Desert Creature

The latest in my long line of strange and fantastic creatures: I present to you, the Urk'a'tan mount and a desert rider. 

I got this idea looking at an illustration in an old book from my childhood: Dinotopia by James Gurney. The picture was of a stone house perched on the side of a mountain. Out front, a pair of equine-ish creatures and something similar to a rhinoceros were meeting with a group of people. I liked the short, broad-chested physique of the equine creatures and their sloped, slightly leonine features, and so I decided to base a new creature on them. Digging deeper in an attempt to figure out what these creatures were that I'd based my drawing on, I found them to be Moropus, a genus of mammals closely akin to horses and tapirs under the group Chalicothere. They had split hooves that had evolved into something like claws (maybe meant for digging or defense), and were built short, tall, and muscular. What I did was copied the face, broad chest and sloping back, but accented the leonine features and elongated the tail. Once I had that drawn, I couldn't resist the temptation to give it saddle and bridle. That in turn prompted me to draw a rider, and soon enough the notes on the culture to which these two belonged were spreading all around the margins of the drawing.

The Urk'a'tan comes from a desert environment, and as such is generally colored a grayish tan or sandy brown with little striping or spots. Their toes are slightly webbed (though you can't see it well here) to keep their massive weight aloft on the shifting desert sands, and it's capable of going long periods of time without water. They don't run as smoothly as a horse (more of a loping gallop where the entire body cants to one side when the shoulder drops), but they're faster over short distances, and they're extremely agile. Unlike horses, they're capable of climbing anything that can hold their weight, using their dexterous toes and prehensile tail to hoist themselves into places after anchoring with their claws. They're herbivorous, despite their fierce looks, and extremely intelligent.

The riders, like the mounts, are well-accustomed to desert life. Their dark eyes are adapted for night life, when they tend to do most of their daily business, and they wear light armor and white cloaks to repel the heat when they do go about in daylight. They're shortish of stature, but trained fighters, and though they carry few weapons, they're generally avoided in fights on account of their fearsome hand-to-hand combat skills.Those of their race who ride the Urk'a'tan are specially picked and trained at a young age to become messengers, and it's their duty to ride across the breadth of the desert to deliver messages to other tribes, peoples, races, etc. Mount and rider share roughly the same lifespan, so partnerships are lifelong, and an Urk'a'tan will not allow another rider to mount unless said rider is given permission. Riders tend to give their mounts little adornments, such as gold earrings or the tail bands that mark every fourth year of service as a messenger. Overall, the pairs are well-respected, and will be given safe passage and accommodation wherever they find it in the vast desert lands.

The wider world to which these two belong is slowly evolving. I've yet to draw out a map, but so far I have an observatory tower of the winged folk, the Royal City where the kingdoms are centered, and a bit of a history involving a war with the demon race and parallel worlds to which said demons were banished. I have several sets of characters housed in this world, and I'm excited to see where it will evolve.

To my readers, I hope you're enjoying your summer (despite the gnats). Keep a lookout for more blog posts, and as always, happy reading.

S.R. Koch

Odonata

The Dragonfly Society of the Americas is an organization that was founded in 1988 by a group of Odonata (dragonfly) specialists, and has since grown into an organized group whose collective goal is to advance the "discovery, conservation, and knowledge of Odonata through observation, collection, research, publication, and education" (Mission statement). They host an annual meeting to exchange news and ideas, collect new samples, and attract new members, and this year was the 25th anniversary meeting of the organization's foundation. Myself and a good friend--April Brooks--had the privilege of attending this year, courtesy of our friend, Margy Balwierz, who contacted me about the trip through my science teacher. I'm a bug lover, so of course I signed on, and April kind of had no choice because I dragged her along. 

The meeting this year was split into three parts--a pre-meeting in Fall Creek, WI, a main meeting in Ladysmith, and a post-meeting (which we did not attend) in Vilas County. The meeting was headed by a group of ten or so experts, along with twenty-ish more mid-level experts, and a handful of people (like myself) who had no clue what was going on. The meeting was a mixture of informational presentations and field outings, and even if you actively tried not to, it was pretty much impossible to walk away without learning something. 

As a novice, most of the presentations that these people gave were way beyond me. Talks on Sympetrum corruptum and the distribution of gomphids rapidly progressed beyond my meager grasp of Odonata terminology, and looking back at the doodles in my notebook, I would say that I eventually gave up trying to understand what was going on. There was one, however, that I understood and picked up a few things from.

Ami Thompson gave a talk on the basics of dragonfly identification. For the experts (which as I mentioned comprised the vast majority of the people there), it was just that--the basics. For me, though, it all but blew my mind. 

