My pops and I have been working on cleaning up a huge slab of limestone on the property to be used as a bouldering rock. You can get an idea of the walls location in the above photo – it’s about where the valley ends and to the left of that last bush in the field. It seems like an extension of the house since it’s a short five minute walk and visible from the deck but it is definitely not. I was reminded of that yesterday.

Yesterday, as I was working on some bouldering problems I heard something moving around in the woods to the south, and very close, to me. At first I wasn’t readily concerned since I assumed it was just one of the coyotes that hunts in the field and figured s/he will just run away once he or she catches my scent. Or it could be a turkey, elk, or maybe the moose that was recently spotted. But then I heard some grunting sounds that came from the lungs of something rather large with, probably, sharp teeth. I quickly realized that we saw a black bear walk through the field the day before and spotted two of them on our driveway a few days before that. I simultaneously started making noise and assessing my climbing ability as a survival tool instead of a hobby. Luckily the bear did not approach me so I was allowed to climb in peace.

The incredible fact that I am able to walk a short distance from the house, basically staying on my extended backyard, to a huge bouldering wall (pictured above), and still have to deal with large predators does not escape me. It’s going to be very difficult for me to leave the CCR and move to Pullman.

The Palouse starts south of Spokane and is readily apparent. Small mountains vanish from the foreground and are replaced with rolling farmland, devoid of trees and covered in wheat. Upon entering the Palouse I was overcome with a strong urge to speak to myself in Spanish and yell things like “donde esta las montanas?” and “Ahhh… esta bonita, no?”. Perhaps it triggered something deeply embedded in me, something from the old west, of cowboys, and ranchers. Or it was just a result of driving for three hours without radio.

The view from Highway 195, south of Spokane, the Palouse Loess is nearly ubiquitous. A few road cuts expose ancient basalt with origins from a volcano near the corner of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, called the Grande Ronde volcano, which was active during the late Miocene. The numerous eruptions make up the region in southestern Washington know as the Columbia Plateau. In the far eastern distance the foothills of the Rockie Mountains rise up above the flood basalt flows. One such hill, similar to those in the distance, is much closer. It is little over five miles from Highway 195 and is named Steptoe Butte.

Steptoe Butte is composed of rock much older than any other around. The rock was here before the basalt floods and before the loess was blown here from the glacial outwash plains. It stood tall before the conglomerate of exotic islands that compose Washington State were united, before the Kootani Arc was formed and even before life had evolved. Steptoe Butte is made up of Precambrian belt sedimentary rock and is over a billion years old.

There is a campground at the base of the butte and a road that spirals up to the peak. The road allows nearly everyone an easy way to the top but scars the hill’s facade. I, of course, had to reach the top. The road was narrow. Big trucks barreled down swerving into the middle of the road so I was forced to move inches from the edge just to avoid them. Large rocks sat in my path, marmots scurried all around me, and no guardrail was present. By the time I got to the top I felt as if I just drove through the gauntlet. It was worth it as I was rewarded with an amazing view of the Palouse and its huge sky rich with cumulus clouds. In less than three months I will be one of the many specks in these vast plains and I am nothing but excited about it.

The rules to Mullein War are simple. Two combatants harvest a deceased mullein stem then continuously hit them together in a sword fighting like fashion until something snaps in two. The first person to have his or her stem break is the loser. The winner keeps his or her stem and uses it for the next battle. I have a brother that found a stem that lasted for three days and 21 bouts. It was amazing. I still feel inferior to him today, even fifteen years later.

Mullein, or Verbascum thapsus, is a non-native biennnial that grows in disturbed soils. In the first year the plants produce a basal rosette – a collection of low growing, very hairy, leaves. Because the leaves grow low the plants cannot handle much competition so are considered non-invasive because they have not caused much trouble in established plant communities. The leaf hairs create a signification boundary layer which reduces the loss of heat and water vapor by essentially slowing the rate that circulating air carries heat and gas away from the leaves. It is the same process that the hairs on our arms exploit and is why they stand up (giving us goose bumps) when you and I are cold (increases the boundary layer). In the second year the plants produce a single, tall (0.4-2 m), straight stem that has a large inflorescence with many flowers. At the end of the season the seeds disburse and the plant dies. The stem dries out and the coveted weapon of Mullein Wars is produced.

