May 31, 2018
YUCATAN BOX TURTLE
Three or four years ago when I lived in Río Lagartos on the Yucatan's northern coast, a herpetologist from the US passed through asking all the village Maya he ran into if they'd seen a Coc Ak. He'd had a postcard-like explanation printed out showing that a Coc Ak was an exceptionally pale box turtle. You can see the front of that card at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531tx.jpg
The card's reverse side shows the turtle's top and bottom shells, and heads of the male and female, as seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531ty.jpg
Male heads are white with blue splotches, while those of the female are yellowish. In Spanish the card explains that Coc Ak is a rare species found only in the Yucatan, and that its populations are being reduced because of habitat destruction and "over exploitation." The card isn't clear what kind of over exploitation is taking place, but the researcher told me that traditionally the Maya kept Coc Aks in their backyards because their blood was believed to cure certain serious illnesses. Also, he said that the burning part of Maya slash-and-burn agricultural technology kills and maims the turtles. Juan, a backwoodsy Maya working at the rancho, says that Coc Ak meat is good medicine for coughs.
On the card's reverse side at the bottom, right you can see that the Coc Ak study was being supported by the USGS and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. On the front page a web address, www.coc-ak.org, was provided where Coc Ak sightings could be reported.
In recent years I've kept the Coc Ak card as a bookmarker, so this week when I passed by the rancho's pond and a pale box turtle like the one on the card was trying to get out, I knew I had a Coc Ak. The rancho owner had wanted the concrete-lined pond to serve as a wildlife drinking source, and many birds use it as such, but it has vertical sides over which land turtles fall, and usually drown. I got this one out just in time. You can see her drying out at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531tu.jpg
A close-up of the yellowish head is at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531tv.jpg
And a look at the bottom shell, the plastron, is provided at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531tw.jpg
The www.coc-ak.org website when I tried to access it wasn't functional, so maybe the study has ended. Though the researcher referred to Coc Ak as a distinct species, other authorities on the Internet tend to regard it as a subspecies of the eastern US's box turtle. You can see how similar our Coc Ak is to the box turtles we often saw in Mississippi at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/a/box-turt.htm
Our Coc Ak, considered as a subspecies of eastern North America's box turtle, is TERRAPENE CAROLINA ssp. YUCATANA, known in English as the Yucatan Box Turtle. Seven subspecies of box turtles are recognized, one of which is extinct. The various subspecies are listed and much more information on box turtles in general is provided on Wikipedia's Box Turtle page.
Yucatan Box Turtles are the southernmost box turtle subspecies, and isolated by a considerable distance from the others.
The owner is planning to install some kind of ramp for the turtles to get out of the pond. Meanwhile, I carried the one in the pictures to my garden, where I hope she'll stay. All box turtles are omnivores. Among their foods available here are slugs, snails, cockroaches and crickets, as well as certain types of grass, fruits, berries, and mushrooms.
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"GRAPE TREE" FLOWERING
At https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/boob.htm we see a tree member of the Buckwheat or Knottweed Family, the Polygonaceae, that last September toward the end of the rainy season was producing long, dangling clusters of grape-like fruits. Now at the beginning of the new rainy season, our larger Grape Trees look like the one shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531cc.jpg
Those dangling items are clusters of tiny, greenish flowers, some of which you can see at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531cd.jpg
As with all members of the Buckwheat Family, these flowers produce no corollas. The items that look like corolla lobes or petals are calyx sepals doing corolla duty, normally referred to as "tepals." In these flowers the eight stamens unite at their filament bases into a kind of low rim around the spherical ovary. The ovaries are very small relative to the stamens, and I suspect that at the stage shown in the picture the stamens are sexually mature, but the ovary isn't, preventing self pollination.
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MOUSE'S PINEAPPLE FRUITS MATURING
At https://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/redgal.htm we meet the Mouse's Pineapple, a commonly encountered weedy vine growing along roads and woods edges. Mouse's Pineapple belongs to the same genus as the famously medicinal Noni Tree often seen planted beside people's houses here, and both are members of the Coffee Family, the Rubiaceae. On our Mouse's Pineapple page we see the vine's flowers and immature fruits. This week a vine turned up bearing nearly mature fruits, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531mr.jpg
All the fruits except the one at the image's center-right, despite their yellowish color, were still much too hard to eat. That one on the right was soft enough to squish. I asked our Maya workers if they ate the fruits, and they don't. However, two workers reported that during those seasons when chickens and turkeys develop warts around their eyes, when the fruits are chopped up and fed to the fowls, the warts disappear. One said that the fruit juice is good for boils.
