Sadly, the tank has run dry. To proffer some content today, I’ve dug into my personal photo bank and will post a few miscellaneous shots with brief captions. Click to enlarge the photos
Galápagos marine iguana, Amblyrhynchus cristatus, 2010:
Same trip, baby Galápagos sea lion, Zalophus wollebaeki:
Woman collecting land snails for dinner, São Tomé, 2004:
BBQ dinner at City Market, Luling, Texas, 2004. Brisket, sausage, and the trimmings (beans, potato salad, and the mandatory white bread):
Death Valley and a rare post-rain desert bloom, 2005. Where do the insects come from since these blooms occur only about once a decade? (If you can ID the lepidopteran, do so.)
Usually there is only saltbush and creosote growing on the land, but in a bloom all sorts of flowers emerge from dormant seeds:
A rare Jewish cowboy, photo in the Eastern California Museum in Independence. The last time I went the photo was gone and nobody knew about it or even remembered it. I’d kill to have it:
Mugging in the Alabama Hills, California:
Doing flies, 2005. This is what I spent most of my time doing before I retired.
Flying onto a glacier at Denali (Mt. McKinley). They were dropping off two climbers in a four-seater bush plane, and I hitched a ride there and back. I got to sit next to the woman pilot. From Talkeetna, Alaska. The peak in the center is Denali.
After we landed on the snow-covered glacier, the pilot had to make a runway to take off from, going back and forth on the snow about ten times to pack it down:
The famous polymorphism of color and banding within the snail Cepaea nemoralis, studied intensively by evolutionary geneticists for years. Despite that work and subsequent population-genetic analysis, we still don’t understand the significance of the variation. For some reason the field was covered with snails; these were on a fencepost. Dorset, England, 2006:
The cottage where poet and author Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and grew up. Upper Brockhampton, Dorset, 2006.
When Hardy became famous and wealthy, he moved to a house he designed (also in Dorset), Max Gate, where he lived from 1885 until he died in 1928. In the garden by the house are the burial sites of his beloved dogs and cats. Here are two graves of his cats, Snowdove and Kitsy; I was told that they were inscribed by Hardy himself, who had worked as a stonemason when younger, but I can’t vouch for that story:
A draft manuscript of the famous novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles in Hardy’s hand (taken at the local museum):
T. E. Lawrence‘s (1888-1935) final residence the cottage called Clouds Hill. He lived here after he gave up his fame as “Lawrence of Arabia” and served in the RAF under the pseudonym “T. E. Shaw” beginning in 1935, commuting back and forth to the airbase on his motorcycle. The cottage was very spartan, and had no electricity. As Wikipedia notes,
In a 1934 letter to Francis Rodd, Lawrence (who had changed his surname to Shaw) described his home thus:[5]
“The cottage has two rooms, one, upstairs, for music (a gramophone and records) and one downstairs for books. There is a bath in a demi-cupboard. For food one goes a mile, to Bovington (near the Tank Corps Depot) and at sleep time I take a great sleeping bag… and spread it on what seems the nicest floor… The cottage looks simple outside, and does no hurt to its setting which is twenty miles of broken heath and a river valley filled with rhododendrons run wild. I think everything, inside and outside my place, approaches perfection… Yours ever, T. E. Shaw”
Lawrence had an education in the classics, and is one of my heroes as he was both a man of action and a man of learning. Here’s the inscription in Greek over the door above: οὐ φροντὶς (“why worry”), taken from Hippoclides.
Lawrence’s bathtub and shaving mirror:
Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash on May 13, 1935, soon after leaving the RAF. Heading home on his motorcycle, he didn’t see two boys on bicycles ahead of him because of a dip in the road. Swerving to avoid them at the last moment, he crashed his bike, sustained a serious head injury, and died six days later. A study of his death by a neurosurgeon who tended the dying Lawrence eventually led to the use of helmets by motorcyclists.
The crash site is a km or two from Clouds Hill, and my friend and I scoured the road on foot looking for the crash site, now marked by a memorial (I saw no dip in the road). We finally found the stone:
Ironically, there had been a car crash at the site right before we found the memorial:
When he crashed, Lawrence was riding a Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle. Here’s a picture of him from Wikipedia riding one (clearly not the death vehicle) that he called “George V”. If you go to Clouds Hill, you’ll see several of his motorcycles in a small garage.
This is a treat –
Gee, even when there’s no Readers’ Wildlife Photos, there’s … “wildlife” photos… for readers… or Readers’ “Wildlife” Photos..!
😁
… I think the perspective switch makes it make sense – the proprietor PCC(E) is providing photos for the readers on a webpage… the way “cat food” does not mean the cat made food,.. but means food for the cat…
But.. I ramble…
🐌🐚
Especially loved the Alabama Hills photo!
It seems you have lived a well-traveled life!
“Waiter, there are SNAILS on her plate!” https://youtu.be/FS8Z-MDW42U
I remember those Lawrence of Arabia photos!
Yes, as I go through the last twenty years, there will be some repeats, but readerships turns over.
Thanks for all those! I’m intrigued by the photo and description of the colorful snails — might we have one of your sciencey posts to elucidate us further? [N.B. — I hope this does not flout Rule #6 of da roolz!]
No, but the short story is that people wanted to know what evolutionary forces maintained the variation (it’s not that easy to keep substantial genetic variation at high frequencies in a population, though low-frequency mutations are always there via mutation). Could it be heterozygote advantage, frequency-dependent selection, or natural selection that varied over time and space? We really don’t know, and that’s the end of the tale. Scientists have pretty much given up trying to understand it.
Interesting, very nicely done
Nice pictures! Drosophila in milk bottles. I can still smell the agar agar concoction wafting through the MCZ.
We have Cepaea nemoralis snails in our yard. When I find an empty shell I marvel at the beauty. Since the color is laid down by the mantle edge as the snail grows about its coiling axis, it produces perfect swirls. I guess they’re invasive, or at least introduced, but I still like to see them around.
Enjoyed the wildlife pictures, but I cannot tell a lie: I like the Hardy and Lawrence pics even more!
Like Norman’s, the olfactory memory is strong. Upon seeing Jerry and the flies, I told my wife, “I smell the genetics lab. It’s been decades, and I smell the genetics lab!”
Fascinating photos and comments — is the quote over Lawrence’s door the inspiration for A. E. Neuman’s “What, me worry?”
Wow! That is quite a set! The moth looks to be in the genus Heliolonche.
Thanks!
Wonderful. Share more of yours in the future, please.
I’m planning to as I get time. And I STILL have no readers’ wildlife photos in the queue!
I believe the moth is Heliolonche pictipennis (Red-lined Moth).
Thanks!
Re the missing photo of the Jewish cowboy. I think that most people don’t realize how often that kind of thing happens. I’ve worked in natural history museums for more than 50 years, and I’ve been shocked repeatedly at how often they simply lose things. When I try to locate specimens and even whole collections donated decades ago on a promise of expert care, I often find there is no trace of them. Here we are, supposed to be the specialists in keeping artifacts and their information intact and intelligible from generation to generation, and even we can’t keep the stuff from vanishing. A good object lesson for those who hope that donating their cherished heirlooms to a museum will keep them safe perpetually.
They’re great! Very jealous of your trip to Sao Tome. Love the rest.
D.A.
NYC
I worked there on fly ecology; I went three times.
Many thanks for the pix, PCC(e). Especially enjoyed those of
fly lab, snails, Brit literary locations, and Lawrence’s motorcycle
(having been a biker myself, long, long ago).
Wonderful to see the Thomas Hardy
related photos. One of the truly great
novelists, I think.