There is a huge, year old, rosette on the property that is sure to produce a fierce fighting weapon this spring (unless it waits for the third year to produce the stem, as some have been shown to do when they are stressed). If my brothers take a break from college I’ll have to slap them in the face with a leaf and challenge them to a duel.

Springtime is a great time of the year. The days are longer, the seedlings spring from the earth, and the buds finally open. But most enjoyable is the warm weather. So it was a bit of a surprise to me when I woke up this morning, looked out the window, and saw… snow? In fact, it snowed three days now with lows near 20 F. The weather hasn’t been warm this Spring, it’s been abnormally cold.

The relatively cold weather is a slight annoyance to me but it is something that I can tolerate. What I cannot tolerate are how some people are reacting. They view the chilly Spring as proof, absolute, empirical, in-your-face proof, that global warming is false and that all the science, concise peer reviewed models, thousands of meticulous studies conducted by some of the worlds most intelligent and educated people, are all false. “Look outside you dimwitted liberal hippie, it’s cold. It’s obvious the globe isn’t warming.”

There is, of course, a simple rebuttal to their claim. It’s so simple it scares me that people do not grasp it on their own. I do not think that people are unintelligent, uneducated, or lack critical thinking skills. What I do think is that their ideals and values block their tools of logic. But that’s besides the point.

Here’s the rebuttal: Weather and climate are two different things. Weather is short term and will have fluctuations. Climate is a long term average of weather. Snow in spring is weather. Global warming is climate (that’s why it is also referred to as “global CLIMATE change”).

The above mentioned naysayers have a blatant misunderstanding of global warming. Somewhere in their heads, I assume, they conclude that because the globe is warming each day at every place in the world MUST be warmer than the corresponding day during the previous year. This is not true as I mentioned before – weather fluctuates.

Weather is an incredibly complex system and it is very difficult to make prediction about it. There are random factors contributing to it that we cannot explain. To disprove a long-term trend based on a short term occurrence when random events are a factor is a mistake. It would be like disproving that the chance of getting heads on a flip of a coin is 50% by getting tails on the first two flips. Or that the chances of rolling a six with a six-sided die is greater than 16.67% because the first two rolls were sixes.

Weather is not completely random. In fact part of the cooler spring this year is attributable to an event called La Nina (the opposite of El Nino) where equatorial ocean currents are colder than usual which cools the air above it. But casual factors aside, it is foolish to extrapolate trends, or basically anything, solely based on a few occurrences.

The location of my current residence, aptly named the Carlson Canyon Ranch (or CCR), can be placed into many categories.

Geographically, the CCR is located in Northeastern Washington where the Columbia River spills out of Canada and near the southern end of the Silkirk Mountain range. The CCR is a 10 minute drive to Northport, WA but has a Colville, WA zip code. It roughly fits into the longitude/latitude coordinates of -117.78/48.9 and has the elevation of 2,000ft.

Geologically, the CCR rests on an ancient continental shelf, called the Kootenay Arc, which is the old margin of the North American Continent. Millions of years ago the shelf was tightly buckled and folded by the pressure of another continent docking into the North American plate. Limestone is the predominate rock and was created by millions of years of accumulation of marine organisms that lived, died, and drifted to the ocean floor. In the past this area was covered in glaciers which left U-shaped valleys and glacial till as a reminder of their ancient presence.

The CCR is included in the Canadian Rockies ecoregion, defined by the organisms that live here and by the climatic variables that those organisms can tolerate. This ecoregion is one of the nine that Washington State hosts and comprises only 4% of the state but extended north for miles into Canada.

The climate here is dry during the majority of the year with an annual precipitation of around 18in but with significant snowpack during the winter especially at higher elevations. Temperatures in the summer can get into the high 90’s and in the winter can drop below 0 F. These climatic conditions are able to support large coniferous forests, dominated by ponderous pine and douglas fur, and lush grasslands of fescue.

