LUMIÈRE ET OBSCURITÉ

BEAUTY AND LIGHT: AMETHYST

FROZEN IN TIME: MAMMOTHS

We may one day have wooly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), extinct since the Pleistocene, roaming around zoos and colder climes. At least it looks that way.

Because of their massive size and icy cold environment, many mammoths have been preserved as frozen carcasses instead of being turned to stone, thus they are prime candidates for genetic reproduction. When originally touted in the news as a possibility, most audiences took the science to be too far fetched.

Researchers harvesting DNA and deciphering their genome feel they are on the edge of doing just that. Science as we know it is sliding down the double helix to science fiction. DNA, long bits of genetic code that form the roadmap of how we are built, is relatively easy to harvest and remarkably hardy.

Even with the abuse of time, small amounts can be extracted and with that the genetic wizards are able to put the puzzle pieces back together. Frozen sperm is used in fertility clinics around the globe, the difference here is that the entire mammal is frozen before harvesting the sperm. Once harvested, the frozen sperm from long extinct male mammoths is injected into eggs from females of closely related species.

While positive results have been made and papers published (see the National Academy of Sciences) a baby mammoth has yet to be conceived.

AMMONITE DETAIL: CREATIVE366PROJECT

ORCHIDS: CREATIVE366PROJECT

Orchidaceae get their name from the Greek ὄρχις (órkhis), which literally means "testicle", a nod to the naughty nub shape of their roots.

In Greek mythology, Orchis was the son of a ugly a nymph and a satyr who came upon a festival for Dionysios deep in the woods. Liking his fermented grapes a wee bit too much, he overindulged on wine then tried to have his way with a priestess of Dionysios.

As a result the Bacchanalians tore him limb from limb. His grieving father prayed to the Gods for him to be restored. Not that keen on folk of his ilk but feeling kindly, they turned him into a flower instead.

KANE: CREATIVE366PROJECT

INUKSHUK

BILATERAL SYMMETRY: BRACHIOPODS

Looking down at the pebbly sand, you see just the wee top of this lovely fossil brachiopod poking out. Glee, delight and wonder follow as you roll it over in your hands and notice how it differs from clams you may be more familiar with.

Clams or bivalves are molluscs, the second-largest phylum of invertebrates with about 85,000 extant species. While brachiopods share some similarities with their molluscan friends they are in a phylum all their own.

Brachiopods are small marine shellfish that are not so common today but back in the Palaeozoic they were plentiful the world over. The two valves that make up a brachiopods shell are of different sizes and if you look closely you'll see that the hinge runs top and bottom  -- versus left and right like a clam.

Their lineage dates back to the Cambrian with over 12,000 fossil species and 350 living relatives sorted between 6,000 genera. There are two major groups of brachiopods, articulate with toothed hinges and simple open and closing muscles to manipulate their shells and inarticulate brachiopods with untoothed hinges and a more complex set of muscles used to control the brachial supports used to open and close their shells.

WINTER MORNING

CASTLE PEAK FOSSIL FIELD TRIP

IMMORTAL BELOVED

CANADA'S GREAT BEARS

Look at how this protective mamma bear holds her cub in her arms to give him a bit of a wash. 

Her gentle maternal care is truly touching. This mamma has spent late Autumn to Spring in a cave, having birthed them while still hibernation and staying in the den to feed them on her milk.

Black bear cubs stay with their mamma for the first one to three years of their lives while she protects them and teaches them how to thrive in the wild using their keen sense of smell, hearing, vision and strength. Once they are old enough, they will head off into the forest to live solo until they are ready to mate and start a family of their own. 

Mating is a summer affair with bears socializing shoulder to shoulder with potential mates. Once they have mated, black bears head off on their own again to forage and put on weight for their winter hibernation. If the black bear lives in the northern extent of their range, hibernation lasts longer — they will stay in their dens for seven to eight months longer than their southern counterparts. For those that enjoy the warmer climes in the south, hibernation is shorter. If food is available year-round, the bears do not hibernate at all.

The American black bear, Ursus americanus, is native to North America and found in Canada and the United States. 

They are the most common and widely distributed of the three bear species found in Canada. 

