This is the hillside where I spotted this nasturtium, trailing toward the bay. I love its shady, pooly green tranquility, but I do wonder what it would look like in full sun, with all those blossoms blazing firelight…
And this is the last of my photo parade from San Francisco. As soon as my beloved little camera is replaced, I’ll have new moments from around Chicago to share with you. It’s time—the city’s wild flowers are in their glory just now, and we will celebrate them all together.
Another bird, another flower. In my mind, it’s always going to be spring in San Francisco.
I could look up what kind of bird this is, perched in the lovely datura branches. But unfortunately I’m apartment hunting, and I can’t spare the time away from compuslively refreshing craigslist. When that spacious, air-conditioned 2-bedroom treehouse comes on the market, I need to be the first to know. So meanwhile, nice bird, nice flowers, and so on. Enjoy.
Back in San Francisco, this time for just this drift of wild leaves, lit big by the sun, full of sun to bursting.
Cross-country skis? Robot surgeons? Straitjackets? I think it’s safe to say that the groundbreaking study of snake motion in the newest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has it all.
Lead-authored by David Hu of Georgia Tech, this study is the first to combine theoretical modeling with experimentation to understand what the slither is all about. The research reveals that specialized muscles enable precise, intricate micro-manipulation of belly scales. Grip the surface, lift the body, adjust the weight, and push ahead in a sequence that propels the snake forward.
Along the way, snakes were placed on a photoelastic gel medium which lights up as pressure is applied. And snakes were sheathed in cloth straitjackets to isolate the role of belly-to-surface contact. Snake straitjackets, or snake condoms, if you prefer. The researchers prefered “snondoms”. And I trust that you do, too.
As for that surgery? Biomimetic researchers are hoping that the study can inform robot technology, refining tools that slither into patients to perform operations with minimal damage. Creepy cool.
(photos courtesy of National Geographic. See more here!)
(Click for larger image, showing very cool eye)
We resume our photo parade through San Francisco with the gull, as promised.
In addition to not assaulting me, this nice gull is also giving us a perfect view of the brilliant red spot on its lower bill. We know that this spot is used by hungry chicklets, who tap it with their own beaks to beg for food. But behind the habit lie interesting details about the nature, or nurture, of animal instinct.
The laughing gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) was the star of Niko Tinbergen’s studies of sign stimulus and food regurgitation response, later expanded by Jack Hailman in his intriguingly titled Scientific American article “How an instinct is learned”. Returning to the nest, an adult laughing gull swings its head from side to side. Peck the red spot and the chick receives food. Tinbergen’s experiments using model birds revealed that, if the red spot were anywhere else on the head, the young gulls would fail to peck. Ignore it completely. They’d tap to elicit food only when the spot was in the right, er, spot.
But the swinging action of the bill, too, has its role to play. In their first feedings, baby gulls would often miss the moving target. With practice, their accuracy increased until they reliably pecked the red spot in motion.
It’s a complex interaction: the stimulus of a precisely placed spot instinctively evokes pecking, and the swinging motion promotes learning of visual and muscular skills. Through observations like these, ethologists came to understand “instinct” not as inborn, unminded and ancient response, but as a behavior pattern pre-programmed to develop.
(And if you think this is fascinating, wait until we uncover Tinbergen’s juicy revelations about the life of the three-spined stickleback. Ooh, as they say, la la.)
| 1:15 p.m. The construction site next door. In a spirit of optimism, snuck in and cleared the trash and the weeds along their side of the fence we share. Turned up the soil and set in these two little cucumber vines to grow.
4:30 a.m. Woke up puzzle-headed. How can one blare of a car horn last ten minutes and more? Answer: The car is on fire. Directly beneath my bedroom window. Watched the flames towering bright and strangely quiet, until the fireman reached the alley, blasting with hoses, powering gallons of water and charred debris in a southerly direction. Onto my newborn cucumber plants. |
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Today they are looking wilted, beaten. We will see.
Pleasant touristy picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. Except that I didn’t realize at first there was a bridge in it. I = worst tourist anywhere ever.
These were my last hours in San Francisco and I felt so restless for more of it. Walked the way I hadn’t been yet, which was Chinatown, and North Beach, past Fisherman’s Wharf, ending up at Fort Mason and this skinny spiral walkway deep into the bay. Out there I got obsessed, dazed with all the astounding, shadowy tones of blue surrounding: in the sky, between the hills, under the crook of each little wave. And the gulls there, biggest gulls I have ever seen, and how the blank and solid massy white of them was so different from the vague shifting sea-light blues, those unreal blues—so opposite and so evolved to cut through them, transcend them.
Anyway, when I tried to photograph all these self-indulgent daydreams, this particular transcendent bastard flew directly at my face with muscular determination. I may or may not have squealed. Then he flew away and a bridge was behind him. The end.
(Coming up next: a real gull, standing still and managing not to scare the crap out of me. Some bird-rescue-volunteer-slash-intrepid-world-traveler I turn out to be.)
 (click for larger image) |
Have we talked about my love for the octopus? Oh, we will. Meanwhile, be teased by this pert little specimen, edging his way out of the waters for purposes unknown. |
*I hope you will feel free to sing this title to the tune of Jawbreaker’s ‘Ashtray Monument’. Also to ponder how very apt the (para-)phrase “Octopus… monument… a life spent waiting on cement…” is to this bronzed octo-gentleman, suspended in mid-slither on his concrete slab, as it plays hopelessly round and round in your head.
| Nasturtiums, growing wild on a hillside near Fort Mason. I grow them every summer on my little balcony, double blessings, double explosions of firecracker color and hot peppery savor.
I saw them growing leggy and wild in East Africa, and told my guide Tumaini that they were popular to eat here at home. He found this quite eccentric. |
