Tarantula encountered on the path between the Zambia and Thailand (at the Heifer International Global Village).
We ran into this young tarantula on the path between the Zambian and Thai houses in Heifer International’s global village in Arkansas. We were taking the tour, and while this young fellow (probably male according to Zaq our guide) was not part of the regular schedule, we were lucky to find him. While tarantulas are venomous (mildly), and some have stinging hairs, their bites are about as painful as a bee sting (Warriner, 2011). But they are large, and, since most of us have a visceral fear of large arachnids, they’re pretty awesome to encounter (charismatic megafauna – is the term I like to use).
Zaq branished the wooden Spoon of Silence and shouted, "Hey. Take a look at this."
Tarantulas arrived in Arkansas about 8000 years ago (Warriner, 2011) at the height of the warmer, drier climate that followed the melting of the great North American glaciers about 10,000 years ago. The climate of Arkansas has gotten a bit wetter since then, but the spiders survive in isolated, drier upland areas (according to the Arkansas Tarantula Survey), like bits of grassland surrounded by forest. Pretty much like the grassy slope between the Thai and Zambian houses in the global village.
They can live to be 10-20 years old, which I think is pretty impressive for a spider.
Tarantulas usually just hang out at the mouth of their burrow and ambush anything that looks like prey to them. This includes insects and other spiders, but sometimes even lizards and very small mammals.
Identifying tarantula species is apparently difficult because their differences are usually quite subtle. The Arkansas chocolate tarantula (Aphonopelma hentzi), “is presumed to be Arkansas’ only tarantula species” (Barnes, 2002).
If you annoy them (with something like the Wooden Spoon of Silence) tarantulas will rear up and look menacing. Which is pretty awesome.
Maggie E. has a wonderful eye for spotting small fauna. She found this mason wasp (Monobia quadridens) while we were weeding the Heifer Ranch’s herb garden. It had caught this caterpillar and was trying to take off with it. It was a difficult job – the caterpillar probably weighed as much as the wasp – but it finally managed to take it away.
The wasp found the caterpillar difficult to move.
According to the Atlas of Vespidae, these wasps prey on small moth caterpillars. Which is probably why they are usually found in open habitats with flowers; hence the herb garden.
They also use caterpillars to feed their larvae (Wikipedia, 2011). They’ll lay an egg in a cell of their nest and stick a paralyzed beetle larvae, spider or caterpillar in with the egg to feed the wasp larvae when it hatches.
References
The wasp finally managed to drag the caterpillar to the edge of the wooden bench before it could take off.
Identifying these wasps was not too hard. The first image in the google search for “wasp caterpillar” looked just like the bug we found, carrying almost the same type of caterpillar.
The image was from the wonderful “What is that bug?” where you can send in bug pictures and the author (Daniel Marlos) will try to identify them.
What’s That Bug referenced the BugGuide which gives the full taxonomic classification and a lot of information about habitat, food and life cycle that’s in an easily readable form.
Picking green beans at the Heifer International Ranch.
We worked in the fields this afternoon: picking beans and planting garlic. Clear skies with a cool, early October breeze; warm, but not hot.
It was enjoyable work. The fields were small and there were a lot of us. Lots of conversation.
We picked somewhere close to 64 lbs of green beans, which, according to our guide, sells for somewhere around six dollars per pound (organic beans). Three hundred and eighty four dollars. Took us about an hour.
Earlier in the morning, we’d had a discussion about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Heifer ranch is a CSA. People from the surrounding towns buy shares in the annual crop, and the ranch brings them a basket of produce every week for the season. CSA’s are great: fresh local produce, for about the same price as in the store. You tend to get a broad enough variety that it helps expand your cooking repertoire. And you avoid all the externailties from long distance transportation and factory farming.
Finding out how much workers make in CSAs vs industrial agriculture.
They (our guides) had compared CSAs to the “typical” industrial agricultural system. Students read out notecards as they went through the all the jobs of the people who get your tomatoes to you. One student, who represented the energy going into the system, had to do a lot of jumping-jacks and pushups – situps too. There are eleven different jobs in the industrial system, with the people actually picking the crops – migrant workers – getting one cent for every dollar you pay at the store. They are three jobs within the CSA, and the farmer gets 80% of the sale price.
The presentation was a little problematic, unfortunately. Heifer is a CSA after all. Trouble started with our facilitator’s terminal question, “So which one do you think is better?” The first response was, “Well with the economy these days, won’t you loose a lot of jobs with the CSA?”
Fair point. But it might be argued that the industrial system might take one big farm and 11 jobs to bring 1200 tomatoes to market, it might take 4 CSAs, and about the same number of jobs (12), to do the same. Although the each person in the CSA system gets a little less, the money is more equitably distributed.
The second question, cut to the crux of the problem, “But what are the notecards leaving out?” Cynical? Perhaps. However, I’d like to think of it as healthy skepticism.