The area had a rugged history where western man never really tamed it. Northport, WA was established sometime near 1892 as the railroad portal into Canada and as a mining boom town. Northport was plagued with many fires, two of which burned a huge are of the city in 1893 and 1914 and floods, one of which drowned the northern section of the town for many months in 1894. The ferry across the river was attacked by indians until a bridge was built but even that was destroyed by uprooted trees being swept down the Columbia during a high water year. Today Northport resembles what it was in the early 1900s with a very similar road network but with less buildings.

To categorize an area is no easy task and to define an area is even more difficult. My past and future writings are and will be largely influenced by the CCR and the surrounding area. I will attempt to communicate the natural history and ‘essence’ (the CCRness) of the area but I will be fully aware that a location can be many different things to many people.

I am sitting outside while writing this. It is a little over 40 F but in the spring sun it’s warm enough that I can sit in comfort. I am softly cooing to a timid horse, Zim, while he eats his breakfast. He had little human interaction while a colt so does not feel comfortable with our touch. If I reach out a hand to touch him he recoils and if I move closer he flees. I am hoping that by sitting here Zim becomes accustomedhttp://picasaweb.google.com/home to my presences and realizes that, although I look and act like a predator, I mean him no harm. His loud chewing indicates that he is used to me enough that he can at least ignore me.

I just finished feeding the other horses, the chickens, and the dogs. A piece of our jury-rigged fence was down and our older horse, Kyam, got into another corral that was blocked off so new grass can grow. He was happy to follow me to the barn where he got oats so I was able to fix the fence while he was distracted with his stomach. The chickens produced three eggs which were fresh enough to still be warm and slightly soft. The chickens are getting anxious to range free and the abundant insects are an indication that it is about time we allow them to. The problem with allowing them out of their coop is that not all remember to go back at night and we usually loose the majority of them to coyotes, skunk, weasels, hawks, or other predators.

In fact, as I was writing this I heard the roster release a string of alarm calls. While this was happening the dogs ran pass the chicken coop and out into the canyon with their hackles raised barking and growling. The horses at the barn did not seem alarmed but the horse I am with gave the commotion his full attention and stood in a posture of fright and agitation. There were too many possibilities that could have caused the event. There was no use speculating so I just enjoyed the show and made sure that everything was safe.

As I look over our property I think of my living conditions just a month ago. I was living in Seattle in a house with a back yard and a small front yard. It was within walking distance of Green Lake and Gasworks Park. For Seattle standards I was in a great location. But I was not able to see the horizon, only other houses and concrete buildings. I could not see the sun rise or set. If I went for a jog I would have had to wait for stoplights and cross walks or jet across the street and play frogger while young drivers tried to run me over. Green Lake was a small retreat but it was full of similar minded people who talked loudly or had children or dogs that made it impossible to stay quiet. I found myself enjoying Gasworks but only because I was slowly learning how to mental block the houses and condos in view and even caught myself saying “Wow, this place is so beautiful, you can barely hear the traffic.” To enjoy Seattle I had to actively tax my perception with a mental filter that selected certain senses to processes or ignored.

Here, at the CCR, I hear no machines or unwanted sounds. I only hear the sounds of courting turkey or nesting barn swallows and American robins. I can hear red-winged blackbirds staking out their territory or the nearby nesting red-tailed hawks piercing the air with their characteristic shriek. I listen to the frogs crock at the pond and can almost visualize a disturbance move across them as they subsequently quiet down and then start up again. It could be caused by the great blue herons or one of the many types of ducks that live there; the mallards, the ring-necked ducks, or the hooded mergansers. The flies, hornets, and beetles are out creating a rich set of constant vibrations that fill the ambient air. Soon the quaking aspen will be hosting a vibrant collection of leaves that tremble in the slightest wind.

Here, where I live now, there is no reason to mentally block any sound. There is no reason to train my mind to get used to certain disturbances. I don’t have to “put up” with noise, or pollution or congestion. I can take in all of my surroundings, with all senses, and be pleased with all of it.

During the cold winter months, below the snow layer, there exists a cache of seeds frozen in the soil. Many of these seeds are small and frail and may stay dormant for many years. Others will experience certain environmental cues that will cause a cascade of chemical and biological transformations leading to a life full of competition for energy and nutrients in order to survive and reproduce. Our subject was recently one such seeds and is now in it’s first and most vulnerable developmental phase; the seedling.

As a result of millions of years of evolution of fine tuning seed dispersal mechanisms; geological uplift, erosion, and glaciation; and a bit of dice rolling by mother nature, our subject was placed on a southern facing slope in a soil bed of glacial till. This is the exact spot where our subject will stay until its death and it is the exact spot where it will need to use all of the tools evolution has equipped it with in order to survive long enough to contribute its own seeds into the soil. This is no simple matter and in fact our subject is at a phase where the death rate is at its highest.

The reason survivorship is so low is because the seedling must establish itself, in a very unforgiving environment, with a limited food supply proportional to its seed size. Our subject came from a small seed. This was not a result of some error or misfortune but rather a result of its ancestor’s life history strategy – to produce many small seeds instead of a few large seeds in hopes that some, being randomly disbursed, will reach an easily habitable environment. In our subject’s case it seems as though the strategy worked. Although the seedling was left with little food, so it cannot cope with strong competition, it was placed in an open area rich with sun and nutrients, thus competition may not be a large factor.

Although competition may not be a large obstacle to success there are still plenty that our subject must overcome such as environmental stress, herbivory and disease. Environmental stress includes frost damage and dessication, or drying out of the plant tissue. In order to get a head start on the competition the seedling needed to germinate and start growth as early as possible. In a dense population of seedlings a day or two head start can mean life or death. The risk of growing early is that the days are shorter and the temperatures are colder. If the seedling grows too early it may experience too many cold nights where ice will form in its cells and will tear and rupture the walls causing certain death. Dessication is another stress and to overcome this the seedling not only needs to put its limited resources into shoot and leaf growth but also root growth. Soil moisture can be rare here in early spring where the majority of it is still locked up in ice crystals at higher elevations so our subject needs to send its roots far into the earth in hopes to siphon up as much moisture and nutrients as possible.

Growing a stem, leaves, and a root system is no easy task especially from a small reserve of food donated by the endosperm of the seed. Our subject must devote all of its initial energy into growth to rapidly gain access to sunlight, nutrients, and water. This leaves little to allocate to defense and so herbivory and pathogens are very real factors that are responsible for many seedling deaths. The seedling cannot move or run so cannot escape approaching herbivores or parasites. It is stuck in one place where it devotes all of its energy and reserves to growth so it can survive another day but could be all for naught if a single deer decides to take a bite in its location or a turkey decides to scratch the ground looking for insects. Our subject is vulnerable and just as many millions of years of random events led up to its position in this world a single random event can cause its doom.

I was asked to write about how I got into graduate school at WSU. I think reading about other’s experiences would have helped me while I was applying to grad school so I figure I better make my response public so other may benefit. Feel free to ask me any questions. Enjoy.

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The program that I am starting in August is at the graduate school of biological sciences in Washington State University. I will be pursuing a Masters of Science (M.S.) degree in physiological ecology with a concentration in plant sciences. Basically, physiological ecology means that I will be using the very minute aspects of biological systems (biochemistry, hormones, nitrogen and carbon cycles) to answer very large questions concerning things like whole ecosystems or even the entire biosphere. One great example of this is research being conducted by a professor at WSU, Asaph Cousins. Cousins and others have realized that photosynthesis and ecosystem respiration have distinct effects on the isotope composition of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels (the two contribute a different ‘version’ of the CO2 molecule). Using this knowledge Cousins is able to address questions concerning global exchange of CO2 by using molecular techniques to elucidate specific processes in leaf gas exchange. Basically, he is looking at the very specific mechanisms that gas is used in plants and using that knowledge to better understand the plant’s signature on the ecosystem level.

To get pass the first step for getting into grad school at WSU I had to meet certain requirements and do a lot of busy work. The most important, and awkward, experience was wooing a faculty member. Yes, I said wooing. Graduate school in the sciences is a lot like an apprenticeship so it is necessary to find a mentor (in academia we call them advisors – spelled incorrectly ). To find an advisor I presented myself in the best possible light by writing an essay about my ambitions, experiences, etc and telling the potential advisor how much I like him/her and how much we have in common. Yes, I was basically asking the person out on a date. For someone who has never tried online dating it was very strange for me.

