Some Critters Around The Neighborhood in June

 Tiny jumping spider came to visit back porch. About 6mm long.  Tutelina elegans.  I need a REAL camera.  those black and white stripes on it's head are cool eyebrows.

backyard bunny chillin'  Every evening.

Caviar on a leaf?  I think it's a fungus.  I think it's a fancy Birch tree.  I think the fungus is not mature yet.  will wait a few weeks for it to grow reproductive structures.  also I have to take thinner sections of the leaf it's growing on to see if it is growing INSIDE the leaf tissue.

The little pink blobs are about a 1/2 a millimeter high on the surface of the half a millimeter thick leaf.

Little hollow trumpets with pink blobs at the top.  What will they grow into?  dunno!  I can't tell if the fungal tissue is growing INSIDE the leaf.  can't see leaf cells niether!  need thinner section.  don't see any cells in the fungus either!  maybe is NOT a fungus.  Time will tell.

I could see hints of vascular tissue (tubes for water and nutrients, the plant's circulatory system) in the cross section tho.  each tube is one cell thick.

I think the large circles are cross sections of Xylem, the tubes that ship up water from the roots.  The Phloem, the tubes that the leaf sends food back down to the plant in, should be below.  

ok, update!  These are NOT fungus.  

What i thought was a fungus on the tree leaves, turns out to be the leaves reacting to being fed on by an Eriophyrid mite! Mites are related to ticks. some, you have seen, like these cute velvety red ones: about a millimeter long. u see them crawling everywhere even under water.

 

from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trombidium.spec.1706.jpg

 

most, you don't see as they are much less than a millimeter and hide, like hair follicle mites, house dust mites or plant gall mites. 4000 kinds of those. feed on plants and the plants get annoyed and make Galls around them.

 

 

Anyway, i've been told that my purple/salmon blob 'fungus' on (probly) Downy Birch leaves is the leaves being disturbed by 1/5th of a millimeter long mites, Acalitus longisetosus

https://bladmineerders.nl/.../acal.../acalitus-longisetosus/

I will have to look at the leaves closely and find the mites! tho maybe they are only active spring and fall!

 

They will look something like this: (from https://bladmineerders.nl/parasites/animalia/arthropoda/acari/actinotrichida/prostigmata/eleutherengona/eriophyoidea/eriophyidae/eriophyinae/acerini/acalitus/acalitus-brevitarsus/)

 

 

Some Random Thoughts On Whether The Abiotic Universe Computes Complex Math Structures

biosignatures

vvvvvv
the sequence of digits in pi is! a biosignature really?  have we ***ever*** found them in a natural system?  or only systems designed by living humans?????

welll... duh, in base 10, that's an arbitrary system that evolved with us.  approximate circles exist in nature so distributions of ratios close to pi exists in nature but.. only approximate.. any discrete representation of pi will need to come from an iterating dynamical system, one of which can come from life...

well bar ***** does math exist in nature or did we create it after all????  we didn't create the periodic chart, that's math in nature!  platonic solids... some exist in nature!  fibo numbers exist in nature.

prime numbers?  evolving system of cicadas and predators have computed some prime numbers!

so how much math can physics compute for us and how much requires biology?  so 2000 abiotic minerals are finding many math structures.

could something in the abiotic universe come ***anywhere close*** to finding pi to a million digits, or finding the monster group, or the first million primes or even classifying all finite groups or proving the 5 color theorem?  these are phenomenal tasks

quantum mech found the periodic chart which is a ****very rich structure***  abiotic chem  finds a bunch of topology!  a vibrating box of strings (not 10dimensional ones) can find many knots, could it find all of order n?

physics computes integers by instantiating energy into discrete particles!!!!!

we can build simple machines that compute prime numbers, digits of pi.. why doesn't the universe build these machines?????  or similar ones?  the universe doesn't seem very interested in these kinds of structrures, even though it is capable of much complexity.

biology computes fibo numbers.  those 2 physicists (duaday and...) built a simple machine that computes some, there must be a phyics process that does!    

fluid dynamics creates weird patterns.  jupiter's surface is complex  and saturn's fluid dynamics creates a hexagon.

stars can build numbers up to 98 or 280 or whatever number of nucleons using quantum mech!



bar... biology builds systems with on the order of 10^10 parts, either proteins in cells or cells in brains.

whatabout galaxies?  10^10 stars.  they interact?  can make cool spirals, infinite variety of weird shaped supernova bubble nebula...

solar systems create systems of small integer ratio resonances

gravity is not good at creating medium scale complexity out of equal masses, between 2 and 1000s go to chaos?  and >1000s make glob clusters?  ***any structures in glob clusters?****

and spiral galaxies?  lots of variation any ***detailed*** structure gonna get swamped with 3body chaos!!!!

so gravity is no good.

well so then there are all the phase transitions.  

fluids: couete rolls between 2 cylinders depending on velocities.  

discrete structures of phases in p-t space of elements and compounds

>>>>>is that limitless?  as you increase temp pressure eventually what?  say u do it with h, eventually... can you get incredible pressures but ***not*** high enough temperatures to get fusion?  anyway u eventually get fusion and begin creating periodic chart... i'm confused... all those diff phase transitions of p-t diagram eventually end when you get plasma  >>>>or do they?

anyway if you increase temp >>>>but not pressure?  you eventually create exotic particles like in particle accelerators  higher and higher energy particles??? more massive???  we think we have a chart of them all, but we build ***realy tiny*** particle accelerators!  what gets created in those galactic jets?  in neutron star collisions?  or as you go back in time towards big bang?  that's not a ***boundary*** so asymptotically do we get more and more complex particles?

still bar, how is th universe going to ever find the finite simple groups?