So now our guide was stuck. How could she, an obvious advocate for CSAs, convince the skeptical? Not easy, perhaps not even possible. By being too strong of an advocate for her side, she’d have a hard time convincing even the impartial.
It’s not easy making an argument that you’re passionate about. Not at all.
Snapping green beans. Students agree that beans you pick yourself taste better.
I made sure I had a small discussion with the more skeptical students, to make sure they realized that even if you distrust the credibility of someone, you can often learn something useful. In fact, that’s why you should always look for multiple sources of information. Also, while CSAs are great for some things, local farms in Arkansas or Missouri aren’t going to be producing a lot of tomatoes in January.
That’s why I’m glad we picked the beans later in the day. And it was important that we did the accounting.
It took sixteen of us one hour to pick $384 worth of beans. That works out to 24 bucks per person per hour. Since the migrant workers only make 1% of the final cost, we would have made about 24¢.
24¢ for an enjoyable hour of gardening on a pleasant day. But what do you do when you’re hot and miserable in the middle of the summer, and hour after hour after hour of the same work is what you need to feed your family. And you’re missing school to do it.
Planting garlic.
I’m not sure that students will intuit the difference between what we did and what migrant farm workers do; neither the time we put in, nor the effort we expended were anywhere near equivalent.
I think making that distinction is important. Recognizing what migrant workers do, many who are the same age as my students, might make the point of what organizations like Heifer and Human Rights Watch are trying to do better than just talking about it, or simulating it, in the classroom.
I think it might make a big difference to hear the voices of these workers.
So I’ll show the HRW video advocating for the CARE Act to reduce child labor among teen migrant workers, and see if it has an impact.
One of the first things we learned at Heifer was the process of group formation. It was also one of the last things they talked about so it must have been pretty important.
The four steps are:
Forming: Students are quite polite to each other when they first get on the balance board.
Forming: When the group first gets together, people tend to be cautious with one another. But because they’re so careful with what they say and what they do, newly forming groups don’t usually get much done.
Storming: Now the barriers start to break down as individual personalities manifest themselves. People start speaking up. A lot. They become less polite. Conflicts arise. People become accusatory. There’s lots of energy, but because of all the conflict, they still aren’t able to get much done.
Storming: Vociferous disagreement breaks out.
Norming: The conflict begins to settle down as the group starts to work out its kinks, as all the individuals begin to adapt to one another. Groups may need guidance to get there because everyone has to stop fighting, but as it usually helps that the group will start to see successes because of successful co-operation.
Performing: A well-functioning group can get a lot done. They’re able to communicate effectively, and take action effectively. Their productivity kicks into high gear and they can accomplish much together.
Norming: The group begins to organize itself. Rules of order are put in place.
Not all groups get through all four steps, and every time the group changes, such as when a new member (like a new student) is introduced the groups will need to go through some version of the four steps as they learn to accommodate the newcomer.
A well established culture will help groups adapt to change. This is yet another benefit of multi-aged classrooms, because a healthy classroom culture eases the transition as older students leave and new students come in.
Performing: Roles are assigned. Balance is achieved (from 2, to 5, to 57 seconds).
Even so, awareness of the four steps is extremely useful because it helps everyone anticipate that there will likely be some conflict, but that conflict is part of the group forming process and will likely diminish with time.
So you should expect, every year, to have to spend some time group building. Two weeks dedicated to orientation and teamwork is what Betsy Coe’s Montessori Middle School program uses. It’s a fair chunk of time to take out of the year, but because good groups can get so much more done, it’s well worth it to build a good classroom community.
A spicebush swallowtail butterfly (Papilio troilus) in the herb garden.
At the Heifer International ranch. Time spent weeding the herb garden. Not much weeding done (by me at least), but much photography. Pretty. A word designed for butterflies.
A variegated fritillary butterfly (Euptoieta claudia) in the herb garden.An eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus; officially documented by Linnaeus in 1758).A skipper (family Hesperiidae) extracts nectar from a flower in the herb garden.
Butterflies are classified as:
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera
References
Maggie Eisenberger, personal communication.
Opler, Paul A., Kelly Lotts, and Thomas Naberhaus, coordinators. 2011. Butterflies and Moths of North America. Bozeman, MT: Big Sky Institute. http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/ (Version 10/08/2011).
We’re off to the Heifer International farm near Little Rock for a week. I have not been there before, but I suspect I’ll be disconnected, loosing contact with the part of my brain that has all the details.
I could program during some of my downtime, but all the reference documentation is online. I could do some reading about pedagogy – I’ve been meaning to get to the book about homework – but I suspect it would be extremely frustrating to not be able to look up the references and follow thoughts with some online research. And I can’t really blog.
I’m not even sure I’ll have phone service.
