An interesting Ant Plant Mutualism and How I Got Started In The Study of Ants. Vicia and Camponotus

Once i was out botanizing and found two species of  Vicia (Vetch) growing next to each other on a roadside in NY state (they are of asian origin).

one of them, V. sativa had ants crawling all over it.  when i disturbed it the ants would snap their heads against the stem, presumably making vibrations to call others for help.  Eventually they were all over me.

i noticed there were nectaries at the leaf axils that the ants were drinking from. (curiuosly the axils are also were the flowers grow)

scroll down here for pics of nectaries with ants at them

https://www.francini-mycologie.fr/BOTANIQUE/Vicia_sativa.html

image from that page:

 

these are in france AND the ants appear to be Camponotus too!


so i looked at the other Vicia (V. cracca) next to it.  no ants.  NO NECTARIES!

https://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/flower/tufted-vetch

 image from that page

very curious.

i was so fascinated that i took some ants home, went to the college library for an ant book to key them out with (all i could find was Wilson and Holdobler 'The Ants') and got them down to genus: Camponotus

this was my start in the study of ants!

at the time i did not have a camera to take pics.  posted are pics from other websites.

Rough Notes on Cuatro Cienegas (Mexico) interesting geological/biological region.

Notes From Complexity Explorer origins of life online course summer 2020

2.3 cuatro cienegas
https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/155-origins-of-life-summer-2022/segments/15359

 
Valeria Souza et. al. 2018 "The lost world of Cuatro Ciénegas Basin, a relictual bacterial niche in a desert oasis"
https://complexityexplorer.s3.amazonaws.com/supplemental_materials/2.3+Likely+Environments+for+Studying+OoL/elife-38278-v2.pdf




mexico

Dr Valeria Souza universitad national autonoma de mexico

amazing geology
Sierra San Marcos y Pinos
marine sediments stored conditions of ancient sea
magma rich in sulfur back to archaean?  
very poor in P, skewed stoichiometry
life needs 60N /P
here it's 100-200N/P
so this life needs to steal P

stromatolites and microbial mats, go back to archaen and precambrian boundary  EDIACARA


Maria Kalambokidas

at Pozas Azules
archean domes microbial mat
methanogens cfreated a bubble that burst
mats hidden below salt crust

she looing at evol resilance of microbial mats
layers: methanogens make food for
then sulfur oxidizing bacts
then photosynth

WAIT SO I DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW OLD THESE COMMUNITIES ARE.  ARE THEY LOOKING AT LIVING COMMUNITIES FOSSILS WHAT?

LOW IN PHOSPHORUS

3) why so many species?




looking for microbial mats and stromatolites
at ccb perhaps we have ancient lineages

the magma below recycles fluids in deep aquifer and mimics ancient ocean environments perhaps
unbalanced stoichiometry of Mg and S replicate marine osmolarity, despite being low in NaCl!
something about isotope analysis saying this composition is ancient.  Wolaver et al 2013
also unbalanced stoichiometry between N and P Elser et al 2006

redfield ratio for open ocean and phytoplankton averages strongly around 16:1  individual species go from 60:1 to 6:1

in ocean this has to do with residence times and mixing.  in organisms maybe it's the ratio of proteins to rRNA

ccb has much lower P ratios.  these niche variables, P, S might be responsible for unique microbial communities surviving here for 100s millions of years.  Torsvik 2003 stable geology: this site on the coasts of Laurentia for a long time. then 35mya the Sierras uplifted and isolated ccb from the Western Seaway Souza 2006.  and the acidification of /Chihuahuan desert in the last 7my  

oh they are saying this is an isolated relict from seas!  even the viral part of community maintain marine signature!

N:P ratio in sediment of Churince hydrologial system is 167:1  wow.  some ccb bacilii have N:P as high as 965:1

[ok whats the histogram of P usage in bacillus?  phospholipids, DNA, mRNA, tRNA, rRNA, ATP, phosphorylated proteins, phosphorylated metabolites...

Alcaraz 2008 says phospholipids can be ~30% total phosphate in living organisms.

some ccb Bacillus spp synthesis  sulfolipids!  ability they got a long time ago by HGT from cyanos!  Alcaraz 2008  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfolipid  it's sulfoquinovosyl diacylglycerol the usual triacylglycerol with sugar head like cerebroside and a SO3- substitution

so they claim these conditions characterstic of precambrian ocean, but then abruptly in phanerozoic 542my afer glaciation continental weathering dissolved phosphates in ocean.  planavsky 2010.  some suggestions that cyanos and Bacilli from ccb diverged in late precambrian

Churince is closed hydrological system and most endangered site in ccb,

they find ancient ediacara endemic claids in soils but more recent jurassic invaders in aquatics

patagonia also has isolated lakes aguayo 2017

ccb also extremely diverse 57/86 known bact phyla  only comparable t pearle river in china 2400km of multiple inputs. but ccb TINY 1kmm!

[[CONFUSED THEY SAY **SOIL POPS ENDEMIC BUT TALK ABOUT ANCIENT **MARINE SIGNAL]]

NOT LOT EXTINCTION EVENTS


lots of paper not make sense

the area is endangered last 50yrs

another paper tries to look at rRNA operon copy number to link to phosphorus metabolism and finds conflicting patterns

ccb is most diverse site in NA???? which is odd considering low productivity.  hmm

similarities in viral sequences with gulf of mexico and sargasso sea which haven't been in contact for 35my


many strains metabolicly interdependent!