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PIÑUELAS FLOWERING
In the Yucatan two common, closely related species are known as Piñuelas. One is Bromelia pinguin and the other is Bromelia karatas. Last March, the Bromelia pinguin plants were flowering, as shown on their page. Now Bromelia karatas is flowering, and you can see the colorful event at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531bm.jpg
In that picture notice that around the edge of the cluster of brown-gray things in the plant's center, purplish flowers are arising. A close-up of some flowers rising amid masses of cottony fiber is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531bn.jpg
On our Bromelia karatas page we see how Don Vicente in Sabacché taught us to use that fiber for staunching blood.
The two species' flowers are very similar, but they're displayed very differently. Flowers of Bromelia pinguin are arranged in large panicles atop a stout stalk, while above you see that blossoms of Bromelia karatas, as with its fruits, cluster down in the plant body's center.
In March when Bromelia pinguin was flowering, I the plant's newer leaves often were red, while at that time when Bromelia karatas was fruiting, that species' leaves were all green. Now we see that when Bromelia karatas flowers, its newer leaves also can be red, and when I inspect the same Bromelia karatas plants that last March bore red leaves, now those plants' leaves are all green.
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MUSHROOM FRUSTRATION
Most of the year the Yucatan is too arid to produce many mushrooms, but now with the advent of the rainy season occasionally some nice ones show up. For example, this week a pretty one emerged from the rotting wood of one of my plant beds, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531c5.jpg
The flesh was soft and pliable, and the caps were notable for their depressed or sunken centers, their being covered with short hairs and dark-tipped scales, and for their slightly violet color. You can see another important feature for identification, along with my thumb tip indicating the size, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531c6.jpg
Notice how the gills extend partway down the stems, which are a little bulbous toward their bases. Having such gills separates this species from most gilled fungi, and directs us toward the vicinity of the famously edible Chanterelles we used to eat so many of back in Mississippi. You can see the present species' similarity to the Mississippi Chanterelles at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/x/cibarius.htm
The violet color barely detectable in these mature mushrooms manifests much more intensely in immature one right beside those shown above, as you can see at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531c7.jpg
Having all that information and an obviously distinctive mushroom, now the frustration begins. For, the fungi simply are not much known in this part of the world, and no effective means exist to identify them. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that fungal spores travel enormous distances on wind, so even the rarest species might turn up in unexpected places.
On the Internet I found a picture of one species fairly matching our own. It grew in Europe, in a climate very different from ours, and was described as growing on wood, though it wasn't clear whether the wood was living or decaying. That species -- which seems to occur over most of the planet -- was identified as Cantharellus melanoxeros, and you can see how similar it is to our Yucatan one at http://www.fichasmicologicas.com/?micos=1&alf=C&art=375
On the Internet I'm filing our purplish, Chanterelle-like mushroom, under the name "aff. Cantharellus melanoxeros." The prefix "aff." is a standard taxonomical abbreviation used when you wish to say that you don't really know what the name is, but it seems to show an "affinity" to this species. Maybe someday an expert studying tropical members of the genus Cantharellus will Google up my page and write us telling us what it really is.
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CORYPHANTHA CACTUS
Last April 5th in the mountains east of Saltillo, Coahuila, I started out hiking on a valley floor, and climbed a small limestone mountain that was grassy and scrubby at its base, but forested on top. Toward the top, at ±7000 feet in elevation (2100m), where trees were just starting to appear, I found growing in a crack in naked limestone the little family of cacti shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531co.jpg
You can see that this species is of the kind whose body looks like a cluster of green chili peppers all turned with their rounded ends facing outward, and those ends bear clusters of spines. This species' spine clusters are shown close up at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531cp.jpg
Notice that these clusters consist of two or three "central spines" and that the largest central spine rises ±perpendicular to the lower ones. There's a special word for a cactus spine that's central and stands perpendicular to the surface, which is "porrect," and this species has very well developed, exceptionally long porrect spines. The lower, smaller spines radiating from the cluster base, or "areole," ±horizontal with the cactus's surface, are called "radial spines."
