THE SHOW SO FAR

Check out these beautiful little jellyfish I recorded at the Coney Island Aquarium . . .

colony 1

colony 2

We are never really alone. I’ve been out in the rain forest observing slime molds and am completely beguiled by them. These are the pictures I took yesterday. Ancient as time, the slime mold is a colony of tiny amoeba-like things that coagulate occasionally into a super-organism, which oozes toward new feeding grounds, or an auspicious place to sporulate. With its mission accomplished, the mass dissipates back into individual organisms and disappears into the soil. They have no brain or nervous system of any kind, yet slime molds are able to make complex decisions when they aggregate into these entities, including being able to solve mazes. This is accomplished via a secret chemical language that allows information to flow between adjoining individuals. When added together, this simple network creates a superior collective intelligence without the need for any kind of centralized command structure. When the urge to eat or reproduce besets enough individuals, they reach critical mass and just slime their way toward their objective. A simple but effective strategy. But if we adopted it, what would we do with all those bosses? Billions of years before the internet, and the slime molds had already perfected the cohering mechanism of ad hocracies like Digg or open source software development. The way I figure it, the status of the lowly slime mold needs to be elevated. They are such an inspiration. –Lord Running Clam, I salute you!

Virginia rail

Red-breasted sapsucker

Chestnut-backed chickadee

I don’t look for them particularly. I’m not what you’d call a bird ‘watcher.’ I’m more of a bird finder. I seem to come across them everywhere; injured, panicked or hopelessly lost. I’ve pried them from the jaws of cats, carried them quivering out of the buzzing labyrinths of shopping mall food courts and plucked them from windowsills where they have been battering themselves against their own reflections. Trembling, nictitating and bedraggled, the world’s birds are in trouble. Populations of many previously common species are now in free fall, both in Canada and around the world. We stand on the threshold of a bleak new age of summers where barn swallows no longer course through the warm evening air and the haunts of meadowlarks lie extinguished beneath strip mall parking lots.
And then there is the case of the crested myna. This jaunty, subtropical bird resembles a chunky starling with white wing patches. The mynas were brought to Vancouver at the end of the nineteenth century by Chinese immigrants, who kept them as cage birds. Inevitably some escaped or were set free and they managed to survive the clammy West Coast winters by holing up in attics and under bridges. Back in the early nineteen-nineties, I used to see mynas pretty often, hopping across the roof of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre or schnarfling up discarded pizza crusts between the trolly buses, in front of Golden Boys’ on Commercial Drive. Now the mynas are gone. The last known pair died out in Vancouver in the winter of 2002. Of course there are theories as to why. Perhaps these dreamy tropicalists couldn’t compete with the more aggressive and numerous European starlings, or maybe they found themselves excluded from their favoured attics by an epidemic of aluminum siding. It is hard to say. Whatever it was, I miss the mynas. Vancouver just isn’t same without them. My local pair used to nest inside the Spotlight Custom Collision sign on Clark Drive. In the midst of this industrial wasteland, devoid of vegetation, the mynas clung to life, incubating their precious eggs by the warmth of the humming fluorescent tubes, gazing out over the six lanes of howling traffic. One day as I was walking by, I happened to snap a picture. It was 1993, the first of June. I didn’t think much of it at the time. There was some high cloud, but the sun was shining. A glossy black bird sat high above me, surveying its asphalt domain. It was a day like any other. Back in the age of mynas.

Crested Myna in its habitat. Vancouver, June 1st, 1993.

Crested Myna close-up. Vancouver, June 1st 1993

burprestid 1

buprestid 2

He falls asleep in the woods one day.
Spent twenty years of his life that way,
Rip Van Winkle, Rip Van Winkle, Sleep, Sleep, Sleep.

And so go the words of an old and wacky song. Yet sleeping for twenty years is de rigeur for certain insects. In scientific terms this is called extended diapause. Every once in a while, I find one of these surrealistically beautiful, golden buprestid beetles crawling out of the floorboards of my house. They belong to the jewel beetle family and start out their lives as eggs laid in freshly fallen Douglas-fir logs. Now our house is mostly made of Douglas-fir, but it was built in 1979, so the wood isn’t exactly ‘freshly fallen.’ A little research turned up the fact that buprestids can diapause for up to 51 years, making them the Rip Van Winkles of the bug world. The larvae just keep sleep, sleep, sleeping, even while the log they’ve been living inside gets milled into lumber and incorporated into a building. Eventually, something (and it’s hard to say exactly what) tells them it’s time to wake up. I’ve noticed that firing up the wood stove, after the house has been cold for a while, can serve as a trigger for their emergence. The buprestids are sluggish when they first come out; a little dazed perhaps by the burden of their new responsibilities or the first rays of light they have ever seen, reflecting off their iridescent exoskeletons. Now that they are adults, time has lost its viscosity and they are launched into a frenetic trajectory of mating, laying eggs and dying, soon after. Their long, quiet decades of dreaming behind them, the buprestids crawl stalwartly toward their fate.