So instead I’ve brought a book of poetry. It’s the same one I used to take on long trips before I was so fully committed to the internet. I’ve read it through a number of times, but there’s always something new to discover.
And it should provide the time I need to finish memorizing a few favorites. At one point I could recall the first three parts of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, but I think I’m back down to one now.
At any rate, there might be some slow blogging for the next week. I’ve scheduled a few posts but not enough to cover the time I’m gone, so this might be the first significant break for a couple years. We’ll see how it goes.
The western end of Deer Island extends a white, sandy, artificial, spit that partially covers the first of a series of riprap breakwaters that protect the waterfront development of the city of Biloxi. Although we’d landed there to pick up garbage as part of our coastal science camp, the beautifully developed beach profile was worth a few minutes.
Figure 2: Narrow beach typical of the east-west trending shorelines that are not exposed to the direct force of the waves.
The spit curves just ever so slightly northward, so it feels more of the direct force of waves blown all the way along the length of Biloxi Bay. The combination of unvegetated sand and stronger waves makes the beach along the spit looks very different from the beaches that parallel the shore. While the parallel beaches on Deer Island are covered in grass almost to the water’s edge (Fig. 2), the spit has a much wider beach, with a nicely developed sandbar protecting a shallow, flat-bottomed, water-saturated trough behind it (Fig. 1).
While the white beaches are pretty (that’s why they imported this sand after all), there are a number of fascinating features in the trough.
Figure 3: On our Natchez Trace hike we found it quite easy to stick fingers into the red precipitate at the bottom of the stream.
The first, and most obvious question is, why the reddish-orange color in the fine grained sediment at the bottom of the trough? A microscope and a little geochemical analysis would be useful here, however, lacking this equipment, we can try drawing parallels with some of our experiences in the past. In fact, we should remember seeing the same color in some of the streambeds when we were hiking in Natchez Trace State Park in Tennessee (Fig. 3). My best guess at that time was that the red was from iron in the groundwater being oxidized when it reached the surface.
Figure 4: The rich black of decaying organic matter, sits just beneath the rusty-orange surface sediement.Figure 5: Green, organic matter, freshly deposited at the edge of the trough. If it decays while saturated with water it will turn black. Note also the splay of white sand at the top of the picture.
This is probably not a bad guess for the red in the trough as well, since there is some fresh groundwater discharge from the shallow watertable on the island. However, I suspect that the story is a bit more complex, because the rich black color of the organic matter just beneath the surface (Fig. 4) suggest that the shallow water and surface sediment in the trough is lacking in oxygen. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon to have steep geochemical gradients in boundary environments like this one.
The physical and geochemical gradients extend horizontally as well as vertically. At the edges of the trough the organic matter just beneath the surface is green, not black (Fig. 5), because this is the color of the undecayed algae.
At the seaward side of the beach, the waves of Biloxi Bay lap against the sand bar. When the tide rises, and the wind picks up, these waves wash over the crest of the sand bar pushing water and sediment over the top into trough. When the sand washes evenly over the top it creates thin layers (possibly one layer with each high tide). If you cut into these layers you’ll see little the laminations in profile, which, because the layering is close to horizontal, look like the lines of topography on a map (Fig. 6). When the waves wash over small gaps in the sandbar the sediment it transports is deposited in a more concentrated area – these are called sand splays – that overlap and cover some of the fine-grained, orange sediment at the edge of the trough. These are both two of the small ways that the sand bar moves, slowly pushing inland.
Figure 6: Sand splay and laminations on the landward side of the sand bar. The laminations are created by even overwash of the sandbar, while the splay is the result of more concentrated flow.
Bioturbation
The features on the bottom of the trough are a quite interesting because of the observable effects of bioturbation (disturbance by organisms) (Figs. 7, 8 & 9).
Figure 7: In close-up, the holes of the crabs and the mixture of colors looks like an arid, volcanic landscape photographed from space.Figure 8. Digging deep beneath the orange surface sediment, small crabs create mounds of white sand. Figure 9. Footprints of predators. Paleontologists use features like these that are preserved in rocks to discover interpret what the relationships between organisms was like in the past.
Plastic bottles take 100 years to break down; styrofoam cups – fifty years; aluminum cans – 200 years; glass bottles, which are made of silica, just like the beach’s white sand – who knows. So we took a little time out of our adventure trip to collect anthropogenic debris as we walked along the beach on Deer Island.
Leather (shoe) - 50 years.Plastic bags - 10 to 20 years.Styrofoam cup - 50 years.Plastic bottles - 100 years.Tin cans - 50 years. Aluminum cans - 200 years.
We picked up stuff on our way out, so we were able to enjoy the fruits of our labours on our walk back to the landing point.
The beautiful beach cleared of garbage.
Note
The degradation times for marine garbage can be found on the SOEST website, but That Danny has an interesting compilation of data that tries to reconcile the different degradation times you can find on the web.