A shot from above showing the cactus's depressed, white-woolly top is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531cq.jpg
Several cactus species with chili-pepper-cluster bodies and spine clusters with similar central and radial spines occur in northeastern Mexico's uplands. However, with the help of Alfredo Flores' Guía de Cactáceas del Estado de Coahuila , I was able to figure it out, thanks especially to this species' unusually long central spines, and the fact that the lower central spines typically curve downward -- which you can confirm in the first picture. Flores's Guía is freely available on the Internet in PDF form at http://www.sema.gob.mx/descargas/manuales/cactus.pdf
Flores lists our cactus as Coryphantha roederiana, but most experts seem to agree that that's a synonym for CORYPHANTHA SALINENSIS. One problem with the naming is that the dried, preserved and stored type specimen from which the species was formally described in a German periodical in 1929 was destroyed, so the species can no longer be positively identified.
The species Coryphantha salinensis is endemic to the arid uplands of northeastern Mexico, in the states of Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. It occurs with desert scrub not only on limestone rock but also in alluvial plains and limestone gravel. It's said to be common over its limited distribution area and though large populations are being destroyed by ranching and urban sprawl, it isn't considered yet to be endangered.
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"KNOW THYSELF"
At first glance the aphorism "Know thyself" ranks with "Eat your carrots," and "Don't talk back to your mother." However, through the ages such people as Socrates, Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and many others gone to the trouble of saying a great deal about the matter, so there must be something to it. The maxim even has its own page on Wikipedia.
"Know thyself" is being considered here because, for me, that advice also is a prime teaching of Nature. The teaching derives from Nature's unrelenting evolutionary drive toward diversity at so many levels, including among us humans. Each humans is born with his or her unique genetically based predispositions, except for identical twins, and even the predispositions of twins diverge as different life experiences create different people of them.
Since such creative energy has gone into making my own personal package of predispositions, it seems clear to me that one of my primary tasks as a human is to recognize what my predispositions are. And, once I have that figured out, to take my predispositions into account in everyday life. My thinking is that I wouldn't have been created with definite predispositions if the Universal Creative Impulse hadn't "wanted" them to direct the course of my life.
When my Brazilian friend Iolanda was a child, she fantasized about having her own little cart on which she'd push around pans of water, soap, washrags and towels, antiseptic and bandages and drugs, and when she'd find people needing care she'd provide it. She grew up to become a nun caring for the very poor.
Even I seem the product of unambiguous genetic programming. When I was maybe twelve or thirteen I found myself on Saturday afternoons sitting at the kitchen table with information about plants and animals gathered from various sources, and writing about them in my own words. I knew no one else who did such a thing, but I felt compelled to do exactly that, and it felt good, and still does.
It's easy to see why such varied predispositions would be adaptive for the human species. In any random collection of humans, when the community reaches a certain fairly small size, automatically there are citizens predisposed to serve as teachers, farmers, handworkers, warriors, artists, exemplary parents and spouses, hunters, merchants, community leaders, etc. Our genetically programmed predispositions set us up to be useful in our respective communities.
A beautiful feature of the way all this is done is that when a person does what he or she feels most inclined to do, it makes them happy. I don't know anyone happier than Iolanda and I, even though neither of us has much money, and we're often considered by others to be cranks. My happiness, I judge, is fundamentally based on my own self knowledge.
Certainly Spinoza recognized the importance of self knowledge, and tells us exactly why: Only when we understand ourselves can we control our emotions, and that's the primary condition for sustained and rational happiness.
The corollary of knowing oneself leading to happiness is this: That by ignoring our personal predispositions we become unhappy.
In fact, maybe the great failure of our modern Western society is that so many of us have confused the needs of a materialistic capitalism with our own personal natural needs. We believe what we hear day and night -- that having this, consuming that, makes us happy.
It doesn't, at least not for Spinozas sustained and rational happiness. Moreover, my reading of history is that any society in which a large part of a population isn't happy, it's not only a sad society, but dangerous one, because of societal neuroses that inevitably develop among unfulfilled, unhappy people.
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Best wishes to all Newsletter readers,
Jim
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