There were six families of dragonfly that we were expecting to see over the course of that trip: clubtails, spiketails, cruisers, darners, emeralds, and skimmers. I'm not even going to try defining the damselflies, because with juvenile and gender differences being taken into account, there was no telling what you were looking at unless you consulted one of the experts. To me, they were colorful twigs with wings. 

Damselflies notwithstanding, Ami taught us some tricks that would let us differentiate between families.

Clubtail

Clubtail

Clubtails (Gomphidae), in my opinion, are the easiest to distinguish. They do, as the name suggests, have the characteristic bulge or "club" at the tip of their tail, but some species show this less than others and it's an unreliable defining point. We instead looked at the head (And no--I took no creative liberties when drawing that. Also, yes, they are indeed of this world). The eyes on a clubtail do not touch at all at the crown of the head, which is distinct from all of the other families. They also tend to have thicker thoraxes and long, skinny abdomens. 

Darner

Darners (Aeshnidae), by contrast, have eyes that meet together at the top and press together so tightly that it looks like "two balloons being squished together" (Ami), forming a line down the center of the face. They're a bigger dragonfly in general, with long tails and huskier thoraxes. 

Spiketail

Spiketails (Cordulegastridae) are also defined by their eyes, and lie in that middling area halfway between darners and clubtails. Their eyes touch at a single tiny point, forming a figure-eight pattern on the top of the head. Unfortunately, the eyes alone can be difficult to distinguish from skimmers, emeralds, or cruisers, so you have to look at the body shape--long and slender and usually marked by bands along the thorax--to get a better idea. 

Cruiser--thorax stripe detail

The cruiser family (Macromiidae) is most identifiable by the single yellow stripe that runs across either side of one's thorax. It's hard to mistake, and they're generally a longish, slender dragonfly with long, clear wings. They're long of leg as well, to better catch their prey. 

American Emerald

Emeralds (Corduliidae), unfortunately, are one of the harder families to distinguish. They can be longish or shortish; fattish or thinnish, and the characteristic, vivid, emerald-green eyes from whence they derive their name does not always occur. Most times there is a white or yellow ring around the abdomen at the base of the wings, but even that isn't always evident, especially in baskettails. 

Twelve-spotted skimmer

Last but certainly not least are the skimmers (Libellulidae)--the family you eventually turn to after going down the line of distinguishing traits and saying "nope" to all of them. Skimmers tend to be shorter than the others, with broader wings and a broader back wing set than the front. Colors and patterns range all over, but they're fairly common and pretty easy to catch. Chances are, if they're all over the place, they're skimmers. 

With this knowledge of general family placement, we headed out into the field. Dragonflies, we found, tend not to live in convenient places. They like water and plant cover, so you'll find yourself tramping through burdock, nettles, and brambles and then topping your boots in bogs and rivers in your search for these buzzing dots of greased lightning. I was stupid the first day and wore shorts, and so my legs accumulated a lovely pattern of criss-crossing scratches dotted with red mosquito bites (where there's mosquitoes, there's dragonflies, and subsequently there's Odonatists). The clubtails, cruisers, and some skimmers we mostly found on rivers and fast-moving water. The white-faced skimmers and emeralds seemed to like the bogs. Both sites made for adventurous walking, as you were either fighting for your balance against a current and slippery rocks or fighting for your balance against black, sucking mud that's trying to pull you down amongst all the other lost Odonatist skeletons that are no doubt down there.

Anyway.

Identifying--once you get the general family and are flipping through whatever guide you happen to have (I like Kurt Mead's Dragonflies of the North Woods)--goes something like this:

*flip-flip-flip*

"That looks right."

"It does. Maybe that's it."

*flip*

"Oh. So does that."

*backwards flip*

"What's the difference?"

"Better read."

*sigh*

"...'The Ashy clubtails' claspers do not have the downward-pointing tooth of the Dusky...'"

*pulls out hand lens and peers intently at dragonfly's rear-end*

"I think there's a hook."

"Let me look."

*follows suit*

"I don't think there is."

"We'd better ask Bob..."

