The House & other Arctic musings

Guppy photo

Tonight I tried to take some photos of the fish, for the most part without success.  Ah, who am I kidding, completely without success. 

As it happens, the best shot includes the female I just wrote about.  Here she is with two males, and she's in female mode.  Although you can see a bit of her colours the photo somewhat mutes them. 

A guppy in disquise

A few months ago, we acquired about a dozen and a half of guppies. They were fry, or immature at the time we got them, and one of the issues we have, now that they are grown, is that we have too many males for the tank.  As a result of this the female guppies are forever harassed, as are the less dominant male guppies.  We also now have a number of fry in the tank, which will either further complicate, or perhaps alleviate part of the problem.

Anyone familiar with guppies know just how prolific of breeders they are. I commented on facebook, half in jest (I know mortality rates in the wild are high) that I wondered how streams with natural guppy populations don't quickly become plugged with them.

I was taking a long look at the tank just now and I think one of the females may have developed a strategy to avoid some of the harassment from the boys in the tank.  In general guppy females are larger than the males, but I've got one male who is the largest fish in the community. I thought I had two large males, but I now believe that one is a female disguising herself as a male.

This female is more colourful than other females, but not as colourful as the males. She doesn't seem to be bothered much by the males (although there has been some bothering as she appears "pregnant" to me - guppies are livebearers and the females when gravid get boxy and large).  She displays like a male from time to time.  Most interesting is what she does with her anal fin when there are males near by.

In male guppies the anal fin is modified into what is called the gonopodium. Its structure allows it to transfer sperm to the females vent. Unlike most fish fertilization takes place internally, and the eggs develop inside the female. The gonopodium generally lays along the fish's body, but the fish can swing it around in order to fertilize the female.  It doesn't look like a typical anal fin (although it did before the fish matured) and you can think of it as being somewhat analogous to a penis.

Now the very interesting thing about this female is that she will collapse her anal fin up against her body when there are males around, further looking like a male guppy, completing her disguise. I have no idea if this is a common strategy, or that if given her colouring and behaviour she has characteristics of both sexes. But is certainly a fascinating bit of natural history, all in the warm confines of our dining room.

The jelly hunters.

Last Monday was one of those gorgeous Fall days that we have up here, undoubtedly one of the last of this year. Snow has fallen since then, and though it is only a small amount it is showing no signs of disappearing. The rapidly shortening daylight hours (about 20 minutes a day as we race towards the dark season) means the sun has less time to work its warming magic on the land. As of today, the Autumnal Equinox behind us, we will have less sun than you, at least for the next six months (unless you are one of the few people who live farther north than us here at 73 degrees).

But last Monday was bright, and calm, and with out a breeze to whip it away the sun felt warm on your face. After getting Travis and Hilary from school, Hilary went with one of her aunts, so Travis and I headed to Victor Bay, the calm waters conducive to finding Jellyfish.

And what finds! As I stood on the rocks, trying to train my eyes to find one of the comb jellies, a beroid Ctenophore that we had found before, something orange caught my eye.

Another kind of Jellyfish, an amazingly transparent double bell, with an orange fuzzy interior. As we caught it we began to see more and more jellies, and ended up with at least four different kinds. Collecting them in one of our blueberry picking containers. And even though we didn't know it until we looked closer at home, we also caught other zooplankton, incidental catches from a surprisingly rich ocean.

Soon we were running up and down the shore, looking for jellies close enough that they'd be in our reach. Even Leah's parents, who had happened along, got into the act.

And what did we find?  Well there were the aforementioned Beroid Ctenophores. And while there didn't seem to be as many as the last time we looked, they were generally larger, a couple of inches or more. We also found a couple of small, clear jellies, with four tentacles that I think are Aeginopsis laurentii. They were clear and small and I had a hard time finding them in the container never mind take a photo. The link will take you to a photo much better than I could have taken anyway.

The bell shaped one with the orange interior was the most plentiful and I believe it is Perigonimus arctica, although there was enough differences between some of them I don't even know if it was just one species we had. Take a close look at this detail of one of them, there's something else there  (and more on that later).

The last one, and the largest I believe is a Lion's Mane (Cyanea capillata), although I really am not sure. I understood that in general they are larger, and can indeed reach a diameter of over seven feet in Arctic Waters. The largest recorded specimen had tentacles that were 120 feet long (that's longer than a Blue Whale folks). Both of these photos are cropped from other pictures. It is a beautiful creature, with apparently a painful sting.