parking garage

tropical hammock ecology

What is it about Florida? As a kid, waiting out the long Toronto winter in my parents’ rec room, I often wondered what it might be like. I’d seen a picture in a book somewhere, of a down-at-the-heels, roadside serpentarium, where burly men in pompadours would wrestle alligators in a dusty yard. It was somewhere in Florida, the book said. I wanted desperately to go there. But it was not to be. Not until well into my adulthood anyway. And I never did find that serpentarium. So I had to settle for a kind of Florida of the mind. The television programs of the time were saturated with images of a fantastically exotic, subtropical America, where smiling swamp rangers skimmed across the Everglades on air boats, at the beck-and-call of puffy-faced little boys, who had winsome animal mascots like Flipper, the dolphin who just wouldn’t shut up and Gentle Ben, a toothless, overweight bear. During the commercials, the über-creepy Anita Bryant (soon to reign as America’s Queen of homophobia) warbled from a sound stage citrus grove, shilling genuine Florida ‘oinj’ juice to the pallid northern masses. So despite never having set foot in the place, Florida had pretty much colonized my young subconscious. So when I eventually visited there, sometime in my mid-twenties, things seemed strangely familiar, like the spectres of a remembered imagination.

This March, I returned again, to give a talk at a community college in suburban Broward County. Broward is part of a vast conurbation called the South Florida Metropolitan area that runs along the state’s Atlantic Coast. I met many kind and generous people there and it was great hanging out with the students, especially at their poetry slam, where I witnessed some of the most moving spoken word performances I’ve seen in years. Many of the young poets performed work addressing their daily struggles of life and in love in an increasingly polarized America. A young, African-American single mom did a piece about her struggle of trying to put herself through college, to give herself and her kid a better life. A young white guy gave a long, free form soliloquy about his feelings of political alienation, living in a state from which the presidency of his country had been stolen.

Florida is a complicated place. Oh, sure there are still beaches where you can sit in the talc-soft sand and stare out at the sea. This is the post card Florida of tasteful condominiums and toney ocean side eateries. But much of Florida, like the rest of North America, is imbued with a kind of Ballardian placelessness – its vast, flat expanses re-skinned with low-rise exurbs that ooze into a grid work of freeways. Except for the groves of palm trees, the landscape looks pretty much like the one in which I grew up, in Southern Ontario, having followed a similar trajectory of environmental liquidation. Occasionally you might see an ibis wading in the ditch water beside the interstate, but there really isn’t much else to remind you of where you are. This being America, there is an enormous gulf visible between the rich and the poor. Prowling the upscale shopping malls are legions of aged ladies who have had so much plastic surgery done that their heads look like they’ve been taken out of the spare parts cupboard of the Thunderbirds. Seeing these silicon injected marvels of taxidermy bobbling on the shoulders of geriatric bodies takes a little getting used to. But I suppose it is a logical outcome of a society where ‘the pursuit of happiness’ is defined as an inalienable right. Outside of the air conditioned confines of retail-land, in the ubiquitous palmetto scrub that grows on the sides of the roads and in the median strips, lives a ghost army of the homeless. Many are military veterans who have found themselves on the losing side of the class war. Perhaps the warmer climate makes being homeless in Florida a bit easier to bear. But happiness for these people still seems a long way off.

homeless man on traffic island

Yet shoehorned between the freeways and the golf-themed retirement developments, a few fragments of the original Florida still cling to their existence. Thanks to the kindness of an instructor at the college, I was able to spend a few hours amid the vegetative splendor of the last intact tropical hammock ecosystem, left in Broward County. ‘Hammock’ is a name given to little islands of self-perpetuating forest, which, because they are a few inches higher in elevation, manage to escape the worst of the seasonal flooding and fires that afflict the surrounding landscape. The result, as in the case of Broward’s 254 acre Fern Forest park, is a lush canopy of exotic trees such as gumbo limbo, strangler fig and surprisingly, red maple, a tree species I grew up with in eastern Canada. In the wetter spots of the forest, the roots of cypress trees form delightful ‘knee’ structures to cope with anaerobic conditions in the sediment. As I strolled beneath the dappled shade of rustling sabal palm fronds, watching the zebra butterflies sipping moisture from the swamp mud, I was able, just for a little while, to tune out the traffic drone of the nearby highway. It was as if I had been given a little window into the Florida of my boyhood mind.