Bob DuBois

Bob DuBois, among many of the other experts whom we pestered mercilessly, deserves our gratitude. As the writer of  Damselflies of the North Woods, he is not only an expert in all things Odonata, but also a patient teacher and a shameless nerd. Getting to know him, along with a scattering of the other experts--Ken Tennesson, Kurt Mead, Marley Garrison, and Bryan Pfeiffer--was a rare treat. Among other things, we learned from them how to differentiate adult from teneral (juvenile) dragonflies, and how to tell male from female; Tenerals are really easy to pick out, we found, even without capturing them. Their wings are brand-new at that point, and they're subsequently much shinier and tend to glitter brightly as they buzz by. To tell gender, you do have to catch them, so that you can look at the spot on the underside of the dragonfly where the abdomen and the thorax meet. Females are smooth down there, but males have an opening with bumpy claspers for gripping the female's ovipositor. In addition, he also has a big pair of claspers at the tip of his tail, which he uses to clamp onto the back of the female's head (often breaking through her exoskeleton and leaving a pair of holes). Their ritual is referred to as being "in tandem", and it looks something like this:

"In tandem" mating pair

Having the experts point us in the right direction was nice, and gave us something to work off. In the end, though, we took a day to ourselves on the river encircling our campsite, and spent the day catching and I.D-ing on our own. We got wet, messed up more than once, and yet in the end, it beat going to a mall or playing video games any day. 

If you're a bug person, or just some nerd who's willing to tramp through bogs, river, and heavy vegetation for the sake of proving you can, I would highly recommend this as a field trip. Next year's meeting will be held in Pennsylvania towards the end of June, and the group is always looking for new, younger members (it's an older-generation group--April and I were the young'uns the entire trip). You can tag along for free, or sign up for twenty bucks to be an official member of the society (with the added benefit of a catered dinner). 

As always to my readers, I hope you enjoyed wasting your time with this, and happy summer!

S.R.Koch

Our delicious stew

 Top: Frosted whiteface
Bottom left: Hudsonian whiteface; Bottom right: Dot-tailed whiteface;

April and Dominick

Left: Dusky clubtail; Right; Springtime darner

Dot-tailed whiteface female

Slugs

As promised--the enigma of the slug. As you probably know, this post was started in Seattle, when myself and the other NOSB-ers first stumbled across a three-inch long slug trying to cross a path at the Nisqually wildlife refuge. As is the nature of nerd-kind, we stopped to look, named him Matt, and fell to wondering why there was a gaping hole in his side that looked as if it had been pecked there by a bird.
Now we find out.
As is always best, I've found, I've decided to start with some background on the slug. For starters, they hail from the taxonomic phylum Mollusca, which includes a lot of the "weirder" species of earth such as cuttlefish and oysters. It's an old group of animals; we suspect they first became a distinct group around the Precambrian (600 to 4600 million years ago), and they have since built and diversified to a rough estimate of 200,000 described species. Slugs, specifically, are of the class Gastropoda, which translates to "stomach foot" in Latin. The name was earned in reference to the slug's apparent tendency to crawl around on its belly. In light of that, the muscular underside that they use for locomotion has been dubbed the "foot". Looking closely, one will note that a slug moves itself along by rippling the muscles along its underside in a wavelike pattern, lubricating its way with the famed snail slime (a stress-fracture fluid much like soap). The slime also serves as protection against drying out and sharp obstacles, and works so well that a slug could crawl over a razor blade without harming itself.

European black slug (Matt)

On the Seattle Adventure, we encountered three distinct species of slug. I am not the best at identifying gastropods, so the conclusions herein are hesitant; Matt and the other blackish-brown specimens that we encountered mostly in Nisqually were European black slugs (Arion ater) from the subfamily Arionidae. The reddish-tan ones were also from Arionidae (I could not pinpoint the species), and the leopard-spotted one from the rainforest was a banana slug (Ariolimax columbianus) from the subfamily Ariolimacinae. We noticed and wondered about on each of them the little hole that you'll note on the photo of the tan Arioninae specimen; they all had one, and they were capable of closing it and opening it like a sphincter. Research reveals it to be a "respiratory pore". Like our trachea, its purpose is to bring oxygen in from the environment, and it leads directly to the slug's single lung. In addition, the slug can absorb oxygen directly from the atmosphere, sucking it in through its porous skin and redistributing it throughout the body. Most of the organs are located on the dorsal side of the body to better allow the animal to crawl.

Unidentified Subfamily Arionidae

Now, as boneless, exoskeleton-less, shell-less animals with a record speed of around .013 m/s, one would pretty much suspect to see all slugs at the bottom of the faunal food chain. For the most part, that's true; slugs serve as the garbage disposal system of nature, breaking down dead plant and animal matter and recycling it back into the soil. They use their rasp-like "radula"--a ridged tongue that moves like a conveyor belt around a base of cartilage--to rasp away food particles and move it backwards down the gullet. They are hunted in turn by anything from birds to frogs, and for the most part eat at the bottom of the food chain.

