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…

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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?

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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…

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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.

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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!

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