There are roughly 650,000 roaming our forests, swamps and streams — meaning there is a good chance of running into them if you spend any amount of time in the wild. 

Full-grown, these fuzzy monkeys will be able to run 48 kilometres (30 miles)  an hour and smell food up to 32 kilometres (20 miles) away.

With their excellent hearing, black bears usually know you are near well before you realize the same and generally take care to avoid you. Those that come in contact with humans often tend to want to check our garbage and hiking supplies for tasty snacks — hey, a free meal is a free meal.    

In British Columbia, we share our province with nearly half of all black bears and grizzly bears that reside in Canada. The 120,000 - 150,000 black bears who live in the province keep our Conservation Officers busy. They account for 14,000 - 25,000 of the calls the service receives each year. Most of those calls centre around their curiosity for the tasty smells emanating from our garbage. They are omnivores with vegetation making up 80-85% of their diet, but they are flexible around that — berries and seeds, salmon or Doritos — bears eat it all. 

And, as with all wild animals, diet is regional. In Labrador, the local black bear population lives mostly on caribou, rodents and voles. In the Pacific Northwest, salmon and other fish form a large part of the protein in their diet versus the bees, yellow jackets and honey others prefer. The braver of their number have been known to hunt elk, deer and moose calves — and a few showy bears have taken on adults of these large mammals. 

Bears hold a special place within our culture and in First Nation mythology in particular — celebrated in art, dance and song. In the Kwak'wala language of the Kwakiutl First Nations of the Pacific Northwest, the word for black bear is t̕ła'yi — mother is a̱bas and łaxwa̱lap̓a means to love each other. 

Kermode or Spirit Bear, Ursus americanus kermodei

From the photos here you can see that black bears are not always black —  ranging in colour from cinnamon to brown, tan, blonde, red — and even white. 

The Kermode or Spirit Bear, Ursus americanus kermodei, a subspecies of black bear found only in British Columbia — and our official provincial mammal — is a distinctive creamy white. 

They are not albinos, their colouring stems from a recessive mutant gene — meaning that if they receive two copies it triggers a single, nonsynonymous nucleotide substitution that halts all melanin production. Well, not all. They have pigmented eyes and skin but no colour in their fur. The white colour is an advantage when you are hunting salmon by day. Salmon will shy away from their black cousins knowing their intention is to enjoy them as a tasty snack. 

Spirit Bears live in the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia's north and central coast alongside the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation who call the Kermode moskgm’ol or white bear.

The Kitasoo/Xai’xais have a legend that tells of Goo-wee, Raven making one in every ten black bears white to remind us of the time glaciers blanketed the land then slowly retreated — their thaw giving rise to the bounty we harvest today.  

Black bears of any colour are a wee bit smaller than their brown bear or grizzly bear cousins, with males weighing in at 45 to 400 kilograms (100 to 900 pounds) and females ranging from 38 to 225 kilograms (85 to 500 pounds). 

Small by relative standards but still very large animals. And they are long-lived or at least can be. Bears in captivity can live up to 30 years but those who dwell in our forests tend to live half as long or less from a mixture of local hazards and humans. 

Reference: Wild Safe BC: https://wildsafebc.com/species/black-bear/

KAYAKING PARADISE: ISAAC LAKE

IMMORTAL EOCENE

EVENING LIGHT: LUND HARBOUR

OREGON FOSSIL MAMMALS

More than 100 groups of mammals have been found in the Miocene (37 – 20 mya) John Day Formation near Kimberly, Oregon. I'm planning a field trip this July to collect in the fossiliferous strata that have yielded beautifully preserved speciments of many of the animals we see domesticated today.

Dogs, cats, swine and horses are common. Oreodonts, camels, rhinoceras and rodents have also been found in this ancient deciduous forested area.

SHADES OF AUTUMN

THE RISE OF FALL

MOTORING THROUGH ACTIVE PASS

ANCIENT ANTACID: MIDDENS

Many First Nations sites were inhabited continually for centuries. The discarded shells and scraps of bone from their food formed enormous mounds called middens. Left over time, these unwanted dinner scraps can transform through a quiet process of preservation. Time and pressure leach the calcium carbonate, CaCO3, from the surrounding marine shells and help “embalm” bone and antler artifacts that would otherwise decay. Calcium carbonate is a chemical compound that shares the typical properties of other carbonates.