Rules of Six by Benjamin Aranda et. al

DNA origami by Paul Rothemund

Sometimes an event comes along which manages to encapsulate emerging trends that in the future will be identified as defining our time. MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show is one of those instances. The exhibition has so much on offer that it is easy, when walking through the galleries, to get zoned out by over-stimulation. You pretty much have to avail yourself of the adjunct, on-line materials to provide enough context and detail to understand what you have just seen. But this is a small price to pay. ‘Elastic Mind’ highlights the great ‘re-biologizing’ that is taking over human thought, as we gradually abandon the mechanical world views we have held dear since the days of Newton, back in the seventeenth century. The clockwork metaphor of the universe is being replaced by that of a swarm, whose components self-organize and dissipate in concordance to the opportunities created by ubiquitous connectivity. Not the kind of show to make huge pronouncements, Elastic Mind, promotes the notion of ‘thinkering,’ encouraging its viewers to reconnect and remix the ideas it presents, in new and interesting ways. I’m not generally a huge fan of Flash-based web sites, but Elastic Mind’s site uses its animation to show the relationship ecologies that emerge between catalogue items, as we browse through them, offering us a whole other level of opportunity for serendipitous exploration.

crocuses/croci??

Viburnum bodnantense

Spending winter on the west coast of Canada is like living in a giant car wash with all the lights turned out. Spring however, comes relatively early, with the pussy willows and hazel catkins often making their appearances already by the end of January. By the time February is over, the crocuses have usually poked up their cheery little heads. Viburnum bodnantense is another extremely early shrub. Its pink flower clusters have a scent that reminds me of vinyl doll heads dipped in sugar.

old plum

old plum

Though it is one of the world’s most rapacious consumers of wood, Japan worships trees like no other place I’ve been to. Where else would such love and attention be lavished on a couple of four hundred year old plum trees, which, left to their own devices would have up and died ages ago? There is something intensely poignant about these venerable plums, brought from Korea back in 1609, to Matsushima’s Zuiganji temple. To keep them alive, the rotting trunks have been heroically patched with cement and the saggy, senescent branches propped up with poles. The trees are like ancient pets tended to by generations of Zen Buddhist monks, who are born and die in the span of time it takes the plum tree to accumulate a few infinitesimally thin growth rings. And the payoff? What is it exactly? A few ephemeral blossoms, pink and white, to herald the end of a long winter. It is heartening to know that despite the hundreds of years of turbulence, of typhoons, fratricidal wars and pestilence, an unbroken line of caregivers has thought these trees to be worth their attention. To be sure, the Japanese sense of duty must have had a lot to do with it, but there is something else too: a kind of appreciation of the fragile that in my mind has no equal anywhere else in the world.

Ginkgo protuberances

more protuberances

One of the great things about visiting Japan (for a tree geek like me) is being able to see some of the many old Ginkgo trees that are growing here. The Ginkgo, as some readers of this blog might recall, is a kind of living fossil, the last remaining species of a genus that was once widespread. Everything about the Ginkgo tree is strange. No one knows exactly when, or even if, they actually ever really went extinct in the wild and there is some evidence to prove that all the ones alive today are descendants of a few trees rescued in antiquity by early Buddhist monks. Ginkgo is one of the few trees that produces sperm that actually swims. And then there is this matter of the chichi or Gingko nipples, which form on older trees. Their function isn’t clear but it seems to be a kind of aerial root; an upside down version of the ‘knees’ one sees on the bald cypress trees (Taxodium) that grow in the swamp lands of the south-eastern United States. I photographed these wooden wonders that were dangling from a few of the Gingkos lining the approach to Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Outside Asia there aren’t too many Ginkgos old enough to show this curious morphology. The term ‘nipples’ just doesn’t seem adequate to describe such girthy protuberances.

round worm

dolphin brain worm

According to Wikipedia, parasitism is a relationship between organisms in which one, the parasite, benefits from a prolonged close encounter with the other, the host, which is harmed. One could be forgiven then, for wondering why it is that the Meguro Parasitological Museum has become such a popular date spot for young Tokyo couples. The museum’s theme is not exactly an auspicious harbinger for nuptial bliss yet when we visited, the place was packed with twenty-somethings holding hands and staring intently at the contents of the grisly vitrines. I was a little surprised when, in front of a display of pickled tape worms, a stream of brown liquid started to run down the pant leg of a young man, who was chatting animatedly to the girl next to him. Neither of them seemed to notice and they just kept talking. “Sumimasen,” I interrupted, pointing to the puddle expanding on the floor around his feet. He looked a little shocked and extracted a leaking cup of take out coffee from his coat pocket. I was quite relieved when I found out that was all it was. And that love in the company of parasites could still be that distracting.