Also in the mix were some Copepods and Amphipods. You can see a couple of unusual (well to me anyway) amphipods inside the Pergonimus jellyfish in the above photo. I assumed that they were prey of the jelly, but they are much more interesting then that. A little while later the large one was swimming freely and I thought it had escaped.

Their most prominent feature are large bulgy eyes, and when I searched for them I found that they are from the henus Hyperia, the Big-eyed Amphipods. It turns out they are parasites of the jellies. They consume some of the Jellyfish's prey, but also some of the Jellyfish itself, primarily the gonads and tentacles. Eggs are laid in the jellyfish and the juveniles spend all the time in or on the jellyfish.

Adults are free swimming and come and go from the creature. This is my best photo of the Big-eyed Amphipod but unfortunately it isn't very good. You can make out the large bulgy eyes though.

Attack of the luminescent jellyfish

Some time ago Kimberlee, who is the woman behind a blog from the far north of Alaska called The Buggy Side of the Dog, posted a video of a jellyfish that produced an amazing light show along rows of cilia. While on first blush these multicolour lights along the eight rows of cilia would appear to be a form of bioluminescence they are not. What is actually happening is light is being scattered by the cilia as they pulse along the row, sort of like a multitude of tiny prisms doing the wave.

The jellyfish is a beroid ctenophore, one of the comb jellys, and while they do, in fact produce bioluminescence it can only been seen in the dark. The beroids are predators, using a cavernous mouth to engulf their prey, which is almost exclusively other comb jellyfish.

Yesterday I had a couple of hours to kill while Travis was in school for the afternoon. Alright, I didn't really have any hours to kill, but decided to kill a couple instead of any of my chores or other responsibilities. Hilary and I headed over to Victor Bay, unsuccessfully looking for the ukpikjuaq (Snowy Owl) on the way. It was almost dead calm over there, and we sat in the sun on some rocks by the shore, drank some coffee (well I did) and waited for something interesting to pass our way.

Well something did, for I first noticed one, and then dozens of these gelatinous predators in the water. Most were small, around a centimetre in length, but some (including the first one I noticed) were larger, four centimetres. We watched them drift/swim around for awhile, catching glimpses of their light show, usually when they were closest to the surface. Eventually we caught a couple of them and brought one back home to photograph, as all my attempts to get a decent photo in the field failed miserably. The photos are below, and in the first one you can see just a bit of the light show (a couple of cilia are blue) but it really doesn't do it justice.

Oh, one quick story before the photos.  I was pointing out the first jellyfish to Hilary when she asked "Where are the turtles?".  When I explained to her that there were no sea turtles up here, she replied "But turtles eat jellyfish". What? I mean they do, but where does a three year old learn that? I suspect Go Diego, Go.

Just desert?

The area I live in is a part of the High Arctic Desert. Long term average precipitation is something in the neighbourhood of 9 inches per year, divided roughly half and half between rain and snow. Although it varies, the last few years have shown a big increase in our rainfall, something in the order of three times the normal yearly precipitation.

And what exactly brought this little dissertation? Thursday and Friday are my first free days in some time, and I have plans on going camping with Travis. Here is the forecast for the rest of the week...

The 2nd moth and me

Seabrooke, of the Marvelous in Nature and NAMBI has the second edition of The Moth and Me up.  Once again fascinating photos of beautiful moths from all over the world can be found there. Go, don't delay.

Glowworm

After reading a couple of posts over at A Passion for Nature about Glow Worms I ended up really curious about some things. Specifically I got thinking about glowing as a strategy when you're a relatively sedate small organism. It makes sense as a strategy for a winged animal, but less so (to me) for an earth bound one. The little bit of reading I've done so far though has shown some explanations (ie. some of them are toxic so it is a form of advertising ("Don't eat me, I taste bad") similar to brightly coloured diurnal animals. And also, in some cases, it is used as a lure for smaller insects, to predate them, similar to lure fish of the dark ocean depths.

