016

The Old Olive Press

After last week’s stroll through the village of Agios Ioannis I thought we'd walk down the road for a bit and then cut across into the valley below where there’s an old olive press that I’ve long wanted to prowl around. But first, here growing wild at the side of the road is a magnificent straggling clematis climbing the rocks.

The Buttercup family - Ranunculaceae
Obviously, like anemones and delphiniums, it’s a type of buttercup. No, I haven’t finally taken leave of my senses they are all part of the Buttercup family, the Ranunculaceae. But how can such wildly different looking plants all be closely related? It all comes down to plant systematics, the biological classification of plants. A couple of hundred years before Christ was born, a wandering Greek philosopher called Theophrastus started us off by grouping plants loosely into trees, shrubs and herbs. Another Greek, Dioscorides who was a medic in the Roman army, refined this a few hundred years later when he classified over five hundred plants according to their medicinal properties and this became the standard reference work right up until the sixteenth century. Classifying plants by their similarities in structure then took over culminating in Linnaeus publishing his Species Plantarum in 1753 (he dwelt on their sexual organ arrangements but then, he didn’t get out much). Darwin’s publication On the Origin of Species in 1859 pushed us towards classifying plants based upon their evolutionary relationships and nowadays we use DNA analysis to refine that concept in the science of cladistics (see Taxing Taxonomy and Confusing Cladistics) and that’s why clematis is a type of buttercup – they share a common ancestry.

Read on at https://niume.com/post/201221

Publicado el viernes, 23 de diciembre de 2016 a las 08:32 AM por stevedaniels stevedaniels | 5 observaciones | 0 comentarios | Deja un comentario