Banana slug

There are exceptions to the rule, of course. Poiretia cornea, or the dalmatian slug, is carnivorous and, moreover, cannibalistic. It hunts other, smaller gastropods (specifically snails), chasing them down and then using the acids secreting in its slime to dissolve the shells of its prey. Some carnivorous species, such as the wolf snail (Euglandia rosea), have made a pest of themselves. The wolf snails were introduced to the French Polynesian islands to control a different species: the giant African land snails. Predictably, this did not work, and the wolf snails instead set about eating the smaller, native species and driving most of them extinct.
To finish off the post, I'll regale my readers with what I deem the weirdest of all slug traits: reproduction. Being slow creatures, slugs tend not to encounter others of their own kind as much as they'd like. To account for this, they've developed an adaption strategy shared by many deep-sea fish who share the same problem: duo-gender individuals. Being "hermaphrodites" like this allows any two snails to mate, and makes it much easier for them to pass on genes. The "ninja" slug (Ibycus rachelae), which was first described in 2008 in Borneo, has adopted and even wilder reproductive strategy. Rather than allowing its mate to come to close quarters, it instead fires a harpoon-like "love dart" in order to pass on its sperm. Weird as that sounds, it's very effective.
My thanks for your attention, readers. I hope you found this interesting, if not entirely applicable elsewhere in life. I will be leaving again this week for the Odonata Society annual dragonfly hunt in Fall Creek and Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and so I should be posting  about my adventures there in a couple weeks.
Enjoy your summer, and as always, happy reading.

The Great Seattle Adventure

Finally--a spare second.

As many probably already know, two Mondays ago--that would be April 28th--myself, four other students, and our two coaches left home for the National Ocean Science Bowl competition--nationals, this time. Our goal was to compete against 19 other teams in a game designed to test our every bit of knowledge on all things ocean. First, though, we had to get there...

Monday, April 28th
Day one consisted of travel. I don't think I've ever been subject to so many modes of transportation over the course of a single day. We began in a limo--courtesy of Jay Arneson, to whom we all extend our thanks--which got us as far as the airport. I've never flown before, so that was...interesting. We avoided the worst congestion because it was 5:00 in the morning (yes--that means I was up at 3:00 and yes, I regard that as such a fun way to start a trip), and managed to get on all in one group and pick the best seats. Esther (whom I would be spending most of the trip with), fought for and won the window seat, for which I decided she would eventually reap the consequences.
Several hours and a layover to Denver later, we broke through the cloud cover in Seattle, and spiraled in for a landing. The weather, in comparison to the drizzly, chilly, miserable climate we'd just left behind in Wisconsin, was beautiful.
After reclaiming our baggage and after one of our group members accidentally being coerced into donating $10 to some random charity, we all boarded a shuttle bus to a nearby rental car agency. I ended up crammed in the back of a white suburban, and I can tell you honestly--that combined with jet lag is not a fun thing.
We stopped in Tacoma (just south of Seattle) for lunch and some sightseeing. Union Station was there, along with some great glass sculptures that were built into a bridge that spanned the highway. The whole time, the weather was unnaturally sunny, and we could see Mt. Rainier in the distance.
After Tacoma, we got lost for a bit. Our guides--Liz and Jim, who'd organized the whole trip--knew of a national park--Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge--where we could wander for a bit to see the wetlands and the wildlife. We didn't trust our GPS, so we ended up somewhere in the middle of a massive suburb sprawl, and had to backtrack and loop roundabouts in order to get back. The whole time, I just couldn't believe how GREEN everything was (it's been a long winter). I found half a dozen blurry pictures on my camera from when I was leaning out trying to capture the green-ness of it all.
We found Nisqually eventually. The place had a history of having once been a farm--some "visionary" of agriculture decided that, despite all the perfectly arable land surrounding the area, he would conquer nature and drain the wetlands in order to make way for his business. Years later, in an attempt to preserve the ecosystems of Puget Sound, wildlife officials set Nisqually aside as a refuge. Walking through there was wonderful--the smell of water and pond muck, trees dripping with moss, and a long boardwalk that went out into the wetlands themselves, where you could birdwatch and observe the tide coming in. Over the course of two, maybe three hours, we utterly walked our feet off and were perfectly happy in doing so.
After Nisqually, we tried another site called Greys Harbor. It wasn't as interesting--save for the slugs, which I will be doing a post on later--and eventually we just decided to throw in the towel and head to our hotel. The day was pretty much over, except for a quick midnight excursion that we decided to embark on--after hearing that the hotel apparently had "beachfront property", we went out with headlamps and flashlights to find the water's edge. It turned out to be about a half mile from the hotel through paths that looked as if they might be hiding serial killers around every bend, but we made it, and spent some time combing the beach for sand dollars and crab carapaces. There was some licking of sand dollars by certain persons who will here remain unnamed, and then we all trudged back to the hotel for some glorious sleep. Jet lag included, that was a 21-hour day.

