Diario de thebark
Saw a fox this evening at about 11:45, standing in the lighted street looking south down the alley. Glanced my way for a moment as if to say I was neither threat nor food. Got camera but fox had disappeared. Size of a large shanky cat except for the extra long tail. Looked grayish. Might have been the one I saw up the alley in the winter, or the one there two years before that. One of these days I'll get a pic. If I live long enough.
Saw/spooked a hummingbird that was feeding on the standing cypress with the red flowers near the entrance after 1 p.m. today. I was too slow on the draw to get a photo, or even to ID the hummingbird. Keep a weather eye out and maybe somebody can come up with a photo. Keep up the good work!
Yeah, I know I'm not "following" anyone. Plenty worth following; could name 4-5 right off the bat. Trouble is, "following" could turn out to be a more than full-time job if it were say Ellen5 or Amzapp. Do I need to take on a non-paying full-time job? Enough, already, appears on my dashboard.
At a guess there are 4-5 species of sandmats in this area, some as you would expect on the caliche ridges and slopes, but some springing up through the grass and leaf litter in sandy areas in a most unsandmatly way. I did not take time to ID most of my observations intending to go back over them later (sure), but thanks to Euphorbia expert Nathan Taylor for so many IDs.
Only one observation so far has been identified as being unique to our region and that is the Ranunculus which has otherwise been found only as near as Amarillo (by @amzapp ). If all plants were identified, I suspect there would be a couple more unique species. A number of little plants observed are unidentified or tentatively identified. Goodness knows I have dozens of observations I consider unidentified even when there is a label on them.
ADDED; Rarities sighted --
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9216895 Panicled Aster
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/2429933 Osprey
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/13766547 Cursed Crowfoot
I am not good at grasses, either photographing them, finding them, or identifying them. @rowdius is much much better as are the others whose observations are included. I suspect we have only scratched the surface of the grasses here in Mackenzie Park Wilds.
The riverine habitat has a number of dock-like and allium-like species that are hard to identify and even when photographed and "observed" here may not be properly identified.
Also the trees. Has a single Siberian Elm been "observed" in this project? Yet there are many of them. I think there are several tree species unobserved or at least unidentified.
Birds. I've had a number of unusual birds "get away" unidentified and unphotographed in this area, two in the last week or so. You have too.
Nobody has looked at the fish and invertebrates in the stream. We got turtles but no fish, crawdads, or water boatmen.
The Escobaria missouriensis cactus is interesting. See my journal post on this species: https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/thebark/15763-missouri-foxtail-cactus-escobaria-missouriensis-observations-in-yellowhouse-canyon-lubbock-texas
Within the city of Lubbock, Escobaria missouriensis has been found wild only in this area of Mackenzie Park and around Dunbar Lake. Ellen5 found several outside Lubbock and I photographed a different species of Escobaria at Tahoka Lake. Why have none been found elsewhere in Yellowhouse Canyon? I would guess that in landscaping Lubbock canyon lakes parks the city destroyed many cactus. Why then have no Escobaria been found at Lubbock Lake Landmark? Good question. LLL has one would think been thoroughly explored.; not true of the canyon up from LLL or down from Dunbar.
Too often I have been identifying when I really have no clue, based on choices offered by the software on this site. I am thinking about stopping that practice entirely and submitting an ID only if based on a good hunch or better.
What that will do is leave many of my observations labeled "plantae," "monocot." or "dicot," perhaps into perpetuity. While it shrinks the species count, it is more honest.
Was discussing over the internet this evening the issue of data degradation of electronically-stored photo files. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation
Is DNA any better at storing data? Not hardly. Consider first the spontaneous abortion rate, meaning the failure of a fertilized egg to produce a live birth. Estimates are that the success rate is about 30%, or turned around that 70% of zygotes abort or fail. Some or most of that is due to developmental failure, birth as lottery, birth as slot machine. (We could go to individual senescence and telemeres and so on but let's not, for now.)
In biological systems, errors fuel evolution. Perhaps one day machine code errors will drive machine evolution. Good for us perhaps that we are not there yet.
Back 39 years ago some of the biology of this was made clear to me when I started working with my cousin who had, he believed, a method for separating X-Chromosome bearing from Y-Chromosome bearing spermatozoa.
You had to ask, WHY should there be any substantial difference between X and Y bearing spermatozoa tht would enable them to be separated? Sure, the X Chromosome is bigger than the Y Chromosome, but consider that bovines have 60 chromosomes, 30 being the haploid number. If the X Chromosome is twice the mass or volume of the Y, that is a difference of less than 3% in the volume or mass of the head of the sperm; a difference in streamlining, maybe?. And researchers were reporting a difference in the electrical charge of X-bearing versus Y-bearing spermatozoa. What was up with that?
(Electrical charge was the basis of my cousin's patented separation technique. He was a reproductive physiologist with degrees from Texas A & M, Dr. R. Loy Lawson, and some info about his patent may still be on the internet. He was a good guy, good to me, a hard worker in many fields from general construction and finish carpentry to science, and he has been dead going on 20 years.)
The problem -- and this something I worked out for myself from reading in my cousin's collection of Science magazines and never fully discussed with my cousin, who had a weird metaphysical idea that males and females were opposite throughout life -- is that the spontaneous abortion rate is much higher for male zygotes, embryos, and fetuses than for female. One Science article estimated that in humans 170 males were conceived for every 100 females.
The high rate of spontaneous abortion might be because females have a fully paired -- XX -- genotype while males had NO pairing of the sex chromosomes, leaving males lacking backup genes for any data on either the X or Y chromosome except what might have been swapped around by crossing over. Or it might be because of hormones. Females are biologically the stronger sex.
BUT, despite the high pre-birth attrition of males, at birth the sex ratio is not far from 50:50. (It's about 52:48 in humans in favor of males.)
This means that nature has been compensating for the high pre-birth die-off of males by ensuring many more male conceptions, that nature had been doing what my cousin and others were trying to do, and that was somehow favoring X-Chromosome bearing spermatozoa in the race for conception!
But why would THAT occur? This brings up the Fischer Theory of Sex Ratios, which in a nutshell says that purely as a statistical equilibrium, the sex ratio at birth MUST be about 50:50. Think about a herd of wild horses and what an optimal sex ratio might be and if that could be genetically perpetuated. Why should half the foals born be males when, say, 20% males would be reproductively more efficient? If an 80:20 sex ratio at foaling WERE genetically coded then the first horse that produces more male offspring than 20% has a disproportionally greater impact on the gene pool, and that horse's descendants continue to do so, until the average birth sex ratio approaches 50:50.
Therefore nature genetically adjusts the sex ratio., compensating for male frailty by ensuring more male conceptions.
Ellen5 was looking at a photo I took of some wildflowers in the Mackenzie Wilds area and wondered whether what I dismissed as Woolly Locoweed was another species altogether. "Fortune favors the prepared mind," as Pasteur said. Ellen's mind was well-prepared while mine was not.
If confirmed, this is the first Lubbock County observation of Oxytropis lambertii, right here in Mackenzie Park Wilds. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/13895324 While it was my photo, credit belongs to Ellen5.
