June 7, 2018
GRASS SPIDER ON A FENCEPOST
Beside a rancho cowtrail through the woods, an old, decaying fencepost rose up through bushes and weeds. Atop the fencepost a spider's sheet web -- one of those horizontally deployed webs usually seen near the ground -- had been established among a clutter of stems and leaves. It was curious that a sheet web would be shoulder and not ankle high, and the spider was clearly visible waiting for prey to land on the web, so I took a look. The whole thing can be seen at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607sp.jpg
A close-up of the spider, with hind legs firmly planted on the shadowy shelter's walls, so that a quick retreat into the hole can be made if threatened, is at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607sq.jpg
A better look at the head part, nicely showing some of the spider's eight eyes arranged in three rows, and the dark, sharp leg-bristles, is at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607sr.jpg
Trying to get even closer than I did for the last picture, the spider spooked and faster than my eyes could follow disappeared into her hole. It was an unusual place for a sheet web hole, but a very effective one, formed where the fencepost's heart had rotted away, shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607ss.jpg
We've seen sheet-web-weaving spiders similar to this one, in the genus Agelenopsis. You might enjoy comparing the preset one with one seen in Mississippi, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/a/grass-sp.htm
All species of Agelenopsis are known as American grass spiders, so that name is a general one. However, it's the only name I can give here, for -- at least in the Yucatan -- identification to species level is too hard.
Grass spider sheet webs are not sticky. They're just highly visible platforms that certain flying invertebrates might think would be a nice place to land, and when something does appear on the sheet, the spider runs very rapidly onto the sheet, grabs the prey, and bites. Grass spider bites aren't venomous enough to bother humans, but they cause rapid paralysis in insects.
Wikipedia's page on American Grass Spiders lists 13 Agelenopsis species, of which only is mentioned as occurring in Mexico. That's Agelenopsis aperta, the Desert Grass Spider, but pictures of that species don't match our fencepost sitter. The pale lines on our spider's front part, the cephalothorax, are thinner. So, maybe this is a Yucatan variation, or a different species, maybe even a species unknown to science, since little work has been done on the Yucatan's spiders.
Here we'll file these pictures under Agelenopsis and trust that eventually someone will be glad to see them, and know that this taxon with slender lines on the cephalothorax are found here.
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GREEN JAY PICTURE
At https://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/greenjay.htm we have some nice Green Jay pictures, but in each image the bird is twisted around so that the head's handsome blue markings aren't visible. This week a Green Jay came up right beside me as I read on the hut's porch, affording the nice shot at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607gj.jpg
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STIGMAPHYLLON VINE FRUITING
Early last month we looked at the pretty, yellow blossoms of the woody viny called Stigmaphyllon lindenianum, noticing that their ovaries seemed to bear more than three winglike appendages. That seemed odd, since the flowers we'd seen on another Stigmaphyllon species produced only three winged fruits. Nowadays Stigmaphyllon lindenianum is fruiting, and you can see now that also with this species, each flower produces only three or fewer winged fruits. The picture is at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180531st.jpg
Right below the 3-winged assemblage is a one-winged one. If you enjoy "variations on a theme," you might like to compare the winged fruits of our present Stigmaphyllon lindenianum with those of Stigmaphyllon ellipticum, which we saw at Chichén Itzá appearing at the page's bottom at https://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/stigmaph.htm
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"GRAPE TREE" GRAPES BEGINNING TO FORM
Last week we looked at the "Grape Tree's" flowers, and were impressed by how small the ovaries were compared to the flowers' well developed, pollen-producing stamens. Our "Grape Tree" page with flower pictures is at https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/boob.htm
Now just one week later, most of the flowers have been pollinated and fallen off, and the ovaries already are on their way to becoming grape-like fruits, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607cc.jpg
In that picture you can see that a few flowers still are ioeb. Also, in the image's top, left corner, notice the tiny, strange looking critter I didn't notice until the picture was on the computer screen. If it's not a spider, it's a very curious-looking little being.
