Woolly What?

I started wondering why there were only 2 animals that had once evolved into wooly renditions. Times were cold during the ice age. Surely there were other animals that made adaptations, too, in order to survive? And then I remembered, way back in my childhood, of hearing about another animal that was called 'woolly'.

The woolly caterpillar!

Quickly, I set out to find what information I could on this remaining ice age creature.

It is known by many names; woolly bear caterpillar, fuzzy bear caterpillar, woolly worm, and hedgehog caterpillar. But apparently, nobody calls it a woolly caterpillar! I can only guess that one of my childhood playmates shortened 'woolly bear caterpillar' into 'woolly caterpillar', or I did it myself, possibly without even realizing I had done it.

The woolly bear caterpillar is the larval form of the Isabella tiger moth. It has black fur at the front and back, with a band of reddish brown around the middle.

They can usually be found in the autumn, after they have stuffed themselves on a variety of grasses and weeds, including dandelion, nettles and plantain, and are then in search of a dark and sheltered spot where they can hibernate for the winter.

There are those who believe that the amount of black on the woolly bear in the autumn predicts how severe the coming winter will be. But the truth is that its coloring is dependent on how well it stuffed itself, its age, and the species (there are about 260 species of tiger moth).

The isabella tiger moth's larval form occurs in the United States, Greenland and Canada. It can be found in many cold regions, including the Arctic. The Arctic woolly bear caterpillar emerges from the egg in the fall. It spends the winter in its larval form, frozen solid. First, its heart stops beating, then its gut freezes, its blood, and finally the rest of the body. It survives by producing a cryoprotectant in its tissues. In the spring, it thaws, and resumes eating. It will go through 7 winters in the frozen state before it finally becomes a moth. As an adult moth, it has about 1 week to mate, lay eggs, and die.

It is not recommended to handle the woolly bear caterpillar because their sharp hairs may cause dermatitis in some people.

The larval form of the isabella tiger moth should not be confused with the larval forms of the Grammia incorrupta or the garden tiger moth, both of whom are also called woolly bear caterpillars.

Woollybear Caterpillar festivals are held in several locations in the fall: Vermillion, OH; Banner Elk, NC; Beattyville, KY; Oil City, PA; and Little Valley, NY.

Well, that was not what I expected. I was thinking an ice age megafauna, maybe 4 or 5 feet tall at the shoulder, able to provide a feast for dozens of humans at a time. Or maybe they would trample right over humans. Something that when it finally hatched, would produce an adult about the size of Mothra!

Still, that freezing in order to get through the winter, that's kind of neat. I'll have to remember that and work it into some story or other.

 

https://ccswoollybearcaterpillarbaum1.weebly.com/information.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrharctia_isabella

https://www.weather.gov/arx/woollybear

The Dorset culture

Starting around 500 BC and lasting 1500 to 2000 years, the Arctic area of North America was inhabited by the Dorset, a Paleo-Eskimo culture. It is named after Cape Dorset in Nunavut in Canada, where the first evidence of it was found. It is said to have 4 phases due to differences in the technology related to hunting and tool making. Dorset artifacts include triangular end-blades, soapstone lamps, and burins, a specific type of stone tool.

The Dorset were first identified as a separate culture in 1925. They appear to have been extinct by 1500 AD at the latest, and possibly as early as 1000 AD. At some time during the 1000s, the Thule people (a pre-Innuit group) began migrating east from Alaska, and eventually spread through all the land previously inhabited by the Dorset. There is no evidence that the Inuit and the Dorset ever met. In fact, genetic studies show that the Dorset were distinct from later groups and that there is virtually no evidence of genetic or cultural interaction between the Dorset and Thule peoples.

Inuit legends say that they did encounter people they called ‘First Inhabitants’. According to these stories, the first inhabitants were taller and stronger than the Inuit, but they were afraid to interact and were easily frightened off. There is also a controversial theory of contact and trade between the Dorset and the Norse.

Some of the artifacts that indicated a culture different from the Inuit included sophisticated pieces of art. Carvings featured uniquely large hairstyles for women, and both sexes are depicted wearing hoodless parkas with large, tall collars.

Not only do scientists not know for certain what happened to the Dorset people, they aren’t sure where they came from, either. Some have suggested that they may have developed from a previous culture, perhaps the Pre-Dorset, the Saqqaq or - even less likely - from the Independence I. However, these earlier cultures all had bow and arrow technology, while the Dorsets did not. Possibly they set aside the bow and arrow as they switched from land to aquatic hunting.

Another piece of technology that the Dorset lacked was drills. There are no drill holes in Dorset artifacts. Whatever holes they created, they painstakingly carved or gouged into the artifact where it was needed. This was even true of the bone needles that are so common in Dorset sites. It is confusing, since the Pre-Dorset and the Thule had and used drills to great effect.

However little has been discovered about the Dorset people, their history is divided into 4 periods: The Early (500-1 BC), Middle (1-500 AD), and Late phases (500-1000 AD), as well as the Terminal phase from 1000 AD onward. The Terminal phase would have been closely related to the Medieval Warm Period, which began to warm the Arctic around 950 AD. Under those conditions, the sea ice became far less predictable.

The Dorset were adapted to a very cold climate, and it is thought that much of their food consisted of sea mammals that breathe through holes in the ice. A massive decline in sea ice would have forced the Dorset further north. Most agree they disappeared at some point between 1000 and 1500 AD, possibly because they could not adapt to the climate change or perhaps because they were introduced to diseases they had not known before.