But the best thing I found in my brief on-line searching was by far this... the best two minutes you'll have today. The Mills Brothers singing "Glow Worm"

Coffee, clones, and cartography

I heard of a writer, whose name I don't recall, responding to a question about writer's block something along the line of "You know, my father was a trucker but he never had 'trucker's block'". And I suppose its true to a point, but just like there are days when his father probably rued climbing into the cab of his truck for want of being inspired, this writer is feeling uninspired.

After coming up with better than a post a day for the last little while, I'm stuck. Its a beautiful time of the year, even at 11pm there is a glow in sky, the inky blackness of our winter skies suddenly gone. I should have things (and do) to write about, but can't bring any cohesive thoughts down onto the "page". So I'm going to rely on others this morning.  Here are three distinct and diverse things that caught my eye this morning online.

It bears repeating, but if you are not drinking a sustainable coffee you're not only drinking an inferior beverage but you're contributing to the deforestation of the tropics, Developing World poverty, and the loss of critical migratory and tropical bird habitat, including critical habitat for some of our most endangered neo-tropical migrants. It is a simple, and relatively inexpensive way to do some good by switching to a sustainable coffee. Really a win-win-win situation.

Julie, one of my all time favourite writers/bloggers/friend was recently down in Guatemala on a sustainable coffee finca banding birds. It behooves you to visit two of her blogs, Coffee and Conservation and Net Results all of the time.  But if nothing else go to them now and read her reports on her visit down there. Great photos, fantastic birds.

Wanderin' Weeta is another blog I regularly visit. Like many of the authors I enjoy, Susannah has an eye for detail and a curiousity about the tiny lives around us. Check out her latest post on the moth that is most unmothlike, and a fascinating study. She discovered a bagworm, Dahlica triquetrella, an introduced species of moth that, as an adult, has no wings, no mouth, no eyes, and in Canada at least is a population that only consists of females. It reproduces by parthogenisis, so essentially all of its (all female) offspring are clones of itself. What is more, depending on how many individuals were introduced from Europe, it may very well be a clone of a single individual. Nature is so utterly fascinating.

Finally be sure to visit The Arctic Bay Atlas, a joint mapping project of Nunavut Youth Consultants (a local youth group/business) and the Inuit Heritage Trust. The project is mapping the area around Arctic Bay and is fascinating. Hover your curser over a spot on the map and you'll hear (faintly) the Inuktitut name of the place. Click on the spot and you'll get information on the Inuktitut name, English name, features and on some, photos of the location. For instance you can see photos of Qurlurniq, the place I had coffee on my last adventure.

For those Nunavumiut who are interested, the official launch of the website is at the Nunatta Campus of Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit (Iqaluit? Why not Arctic Bay?) on March 30th, 2009 from 10:15 am to 12:00pm. Light refreshments will be served.

The Moth and Me, First Edition

If you enjoy nature at all, a blog you shouldn't miss is The Marvelous in Nature. Seabrooke is a delightful writer and there is something to learn in each and every one of her posts.  One of her many passions is moths, an often overlooked insect.  To help spread that passion she has created a brand new Carnival, The Moth and Me, and hosts the inaugural edition at another one of her sites, NAMBI - The North American Moths Backyard Inventory.

There are posts from many corners of the globe, and if you haven't stopped to consider moths before, take a moment to check out the Carnival. You'll be struck by the variety and beauty of these creatures. Once you take the time to visit, I'm sure you'll find yourself unable to resist returning to future editions drawn, well, like a moth to a flame. 

Come here - I want to see you.

It's the 133rd anniversary of the first telephone call, made this day by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant, Thomas Watson. Or not. Like everything the story is not so black and white, and others including Antonio Meucci worked on similar devices, with Meucci transmitting his voice over wires some twenty years earlier. Even Thomas Edison had a hand in the early history of telephones.

But Bell's success at the patent office and his technology has secured his place as the father of the telephone, probably one of the great revolutionary technologies of the modern era, for how it has transformed our lives. 

I wonder what Mr. Bell would think if he could be transported into our world today, and see the ubiquitous cell phones, my relatively cumbersome satellite phone that allows me to talk anywhere in the world from near by a nesting Peregrine Falcon, Blackberries, iPhones, and all the technology that his brief call made.

I'm lucky that even though I live far away from my family, in place where communication was almost always face to face in the past, that I can simply pick up a phone and talk to them. I can even use those first words that Bell used when he spoke for that first time on his invention - "Come here - I want to see you!"  I wonder if they would?