Diario de whichchick

I have been waiting for this my entire life. No, really, my whole entire life. (Yeah, college, yeah, science, but I wanted to live in Greater Rednecklandia and to play horse. The combo of "live in Greater Rednecklandia" and "$$$ for playin' horse" ruled out academia. I'm a landlord, which pays the bills.)

One of my goals is a week by week catalog of flowering plants (and yes, that is a huge damn list, and I mean huge, because a lot of stuff flowers and not just the herbaceous stuff people think of as "flowers") with pictures, location notes, first bloom each year, yadda yadda yadda. Ideally, this could be made into an interactive calendar for my enjoyment although really by making the calendar I would already know all the... look, I just like categorizing stuff. I like lists.

Most of my observations will be on a fairly quotidian timbered-several-times chunk of ridge-n-valley Appalachia located just outside of Breezewood PA. We have a lake (about 40 acres surface area, big enough for fishes and turtles and obviously a nice selection of odonates, but it is an impoundment and not a natural feature), several pretty-reliable creeks, and a good-sized chunk of east-facing mountainside. All told, it's on the close order of five hundred acres, the borders of which are heavily plastered with no trespassing signs. (We don't like strangers on our land. If you have some science reason for needing or wanting to be here, send me a message or something first. Don't just show up and wander around, that's rude and also illegal. We prosecute.) Our property borders are the Buchanan State Forest (marked with white blazes of paint), the old PA Turnpike (between the Sideling Hill and Ray's Hill tunnels, has a falling-down fence to mark the border), and the top (it has a crappy dirt road along it and that's the property line, more or less) of Ray's Hill.

The lake has a 2.2 square mile watershed (which I know because we need that information for the Dam's Emergency Action Plan) the vast bulk of which is wooded. Water's pretty clear (I have a Secchi disk and should start tracking that just for shits and giggles), mostly unvegetated, and, according to Penn State "low nutrient". The lake was built in 1968/69 and is probably twenty feet deep at the most though I haven't measured it. It's basically a glorified pond.

I have lived here my entire life with the exception of college and I'm reasonably familiar with the property. This makes it easy to find known things but, as I discovered when I inexplicably got interested in odonates one summer, there's a hell of a lot going on out there that you don't see until you look for it. Like, I knew we had "dragonflies" but we have a lot of them. They all fly differently. They hang out in different places. Some like streams that are calm. Some like brisk streams with rocky riffles. Some like big open water. Some like to perch a lot. Some are nearly impossible to net (Common Green Darner of whom I still do not have a picture, I am looking directly at you with narrowed eyes). Like, each species has its own personality and behavior and preferences and seasons. Once you get to know them, it's a lot easier to find them. If I'd had to guess how many odonates we had prior to The Odonate Enthusiasm, I would have guessed like six kinds. Not even close. There are at least twenty in regular presence about the place. You don't know until you look and you don't know how to SEE until you do some looking and then get better at looking by way of having done it a while.

So I went out after work today (way too warm to ride horses that are still in full winter coat) and I heard an owl (couldn't get phone to record, but still) and SAW A FROG, who immediately plopped into the seasonal wet area. (A lot of where I live has standing water all over it from now until about the end of April.) No picture, but hey, frogs in February. Who knew? We had five inches of snow on the ground Saturday, for Pete's sake.

I am on about lichens here of late, mostly because they're one of the reliably interesting things this time of year (We're not quite to frogs and mole salamanders... a week or two, though, and they'll be more interesting. This is the mountains and it's cold. I checked out the usual soggy wets for egg masses and ... not yet. Soon, but not yet.) Anyway, lichens. The Internets (my resource for things, because even if it sucks, it is free) suggest that lichens grow "very slowly" or "sometimes very slowly and sometimes faster" which is fine as far as it goes but not... not really what I want. Most studies of lichen growth rates are on small round dot lichens up north, which is not all that helpful.

The internet does not have good information for how long it takes a rock greenshield lichen to get so big that I couldn't stand on it with both of my feet and still have lichen peeking out around the edges. (They totes get that big around here. See here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9940170 and yes, I can see that that one is really two smaller lichens that have grown into each other with, if you want to be technical about it, two other, smaller ones on top that are also in the process of merging into the whole, here.) This is a big lichen, like easily 15 cm across. So... this lichen grows at what rate?

Because I was curious, I did some reading beyond Wikipedia and http://publications.aston.ac.uk/15210/1/Folios_lichen_growth_review_for_pdf.pdf -- this article was particularly interesting, but basically nobody out there is answering the questions I want answered in an 'explain it like I'm 5' sort of way, which are these.

1. How fast do rock greenshield lichens grow where I live?

2. How big, approximately, does a rock greenshield lichen have to be before it gets all fluffy in the middle?
   
   2a. Why do they get all fluffy in the middle? Are they old? Dying? Insane? Under attack by some other lichen due to having made a microhabitat at the center of themselves that favors colonization by something else? What is going on with that? It's an age/size related thing -- smaller ones do not do that fluffy business.