I wish the article had included some type of rendition of the triangular end-blades. I have a series of stories in the works about a culture that is based on the number 3, and I keep imagining them developing 3-sided blades of all sizes, even arrow-heads. But I don’t know enough about bladed weapons to know if such a shape would be feasible. Anybody have any ideas about that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture

Super Continents 1

In geology, a supercontinent is when all or most of the Earth’s continental blocks form a single landmass. But earth scientists may use a different definition; ‘a clustering of nearly all continents’, which leaves room for interpretation.

The land masses have conjoined and separated several times. The most recent mass that joined them all is called Pangaea. This conjoining began about 335 million years ago, and began to break up about 175 million years ago.

Pangaea looked more or less like a crescent or the letter ‘c’. The Eurasian continent sat at the top, with the area now forming southeast asia stretching south and east. To the southwest lay North America, and along the NA ‘east coast’ lay the west coast of the big hump of Africa, which was pushed clockwise a bit off its southern tip. The bump of Brazil of South America lay snuggled against North America and Africa. India and Antarctica rested along the southeast of Africa, from the ‘Red Sea’ area south. Australia nestled against India and Antarctica.

I used the words ‘lay’, ‘snuggled’ and ‘nestled’, but the drawing I looked at indicated all sorts of irregular-shaped bits and pieces scattered between all these known continents. I didn’t see anything that resembled the Arabian Peninsula, so I can’t say where that particular piece was hiding at the time of Pangaea.

Pangaea stretched from the south pole to within spitting distance of the north pole. It was a solid body of land that would not have allowed any ocean currents to go around the globe horizontally.

Pangaea began to break up about 175 million years ago. Once India broke away from its neighbors, it raced toward Eurasia at 6 inches a year. Is it any surprise that when they slammed together, they formed mountains like the Himalayas? India (as well as Australia) is still moving northeast at 2-3 inches per year. In a few million years, Australia could scoop up bits and pieces of Indonesia and then head for the northern Pacific. Will it?

I don’t know. Isn’t there a trench somewhere along Indonesia? Seems like a deep ditch would slow Australia down or something. Something else for me to look up and think about.

By the way, this is the first of probably several blogs on super-continents. How long they take me and how often other subjects insinuate themselves into the lineup of blogs remains to be seen. Thems the chances you take when you decide to read my blog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercontinent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea

Boreal Forest

If you want to talk about a forest that is larger than the Amazon jungle, then you will probably talk about the Taiga, the Boreal Forest or the snow forest. They are all one thing, with different names used in different parts of the world. Some say it is one huge forest, stretching from Iceland through the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Mongolia, Alaska and Canada. It is a coniferous forest consisting mostly of pipes, spruces and larches. It covers 6.6 million square miles or 11.5% of the Earth’s land area.

The boreal forest has a subarctic climate, with a very large temperature range between seasons. Summers last 1-3 months, always less than 4 months, and any given 24 hour period during the summer will average 50 °F or less. In Siberia, the average temperature of the coldest winter month is between 21 and -58 °F. The ground being frozen for much of the year, or even permanently frozen, can restrict the growth of deep roots, thereby favoring shallow-rooted trees like the Siberian larch.

Despite these harsh condition, the plants in the boreal forest have a lower threshold to trigger growth, and thus they ‘wake up’ a little earlier than one would expect. Even so, the soil tends to be poor in nutrients. Fallen leaves and moss tend to sit on the soil for a long time in the cold climate, so their organic components are very slow to be added to the soil. Also, acids from the evergreen needles leach the soil, making it even less ‘appetizing’ for anything but lichens and some mosses. On the other hand, diversity of soil organisms is high, comparable to a tropical rainforest.

It seems surprising to me that in a world that is frozen most of the time, fire is one of the most important factors that shape the composition and development of boreal forest. Some members of the boreal forest won’t release their seeds until the pods have been exposed to fire, and I get that, but how does something covered in snow most of the time suddenly burst into flames? Obviously, there is something about the process that I don’t understand.

Most boreal forest fires are either high-intensity crown fires or severe surface fires. These are large, often more than 10,000 hectares (a hectare is 100 acres) and sometimes more than 400,000 hectares. Different areas of the boreal forest burn at different lengths of time; drier areas might burn every 50 years, while wetter areas only burn every 200 to 300 years. And when an area burns, it could take decades, even a couple centuries to get back to ‘normal’. So all that carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) that is released into the air when those trees burn takes those same decades or centuries to be absorbed into the growing forest again.

This is particularly important now, when so much of the boreal forest is burning. Even Greenland - which doesn’t have any boreal forest, but does grow grasses and scrub brushes when enough ice melts to expose ground to seeds being blown around by winds - is on fire. Alaska and Canada are experiencing horrendous fires in their boreal forestland. In northern Siberia, one fire covered 7.9 million acres (over 3 million hectares), and that’s only one fire of 11 (or more) burning in Russia.

It’s been estimated that these fires dumped over 50 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere in June (2019), and they are still at it. 16 million adult trees burn in a day in Russia’s boreal forest fires. The Earth is not ready to absorb that much carbon. If we planted more trees - billions of them - it would help, but possibly not before the climate changes even more in response to that much carbon and carbon dioxide having been freed to begin with.

We really can’t sit around and wait any longer. We have to start facing this problem, and we have to do it NOW. The sky is falling, and doomsday is just around the corner.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/7/31/1875681/-Fire-at-the-top-of-the-world-Earth-s-largest-forest-is-burning-and-it-won-t-be-coming-back-soon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiga