How to get chickens in Amazonia.

Amazonia. If you want chickens, there are several possibilities. One is to go to the next grocery, one that have a freezer (that is, at least a medium size grocery), and buy there a frozen chicken. You may also buy a live one to your neighbour, but that’s more expensive and you have to kill it yourself (and pluck and empty the beast, that’s more work but it’s not impossible).

Or there’s the other way. I’m going to tell you…

Budding bodies

Sometimes, you have to look twice to get what’s happening. Of course, this is an advice for still life only. Or is it?

Here is what I found a few days ago. Got striked by the brown body growing out of this plant. Asked myself twice, weird, it really looks like the plant was parasitised by a big fungus. I admit I may have been influenced by other cases of parasitism I’ve observed a few weeks ago.

What's that?

Of course, the location should have oriented the diagnostic: this thing is growing at a place where regular pieces of plants grow, a typical bud location. Yep. But then, a parasite would divert existing structure into their own plans for multiplication. Nothing extraordinary. But I had never seen something like such a fruiting fungus body doing that. Okay, but I’m at place many things weird happen, biologically speaking, right?

Greening cities

It’s been already pointed out in here about green plant layered walls and how it gives a very interesting look to classical architecture. (e.g.). Last Octobre, while walking with a friend visiting France (too shortly), we found this by chance (random walks are sometimes quite fruitful):

-This is the vertical garden from Quai Branly, and the wall builds up onto the Museum building- It is really fantastic…

Got. scholared. collared.

Thanks to this post at This Week in Evolution, I discovered one can have a personnal page in google scholar, to group and “revendicate” her/his papers: a recurrent issue when you jump from a field to the other is that you decrease the odds of being acknowledged as an author (“is that really the same gal/dude?” syndrome), and eventually more jumps, less academic visibility. Which may be important if you wish people to know who you are, what you did, even when they are not looking at a résumé. That is, when you look for a job.

Happy 2012!

Happy new year to you all. Joyeuse nouvelle année tout le monde!

May Seeds Aside reappear* on a regular basis… :-)

A butterfly on cashew tree. (That's for an happy new year!).

* I don’t know if that’s the correct orthograph, but I damn like it!

Wildlife photography

Subadult nymph of an Amazonian cricket living currently (a few days ago) near the Lago do Jacunda, Tapajos, Brasil. Me dunno the species of course. *

Even in the wilds of the deepest Amazonian jungle, photographers still make decisions about when to trigger the shutter and what to include in or exclude from the frame. These decisions are as much a lens into the imagination of the photographer as they are a recording device for the subject, and the difference in artificiality between farmed animal photos and wild photos are more in degree than in kind.

Kindly said. But maybe this is somewhat truer when it coes to what people think when they think about wildlife. Slightly biased… This is an animal (not a plant), with a spine (not an exosqueletton, we are the 99% –Oops, needs an upadte!), furry or featherous, etc. Admittedly, many pictures of tropical insects are fake somewhat. I know what it is: cheaper to breed your pet than look for it in the jungle (though that works too, but not as well as rearing these critters yourself). But for plants!

Anyway, the post is actually very interesting and unfortunately true.

*Of course, the setting is natural. And indeed, the same picture could have been taken in a greenhouse with palms that nobody would notice. Huh ho!

Rapid Color Guides

Hey! I was almost complaining as to what I could do lacking any nature guide in here, and email send this link: rapid color guides. A few seem of interest to me right now…

Debooking bunks

Or maybe the reverse.

Just kidding.

I took time to lurk a bit, and found about books. You may have good reviews first, or even open books themselves:

The debunking handbook. Take a look and cook a tale.

Panama Trees guide. Gosh, is there the same for in here? I don’t know any of them (okay, I actually know a few, two fews, too few).

Climate change, the effects on health.

I myself just finished reading a book from Daniel Chavarria, which doesn’t even seem to have an English translation. I heard about this book about ten years ago, and was strongly recommanded reading it. The French title translate as “A tea in Amazonia” and guess what? I found it a month ago in a second hand book market. The whole plot basically begins here, on the Tapajos. Amazing coincident, wouldn’t it? Not a bad book indeed. A plot theory that would find echoes in the current worldwide political situation. Maybe that if you can’t find an English translation, this would be because there’s some truth in it, would it? Just kidding once again, I don’t believe in Tap tea. Not until I find a tree… :-)

Amazon

So I left you long enough with such an unsubtle question, where am I? Of course I decided to go to the place every plant biologist wish to visit in his/her/its life, Amazonia. Note that I guess many other biologist kinds and non-biologists would have a little kid’s dream like this one.

When I eventually realised being a biologist is different from having an academic position, or a position in society at all, and since part of my family in law is here and there for some time now, I decided I better have to go. Some grow up, some go in.

After the fold, a few pix to describe a more precise area, since Amazonia exist only on a map, and we should probably better pluralise the place to better reflect changes in substance occuring between natural areas. But here it is.

Sick alas

Just kidding, but so noisy my little boy was frightened first. Then he think they make great animals…

Not the least idea about the species name, but maybe some reader does?