***

next: Gabriela Olmedo-Alvarez Cinvestav mexico with Valeria Souza

***
maybe lack of nutrients is key to diversity because low productivity makes PATCHY ENVIRON

low nutrients keep euks and multicells from competing with the bacts?

in water are stromatolites and a few 100m away there are salt crusts with interesting microbial eco


seems to be thick grassy vegetation around her poza



Souza:

then pozas rojas  water from below, not rain, fluctuating environs sometimes evaporate and salinity goes up.  and colors become deeper.

they are deep red!

each poza is like an island.  high diversity.  and a lagoon.  

then in 2010 a hurricane spread the lagoon to all the pozas and enriched them with P

and fish came in during the Holocene?

well?  just how stable HAS the place been?

around the pozas is scrub and bare patches

[[ARE THEY GOING TO DRILL DOWN TO DEEP AQUIFER AND SEE WHAT LIVES IN IT?]]

***

Jorge Valdivia
U Nat autonoma de Mex

r operon work


ok now a poza azul, and big stromatolite shelf

why they say ediacara turned oceans BLUE?

and elsewhere are archaean domes mimicing early anoxic environments

nice layered black mud!

[I DONT UNDERSTAND HOW ANCIENT THE AQUIFER CAN BE]

Review of VERY venomous fierce predatory Box Jellies

Notes on the venomnous predator Tripedalia, the box jelly

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326858816_Vision_Made_Easy_Cubozoans_Can_Advance_Our_Understanding_of_Systems-Level_Visual_Information_Processing

 

(diagrams from above article)

lives in complex mangrove root environ.
eats copepods that congregate in light shafts in the roots

video of Tripedalia in mangrove forest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4PFWBOm5g8

4 behaviors:
night day: as it darkens the jelly sinks to the bottom and holds onto a root to settle for night, so it doesn't get swept out of its hunting grounds.  when day comes it swims back to surface

it swims towards the mangrove areas so it doesn't get washed out to sea

it detects shafts of light, when light, it decreases bell contractions and stays in light to eat copepods.  if it drifts out of light it quickly increases contractions to swim back into shaft of light.  is it random like bacterial chemotaxis or can it AIM back into the light shaft?

it detects vertical bars on visual field, diagonal bars a little less and horizontal bars not so much.  the sharper the image, the faster the response (sharper means closer!).  the response is to quickly turn around and swim away, so it doesn't collide with and injure itself on the roots.

the last 2 behaviors are mediated by camera type eyes with irises, lense and couple hundred photodetector cells.  definitely responding to edges across visual field.

there is a nerve net of ~1000 neurons connecting each of their 4 eyes to muscles.

 

Evolution is fun!

This striking Marble outcrop was fun to chance upon!

There's an anomalous marble formation just south of Berlin NY on rt 22, quite surprising to chance upon it.  I believe the story is that it's part of an older part of the continent. then the local shales, Rensselaer Plateau graywacke etc.. called the Taconic Klippe got shoved over that part of the continent.  this small patch of marble managed not to get covered!

here we see a grand outcrop of very light colored (white/grey, hint of blue) marble with lots of criss crossy fractures and some layers are quite weathered into dozens of pages like a book

Here we see a section that has more blocky fracture than layered weathering.

Here I'm holding a chunk that has fallen off of one of the weathered layers from the first picture and the actual rock has weathered into mm thin sheets like pages of a book.  If I let go, it falls to pieces!

Here is a block with more conchoidal fracture, not weathered and quite hard.  Tho... you can see vague roughly parallel lines in it that you can imagine will one day weather into the pages of the image above.

The southern end of this outcrop got a little messy.  I'm not sure what I'm looking at.  It was VERY hard and difficult to get samples.  Some quartz in there maybe.

Is that quartz?  I must go back and investigate.

go look for calcite it is growing everywhere around you.

these beauties were growing on a shale outcrop just south of Ashokan Resevoir in NY.

 

These were growing on the face of a very metamorphosed road cut just west of Willmington VT on Rt. 9.

 

 A warty calcite crust with a green layer inside it. never did get around to crushing some under the microscope to see what was growing in there. was the green biofilm growing the calcite? growing on a limestone outcrop in Rosendale NY. downtown Rt. 213

 

When and how and whether exposed or inside fractures and how long it took for all these calcite growths to grow, I have no clue. woud be cool to learn. I suspect the one with the green (living?) layer in it is contemporary.

 

Quartz Veins In Outcrops

 Here I will collect all the quartz veins i've found so far.  they are ubiquitous, at least in shale outcrops.

the Earth is constantly heaving and hawing and cracking, and hot fluids supersaturated with dissolved silica come seeping up under pressure to fill the cracks.  Does the pressurized fluid help make the cracks?

Often we can see parts of oucrop that have slid past other parts when a crack forms between them.  Often we can see a smooth surface along this crack with paralell striations on it, called slickensides.  Often there are quartz veins against the slickenside.  Does the quartz filling in the crack aid in the rock being able to slide?  Does it cause the slide?  Or does it come in AFTER the slide?  I do not know.

Often the quartz vein will have nice crystals, if it wasn't entirely full of quartz and the crystals have room to grow.  Supposedly you can find lots of cool minerals in these, but i have not found them yet.

1) Rt 209 just north of Ellenville NY.

 

 

  

Rt 2 (congress street) up the hill from Troy, NY past the first traffic light

 

 

   

Hmm... I had thought that I had more. Well, at least these are the two with quartz veins and slickensides.