3. Do bigger lichens grow faster than smaller ones? (What does this mean? Does it mean "increases radius faster" or does it mean "increases surface area faster" or should this be a ratio of current size to starting size? What numbers are useful, here?)
4. How the hell do you measure lichen growth rate meaningfully? Digital pictures? Assume a round lichen and measure some diameters? Radii? I feel like overlaying digital pictures would be helpful. That might give an answer in pixels, but... yeah.
5. What is a good way to mark where your subject lichens are in the field so that you can find them again in another year? (This is especially important when basically huge swaths of your woods are covered in rather similar size & shape grey sandstone-y rocks that have lichens on them.)

I'm kind of curious about this. Maybe I should look into it.

Looking at the lichen questions from last time, there are two different lines of inquiry. First: Central fluffiness. We have a theory (Flavoparmelia baltimorensis gets fluffy in the middle when it reaches a certain age/size) and we need to find out if that's true. How?

First off, I should survey a bunch of them and list size and fluffiness. Probably pictures would also be helpful in case someone else wanted to see if my measure of fluffiness (I be eyeballin' it, mebbe, but I was at the periodontist's the other day and he has a small metal pokey thing that I bet is surgical stainless steel (so nonreactive and probably won't bother the lichens) and it has mm's marked on it to like 10 mm's or so and I bet that would be a great tool for getting accurate "fluffiness" measurements of lichens and whoa, amazon sells these for like six bucks...) was legit or not. There will, I expect, be some edge cases that are "not quite fluffy" or whatever, but I will not know that until I go out and look at some damn lichens and by some, I mean "a lot". (How many? I should have paid more attention in statistics class, but I still have the book somewhere. Determining sample size for studies was a thing we covered in statistics.) So that's not terribly difficult.

But, doing that sort of descriptive survey would only answer "How is the current F. baltimorensis population sorted with respect to fluffiness and size?" I mean, it's a good question and I could totally generate a plot or something with the size of the lichens (X axis) and their respective fluffiness (Y axis) and see what we get there. Ideally, I'd get a trend line that slopes up and to the right if there's a positive correlation of some kind going on there.

HOWEVER, it may be that some F. baltimorensis are fluffy and others are not fluffy and some are a little fluffy and ALL OF THIS fluffiness variation is due to like, genetics or sunshine or relative dampness or something else. If that's the case, I get no trend line at all and maybe only ever noticed "fluffiness" on the big ones because I'm stupid. That, also would be interesting to learn. (I am reasonably certain of my ability to identify these lichens appropriately so that I only have the right kind in my survey. They are exceedingly common in my area, like you have no idea how common.)

But, if it turns out that size and fluffiness increase together (as seen by a gently upward sloping line from "small and unfluffy" to "bigger and more fluffy" to "really big and really fluffy"), then what would really be super-helpful at that juncture would be to follow some lichens for a time to see if they are BECOMING more fluffy as they get bigger. Like, do a longitudinal study of them and measure their size and fluffiness as they go along. I don't know how long that would take because I don't know how fast they grow, which is what I'm going to look at for next time.

From a week ago and the first sighting of the Symplocarpus foetidus (Eastern Skunk Cabbage) for the year (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9891793), they're now well underway and highly visible in their usual haunts. I took a bunch of snaps of them today because I want to illustrate how variable they are. These guys are a well-known and readily identified species for me, and still there is a lot of difference in how they look for their flowering form. Knowing what is 'normal variation' and what is 'holy smokes, this is a whole different kind of thing!!!' is something you get from looking at a lot of examples of the thing and its close relatives. So, here are some nice pictures illustrating the variation in Symplocarpus foetidus that one might find along the same creek bank on the same day within a population that has coexisted there for the last thirty or so years (can't speak to when I was a small kid, but they've been there since I was about twelve or so).

A Very Red One: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9979853

A Medium One: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9979846

A Greenish One: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9979834

If you didn't know a whole lot about skunk cabbage, you might be thinking that these were three different kinds, based on the colors of these samples. Heck, you might not know that these samples were the hoods for the flowering bits and that the actual plant has a rosette of ginormous (for PA) simple green leaves with a strong central vein. You might think that the huge rosette of leaves thing was a totally different plant unrelated to these maroon-and-green early spring jobbies.

But I've seen me some skunk cabbage and I know (locally) where and when to look for it. Where? At the creek that runs into the top of the lake by Kutz's. (I can find them other places, but this is the "I want to look at some skunk cabbage and I'm in a hurry and I don't want to piddle around hunting for it" location. It's a perennial, so when you find some, you can go back and visit it every year if you want and it should still be pretty much where you left it.) When? You can see the flowering hood things from about the last week in February to around St. Patrick's Day in March. Three weeks, or so, I think, but I will track that more closely this year as part of the Flowering Plants project. The large green rosettes of leaves aren't up until after the flowers depart and I think they arrive in late April, but I have not got actual notes about that. I'll try to do better going forward.

Not only do I know where and when to look for it, I have some idea of what is 'normal variation' for the species. So I am not confused by it. But this is a real issue for people going out into the woods and looking at stuff to see if it's thing A or thing B or thing C.