CaCO3 is common in rocks and shells and is a useful antacid for those of you with touchy stomachs. In prepping fossil specimens embedded in limestone, it is useful to know that it reacts with stronger acids, releasing carbon dioxide: CaCO3(s) + 2HCl(aq) → CaCl2(aq) + CO2(g) + H2O(l)

For those of you wildly interested in the properties of CaCO3, may also find it interesting to note that calcium carbonate also releases carbon dioxide on when heated to greater than 840°C, to form calcium oxide or quicklime, reaction enthalpy 178 kJ / mole: CaCO3 → CaO + CO2.

Calcium carbonate reacts with water saturated with carbon dioxide to form the soluble calcium bicarbonate. Bone already contains calcium carbonate, as well as calcium phosphate, Ca2, but it is also made of protein, cells and living tissue.

Decaying bone acts as a sort of natural sponge that wicks in the calcium carbonate displaced from the shells. As protein decays inside the bone, it is replaced by the incoming calcium carbonate, making the bone harder and thus more durable.

The shells, beautiful in their own right, make the surrounding soil more alkaline, helping to preserve the bone and turning the dinner scraps into exquisite scientific specimens for future generations.

SHIPS A'HOY: HAPPY THANKSGIVING

POWELL RIVER

PANGEA: THE GATHERING OF CONTINENTS

Pangea was an ancient continental landmass which formed about 240 million years ago. Had you been around to see the Earth at this time, you would have set your feet on most of the bits and pieces that would go on to become continents we know today. In the Earth's long history, most of the major continental places were gathered into a single mass. Pressure from deep within the Earth let to the break up of Pangea into the two huge landmasses of Gondwana and Laurasia.

Gondwana would split yet again into the modern contents of South America, Africa, India, Australasia and Antarctica. While they are far apart today, we find similar fossils on each of the continents from their shared history.

PLATE TECTONICS & PINOT GRIS

An evening view of Lund Harbour off beautiful British Columbia's rugged west coast is enough to get most folks dreaming of an ocean view. Some 270 million plus years ago, had one wanted to buy waterfront property in what is now British Columbia, you’d be looking somewhere between Prince George and the Alberta border.

Sipping a glass of Sandhill, I'm thankful for plate tectonics and the cultivation of the pinot gris grape.

KAYAKING PARADISE

KAYAK SAILING: ENGLISH BAY

VIEWING THE ANCIENTS

NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR FIRST NATIONS

Newfoundland and Labrador is home to three distinct Indigenous groups: the Inuit, Innu, and the Mi'Kmaq. Descendents of the Thule Inuit, the Inuit have made Labrador their home for centuries. Both descended from Algonkian-speaking hunter-gatherers, the Innu people are found in Labrador, and the Mi’kmaq people have lived and travelled throughout Newfoundland for generations.

SIVERT: AMMONITE PALEONTOLOGIST

A great temple to the god Amon was built at Karnak in Upper Egypt around c. 1785. It is from Amon that we get his cephalopod namesake, the ammonites and also the name origin for the compound ammonia or NH3.

Ammonites were a group of hugely successful aquatic molluscs that looked like the still extant Nautilus, a coiled shellfish that lives off the southern coast of Asia. While the Nautilus lived on, ammonites graced our waters from around 400 million years ago until the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years.

Varying in size from millimeters to meters across, these elegant marine dwellers are prized as both works of art and index fossils helping us better understand and date strata. In the photo above, my cousin and budding paleontologist Sivert, holds an ammonite from the Paris Basin.

Cousins in the Class Cephalopoda, meaning "head-footed," ammonites are closely related to modern squid, cuttlefish and octopus with complex eye structures and advanced swimming abilities. They used these evolutionary benefits to their advantage, making them successful marine predators cruising our ancient oceans expertly capturing prey with their tentacles.

Picture a hungry fellow at a smorgasborg. Now add water.

CASTLE PEAK FOSSIL FIELD TRIP