Luckily Dr. Al Black (a very good professor, the head chair of the Washington natural heritage advisory council, in charge of a large research area called Smoot Hill, and the top dog of the biological graduate program), took some interest in me. I was flown to Pullman, put up in a hotel, and given a personal tour of the campus and faculty. Little did I know that the tour was actually an eight hour interview process where they attempt to break my brain. I was put in front of numerous professors who would rapidly teach me abstract concepts concerning each of their research interests and ask me very detailed and difficult questions concerning my own research experiences and knowledge. I was told I did an alright job during the interview but I was unable to be happy with myself because I was too busy drooling all over my shirt and sputtering nonsense.

So I got accepted and have Al Black as my advisor. I also was offered a position as a teaching assistant where I will co-teach biology labs to punk freshmen who do not want to be there. In exchange I get free tuition, free health insurance, and some money to buy oatmeal and Top Ramen. It’s a pretty good deal but not entirely special in the world of grad school in the sciences (to quote some lady: “If you pay for grad school in the sciences you’re a sucker. A sucker. Don’t do it!”).

Some facts:

WSU is ranked 2nd in the nation in plant sciences based on faculty research and publications, 7th in zoology, and 3rd in veterinary school (http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/page.php?year=2007&institution=3875&byinst=Go).

When I was a wee young’n my father started a game between us and my three brothers where we would keep track of the number of ticks we found on ourselves. It was a small push to get us outside in a time when Super Nintendo was slowly taking over our lives. In his punny way my dad said the winner of the tick game would get a clock – because it goes ‘tick tock.’

While I was helping separate our new horse Zim into his own corral I found a tick crawling up my neck looking for that warm area between my skull and my earlobe. My tick count begins.

It is common to associate moss with moist environments; in the temperate rain forests of western Washington and Alaska or covering trees and decaying stumps in the tropics. For one to cognitively link moss to moisture is not necessarily wrong because their entire method of reproduction relies on the presence of water. However, as illustrated in the picture above, mats of moss can grow in the relatively cold and dry climates of northeastern Washington. In fact, they are found in the hot deserts and the cold tundra; both of which are seriously lacking in moisture. How does this mat of moss survive and reproduce on something as barren as the surface of a chunk of limestone rock?

The ability for moss to survive in such marginal environments as the surface of a rock is a product of their extremely low maintenance. They are small and they are tough. The predominate generation of a moss has no vascular tissue like trees or grass and has leaves that are only one cell layer thick. Because moss lack strong water and nutrient transport they must grow low, sometimes in mats, giving them less structural mass to maintain with nutrients, moisture, temperature, and other concerns. The single cell layer of the leaf allows gas and water to be absorbed quickly and efficiently. Pore some water onto a mat of dried moss to see how quickly the plants spring to life.

The reproductive cycle of the moss is radically different from what may be intuited by a naive observer. The dominate life stage of a moss, the structure most of us are familiar with, is the gametophyte which is the stage where only one set of chromosomes is present in the organism. This is different than, say, a tree or a human. Both of which have two sets of chromosomes (the tree’s pollen and egg have one set just as our sperm and egg do). The male gametophyte produces sperm which must use water as a transport vessel to the female gametophyte. Fertilization occurs from the union of the egg and sperm and a young sporophyte (two chromosomes, one set from the male, one from the female) grows as a sort of parasite right out of the female gametophyte. The sporophyte matures and releases male and female spores that grow into male and female gametophytes. The cycle continues. [Note: the yellow in the picture above is the sporophytes and the brown/black is the gametophytes]

As stated above, water is required by the moss to transport the sperm to the egg. This is the exact reason why mosses grow best in moist areas. Because sperm is tiny, made of only a few cells, any minute bit of water is able to transport a bundle of them. A single drop of rain splashing onto a male gametophyte can engulf a group of sperm and transport them to multiple eggs. Thus one raindrop, timed and placed perfectly, can sustain a mat of moss for another generation.