Well-Rounded Ruminations
Long time no blog. 20 months to be exact. I’ve been living life in all (okay – most) of its glory. Generally though, I find my curiosity blooming not only on trips to the giant Pacific Northwest rainforests, but also in the small, everyday sights that inspire trips down internet rabbit holes. To catch you all up since the last blog, here’s a smattering of intriguing images that I’d like to share with you.
1. Velvet Ants
They’re actually wasps
2. This sleepy kitty
3. Spilanthes
These curious little flowers are also known as the toothache plant because if you pop one in your mouth it gives you the tingles and a zesty numbing sensation! They’re like natural pop rocks - without the sugar rush of course. They’re originally from Brazil but nowadays you might find them just about anywhere.
4. Jelly Fungi
*pokes the fungi*
5. Life finding a way…
6. Vanilla!
Many people have heard me say that vanilla is one of the most underrated flavors out there. It’s synonymous with “plain”, but the warm, earthy flavor of true vanilla should be much more appreciated for its uniqueness and complexity.
Vanilla is the sun-dried seed pod from a tropical orchid. Vanilla flowers must be individually pollinated by hand. The seed pods take about 9 months to fully develop - yes, as long as a human fetus. Once harvested the pods must be dried in the sun during the day and wrapped in cloth and stored in boxes at night - yes, swaddled like a human infant. This daily coddling goes on for weeks to months - yes, like (ahem) a human child!
After the seed pods have transformed from these green-bean-looking things to delicate, dark brown sticks, they must be carefully sliced open for the pulp inside to be removed. Each pod produces roughly 15 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract so the price of vanilla is both high and variable.
After all that you would think that the toasted yet floral flavor produced would be considered the finest of flavors for the most delicate of palettes. However, perhaps because producers of packaged foods made vanilla their go-to crowd-pleasing flavor, it’s largely thought of as bland. Just a baking additive, and the most boring ice cream flavor.
7. Sexy Plants
8. Cat’s Eye Comb Jellies
9. “There’s no such thing as blue!”
Ok maybe there is such a thing, BUT the fact remains that a true blue pigment is exceedingly rare in nature. “But Sej, I see blue in the sky, some birds, those pretty blue butterflies, even iridescent blue in beetles!” - that’s you saying that.
What I mean is that many blue-looking things in nature achieve their appearance through a physical manipulation of light or by overlapping other pigments. The blue morpho butterfly infamously uses tiny transparent structures on its wings to reflect light in such a way that it appears a vivid blue. If you were to crumble up dried out blue morpho wings, they would just look grey.
Green is another tough pigment for animals to make so the smooth green snake has to throw together quite an outfit to get the look. It biologically produces a yellow pigment and has similar light reflecting structures on its scales that would look blue on their own. The combo of the yellow pigment and blue reflectors make it look green. But when the poor things die, the yellow pigment fades away quickly leaving the snake with only its blue outer coloring. But I guess you can’t blame a green snake for feeling blue about its own death.
10. The first time you meet a glacier
“Um… Can I get your autograph?”
11. Dog Toes!
12. Colonial Hydrozoans
Colonial hydrozoans are pretty common in the ocean, but did you know that they are not one animal but are actually a colony of multiple specialized organisms that are not found in any free-standing form? That’s like if your organs were all actually different animals and together they made a human. Crazy, right?!
Man-o-War “jellies” and By-the-Wind Sailors (velella velella) shown in these photos are examples of colonial hydrozoans. The Man-o-War’s stinging tentacles, digesting tissues, and other parts are made of groups of polyps, that are individual organisms. They are connected, and each group has specific functions that combine to what we think of as one individual animal. It’s actually more like a mothership than a jellyfish.
The Man-o-War and the velella velella are free floating on the ocean surface. They are unable to control the direction they move, and the wind often pushes them up on beaches where they can be stranded en masse. Who would think such a simple looking thing is actually a complex, highly-organized mish-mash of different life forms?
13. Ancient Jewelry
14. Curvy Eclipse Shadows
15. A Nice Fuzzy Caterpillar
16. A Mural Made of Beans
Tepoztlán, Mexico
17. Weird Ice
Frozen water is another one of those things that seems straightforward and uninteresting until you look really closely. The very fact that ice has a greater volume than the same amount of liquid water is a wee bit mind blowing and leads to all kinds of strange phenomena.
These ice sticks are formed by melting and refreezing of shallow water. Because ice takes up more room, it squeezes itself as it’s freezing and then fractures into these little spindles. So neat!
The ice coming out of this stick is called hair ice, which would not even be possible unless the wood was colonized by a certain fungus after it died. The mycelium of the fungus (think roots or veins) leaves behind tiny vessels where water can collect. When it freezes, the ice is extruded in very fine strands that look like fluffy hair.
18. Close Encounters
19. Wizard Island
Crater Lake, OR
20. Wine Diamonds
If you’ve ever opened a bottle of wine that is heavy in sediment, you might notice these little rocks on the bottom of the cork or at the bottom of your glass. Fear not, the wine is (probably) still good. What you’ve found are “wine diamonds”. Before you go rushing off to the bank, they are not actual diamonds, just crystallized potassium bitartrate - AKA cream of tartar - the same stuff you might use while baking or whipping fluffy egg whites.
Large scale wine producers will precipitate the tartar and remove it to have a consistent wine that doesn’t raise any eyebrows. But doing this takes a lot of time energy and does not make the wine any better - some wine makers even think this makes the wine taste worse. Next time you pull a cork, check to see if you’ve mined anything besides a nice glass of wine.
21. The salmon journey
Seen at SeaTac Airport
22. Trees you can fit inside
(Left image by Brittney Muir, center and right by Robert Collins)
23. The Precision of Spiders
All images by Sejal Soni unless otherwise stated; please don’t use them without permission. Thanks for reading!