During this last week the tree's flower-fall has been prodigious. You can see dropped corollas gathered in the fold of a fallen leaf at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607cd.jpg
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ROYAL POINCIANAS SPECTACULARLY FLOWERING
At https://www.backyardnature.net/q/delonix.htm we admire the gorgeous ornamental tree often known as Royal Poinciana, in Spanish as Flamboyán, a native of Madagascar, and much planted throughout the tropics. For the last three or so weeks they've been flowering in these parts, and I just have to show you what one looked like along the road to Temozón as I biked there last Sunday to buy fruit. It's at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607po.jpg
Many years ago when I was in Madagascar on a botanical expedition, I wanted to see Royal Poincianas growing in their native environment. I was told that it grew only in certain areas, where I wasn't going, and that it was threatened with extinction because of habitat destruction, and people cutting it for making charcoal.
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PINEAPPLES WITH RIPE FRUIT
At https://www.backyardnature.net/mexnat/pineappl.htm we see what Pineapple flowers and immature fruits look like. Nowadays in my garden the plants are producing fruits so large and heavy that the fruits are falling over, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607pa.jpg
As the pineapple grew larger, the plant's blades began turning red, withering and drying up, apparently transferring nutrients into the fruit. When I eat one of the pineapples, we'll admire the fruit's remarkable anatomy.
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MEXICAN PINYON PINE
Two months ago, on 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. At the top, at ±7000 feet in elevation (2100m), the forest was discovered to be composed nearly entirely of widely spaced, low growing, somewhat gnarly pines and junipers. You can see the wind-buffeted trunk of the pine tree beneath which I threw my tent that night, with my backpack leaning against its trunk for scale, at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607pi.jpg
This tree was producing a few small cones that weren't mature yet. You can see a couple among the tree's short, stiff needles at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607pj.jpg
For pine identification, important field marks are provided by cones and needles. Here we see that the cones appear to be maturing into rather small ones of a somewhat globular or spherical form. Most pine species produce their needles in clusters (there are species with only one needle per "cluster"), and the number of needles per cluster is important. This tree produced mostly three needles per cluster, but often only two, as shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607pk.jpg
When a pine's needles emerge, they have at their bases, immediately above the woody knobs projecting from the stem and bearing them, there's a kind of cellophane-like sheath surrounding the needles' bases. Some species retain those sheathes while in other species the sheathes soon fall away. In the above photo you can see that in this species the sheathes are "deciduous," not "persistent."
Though the trees there weren't producing mature cones at that time, beneath the trees old cones that had lost their seeds could be found. A collection of those, with some seeds that have been nibbled on by wildlife, is shown at https://www.backyardnature.net/n/18/180607pl.jpg
The surprising thing here is that the seeds are so large and plump, and don't bear papery "wings." In fact, the moment these seeds were noticed, it was clear that we had Pinyon Pines just like those we found atop hills in southwestern Texas's Edwards Plateau region. In Texas the species is often listed as Pinus remota, or sometimes as a variety of the Mexican Pinyon, PINUS CEMBROIDES, which is what we have here. The only difference I've noticed between the Texas plants and Mexican ones is that the Texas trees mostly had two leaves per cluster while these mostly have three.
Mexican Pinyons are so common in northern and central Mexico's highlands that in Spanish they're often called Pinos Mexicanos. They have a long history here of being used. My introduction to them was many years ago when traveling by train through northern Mexico's mountains I'd buy paper funnels filled with pinyon seeds sold by indigenous folks at stops. I and most other passengers would sit in those slowly rocking, stinky old rail cars as they rumbled up and down slopes and crossed gargantuan canyons, cracking pine-nuts and tossing the shells out the open windows.
But also the tree produces a fragrant, fast-burning firewood, a soft and not very strong but cheap and easily worked wood for construction, and resin from which waterproofing solutions and glue is made.