>>>>>wait!  symmetry groups.  we've classified a set of 230 space groups.  when stars created a couple dozen elements and then spewed them into planets... has earth found ***all*** the space groups by creating minerals?


so then why can't the universe find the sequence of primes etc... 

Maybe If We Accept What It Means To Be Human, We Can Start To Heal Each Other?

My thoughts on this fascinating article about some very human tragedy.  (I should really expand on this topic)

(warning, story is rather brutal)
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kip-kinkel-is-ready-to-speak_n_60abd623e4b0a2568315c62d

from Jessica Schulberg's post (she's the author)

@jessicaschulb
When Kip Kinkel was 15, he killed his parents, 2 boys at school and wounded 25 others. He took a plea deal that resulted in 112 yrs w/o parole and has been held up as the reason to lock kids up for life ever since. I've been talking with him since August

barry goldman
@barrygoldman1
my deep reaction to this is that this is the 21st century and we still really don't know how to accept what it means to be human, nor how to react to it.  200 year sentences in prison?  we don't know how to react rationally to being human!  that's like supernatural thinking. 1/n


schizophrenic breakdown and we kill.. THAT'S human.  our brains are creative hypercomplicated systems that obviously r going to go haywire sometimes.  that's the price we pay for having evolved into what we r.  when will we accept the reality of th RANGE of human experience? 2/n

in fact if we truly embraced the challenge of being human, the necessity of the divergence that is part of evolving thru being H. sapiens, not stigmatizing mental illness, all manner of divergent ways of being... probly we coulda helped the poor kid before he broke! 3/3

maybe i'm supposed to be working on this radical ministry i've imagined and call, shockingly, cancer is God.

only hinted at in the last paragraph here, in some thoughts about Darwin's day

https://blackskimmer.blogspot.com/2021/02/why-we-can-forgive-each-other-thoughts.html

We Are Visiting Jupiter's Moon Ganymede Briefly After 20 Years Wait.

Our spacecraft Juno (been at Jupiter for five years now) will finally begin flying by the moons. first one: Ganymede, on 7jun at 11am EDT. very short flyby but we haven't been there for 20 years so any new observations can be fruitful.

Ganymede is one of the 4 large Jovian moons, all very fascinating and different (Io has active volcanoes! Europa has an ocean covering ice shell that has been reworked recently, and possibly plumes to chemically analyse, Callisto is the furthest from Jupiter and geologically quiet)

 

The moons form a progression from closest to Jupiter to farthest, closest have more rock than ice and are more heated by tidal forces, so Io has no water at all, and Europa has the most active ocean/ice shell, the other moons have more ice but are cooler and less active.

Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, larger than the planet mercury! SOME bodies in the solar system have their own magnetic field and Ganymede is one of them. Ganymede likely has: a molten iron core, a rock mantle, an internal ocean and an ice shell. the shell has complex features and more recent geological activity than Callisto but less recent than Europa.

 

these were the first new solar system bodies that were discovered by telescope (probly by Galileo, maybe others) and showed that bodies could orbit around other bodies besides the earth (many thought earth was the center of all orbits)

they were also a great surprise when voyager first photographed them back in the 70s as they were all different and complex! They are telling many stories! some of geology, some of chemistry, perhaps even about life! life may exist in their oceans.

 

http://spaceref.com/jupiter/nasas-juno-to-get-a-close-look-at-jupiters-moon-ganymede.html

A Curious Genus Of Beetle That Likes To Live In Enclosed Biological Structures

 My friend posted a picture of a curious bracket fungus coming out of a tree the other day.  I thought they looked too young to key out because the bottom wasn't showing any pores.  But it turns out what I needed her to do was poke at the bottom and find out that Cryptoporus volvatus keeps its Volva (sack that forms around mushroomy things when they first form) covering its spore surface:

(foto from:)

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Photographs-of-Cryptoporus-volvatus-basidocarp-morphology-A-basidiocarp-growing_fig1_264050961

https://www.mushroomexpert.com/cryptoporus_volvatus.html

Now the story gets very interesting.  Note the beetle larva who lives in there.  Since the fungus covers its spore bearing surface in a sack, how do the spores escape to grow into new fungi?  Well Cryptoporus invites beetles to come in and eat some of the spore bearing tissues and in turn exit and spread the spores to new trees.  I've not been able to find complete information on this yet.  

But here is a curious twist to the story! One species of beetle that has been found to do this is Aethina suturalis, and I've met one of its relatives!   Aethina tumida is a beetle who lives in Honeybee hives, curious eh?  These beetles do mostly damage!  I found these two kissing in the observation hive in the Boston Science Museum a few years ago.

 

(photos my own)

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_hive_beetle

Another beetle in the genus, Aethina concolor, lives in Hibiscus buds (I think other flowers too).  These too, cause harm.  But there are insects who have evolved to only eat SOME of the flower or fruit, but in the process help pollinate the flowers, so a mutualistic relationship develops.  This is what A. suturalis does with the fungus!  So there is a chance for A. concolor to evolve into this kind of relationship too!

https://insectsandorganicgardening.com.au/all_insects/hibiscus-flower-beetle/

There are a few more species:
https://www.gbif.org/species/4730123

Very interesting genus of beetles!