Often this species is planted in deforested rocky uplands, because of its resistance to drought. It does a good job protecting the soil from erosion, favors water infiltration, and as such helps reestablish aquifers.
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EATING GRANOLA (MUESLI)
Each morning my breakfast consists of a bowl of granola (muesli) with a sliced banana. While eating this I wear reading glasses so I can focus on each oat and wheat flake, each puffed amaranth seed, each nut, sunflower seed, shred of coconut and raisin.
When I look at a flake of oatmeal, I visualize the Temperate Zone or high-elevation field in which it ripened -- no oats grow in tropical Yucatan. I think of what that flake of oatmeal might know of cool wind in brilliant sunlight, how it might have felt amid its broad community of fellow oat plants (which are green grasses), the whole vast mass of them silently and diligently photosynthesizing, sunlight energy being used to make the oat grain's flaky, white carbohydrate from carbon dioxide gas and water vapor, therefore making something that can be seen, felt and tasted out of transparent gases.
I've seen the fields of red amaranth that probably provided my granola's amaranth seeds. They were in cool, arid, highland Mexico with snow-capped volcanoes rising in the distance, where earthquakes are frequent. I remember how chilly wind formed the amaranth plants into graceful waves, red waves beneath blue sky with gray, white-topped mountains at a distance.
I visualize bees pollinating the flowers that engendered the granola's fruits and nuts. I see the Coconut Palms in their coastal plantations, hot sand between slender trunks growing at angles in accordance with prevailing sea-breezes, birds noisily cavorting in the palms' crown of stiff, shiny fronds that woosh and clap in the wind. And I can get up from my seat right here to go lay my hand on the hard, green, glossy trunk of a banana tree, if I want to remember what they're like.
So, is it just fancifulness, this thing I do with my granola? As the granola's stored-up sunlight energy in all its kaleidoscopic and good tasting forms enter me and start becoming part of me, fueling these very thoughts I'm relating right now with energy not long ago emanating from the Sun, I think not.
For one thing, if my reading glasses could peer even more deeply into this particular hard-pressed oat grain I'm seeing now, the glasses' magnification leading me ever deeper into the oat-flake's substance, eventually a point would come when all human-recognizable form, touchability, color and taste would no longer exist. There'd just be molecules relating to one another according to their mutual electromagnetic charges and configurations. And, farther down, within each molecule, there'd be atoms with their electrons, protons, neutrons and a host of subatomic particles, that relative to their relative sizes, lie enormous distances from one another, so that atoms are basically just force fields around packets of energy, instead of anything that human senses can deal with.
In truth, these flakes from oat and wheat fields, these nuts and raisins, are merely creations of our minds. Packages of Sun-leaving energy called photons bounce off electromagnetic force fields associated with atoms and molecules in my oat flake, enter a human eye and excite nerve endings. The brain combines inputs from lots of eye nerve endings receiving such stimuli and the brain says, "That's an oat flake." But, really what we're "seeing" consists of almost nothing but various forms of energy interacting to create force fields. The subatomic particles such as electrons and quarks that produce the force fields don't really have size, rather are just energized points that can be pinpointed mathematically.
So, this oat flake in my spoon is like a computer screen's icon composed of pixels, except that computer icons are defined by binary code in a computer, while our mental images of things are graphic interpretations of our brains, which themselves are computers, but computers programmed with a language profoundly more sophisticated than a computer's binary code.
And, I wonder: Might not my daydreaming over the morning's granola be the same as what the Universal Creative Impulse does when She conjures the Universe's configurations of energy and electromagnetic fields -- which we humans conceive of as rocks and wildflowers, stars and galaxies, and ourselves?
And, if that is so, as I delight in my morning's psychedelic granola with bananas, might not at the same time the Universal Creative Impulse be delighting in visualizing "me" this fine morning as chachalacas call from dewy woods edges and the dogs lie laughing and wagging their tails when they hear me whispering these thoughts to myself, just to hear what they sound like?
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Best wishes to all Newsletter readers,
Jim
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