Tuesday, April 29th
Our goal this day was to catch a minus tide. Unfortunately, that meant getting up early...again.
We were up at 5:00, and on the road by 6:00. Our intention was to go to the minus tide first, but we ended up sidetracked at the Lake Quinault National Park, where we beheld the world's biggest spruce tree (and it was big--would've taken 12 people to hug). We managed to get to the coast in time for the tail end of the minus tide, and were just in time to poke around in the tide pools for just a little bit before the waves washed in in earnest. We saw all manner of interesting critters--mussels, barnacles, anemones, and little bottom-dweller fish puddling around in pools while they waited for the tide to come in. I made the mistake of wearing my boots, and so I was basically carrying around buckets filled with water in between each wave.
We could have stayed there forever, but there were more things to see.

We were starving by that point, so we headed over to the little town of Forks (apparently home of the Twilight saga) and raided a grocery store for lunch. We ate in a park, where we encountered a dog whom we were pretty sure was the rogue chihuahua "Bean" from the wanted posters at the store, and then moved out to the rainforest.
Washington is widely renowned for being home to one of very few temperate rainforests in the world. Our intention was to go to the Hoh Rainforest, but logistics included, we ended up in a different park, where we left our car at the visitor's center and tramped out into the forest. The place was beautiful--ferns, cedars as big around as a car, and moss and vines hanging everywhere from trees that towered hundreds of feet into the air. I was jetlagged, dehydrated and footsore beyond measure, but I could have happily stayed there indefinitely.

We got more food on our way back through Forks, for which I was grateful, and from there went our way to Rialto beach. That was an amazing sight. The beach is in fact a tombolo--a sand spit of land that juts out into the water and connects up with an island out in the water--and over the years, entire trees that had been washed out to see and polished clean of bark and branches had been washed up onto the spit. Mrs. Huppert's comparison was of a giant's pick-up-sticks game, and I would quite agree. One could easily make it from one end of the spit to the other without touching the ground, although to do so required some  degree of balance and climbing skills. On the island, there were more tide pools--dozens of orange and purple starfish--one of which Esther fell into. She wasn't too happy on the trudge back. After the beach, we went to a different hotel, where we ate pizza and collapsed back into yet more sleep.

Wednesday, April 30th
I got about 6 hours of sleep, and then we were up again and off for a whale-watching tour. Pretty much everyone slept on the car ride (except me--I was tired to death, but I can't sleep upright in a car), waking up only to board the ferry in Port Townsend and later use the bathrooms at the whale watching office in Anacortes, on the other side of Puget Sound.

The boat, when we made it, was a nice affiar--three levels, cushioned seats, and a lunch menu of chili-dog-pulled-pork sandwiches (someone on that boat has a sick sense of humor). They took us out into the sound, sailed around some islands, and after letting us ooh and aah at the harbor seals sunning themselves out on the rock, made for the area where they knew there to be whales. We saw some harbor dolphins (little more than darting black specks with dorsal fins, really), lots of seagulls and cormorants, and later some sea lions that began fighting and roaring at one another out on their little island. Eventually, we did manage to track down a whale--a Minke, which is a rather small, gray specimen with a dorsal fin like a dolphin--and spent close to an hour circling where it last dove and catching glimpses of its back disappearing back under the water. As infuriating as it was, it was awesome.
We ended the day with seafood, which most of us insisted upon since it's basically sacrilege to go to the coast without trying some. We each got a different plate, and spent the meal mooching off one another so that we could try it all. I shared my NPR story about pig bung and calamari (which no one appreciated, strangely enough), and there were some awful puns shared pertaining to the ugly throwpillow with the fake grass sewn on the front. I was tired again when we finally went back to the hotel, but happy in the knowledge that the next day, we would be allowed to sleep in.

Thursday, May 1st

As I predicted, sleeping in was heavenly.
We went to the Dungeness sand spit first thing in the morning--another long length of sand covered with polished, rounded stones and bits of smoothed driftwood with waves washing strange patterns along the shores. I learned from my past experience with my boots (they'd taken the entire rest of the day to dry), and instead wore my sandals. Unfortunately, those were even worse, and I ended up taking them off and walking most of the length of the spit barefoot (which took some creative trailblazing). Despite my feet, it was still great--wonderful weather, ocean sounds, and little crab bits scattered here and there which I decided to wrap up as souvenirs (I regretted that action later when they began to smell, but I persevered).
We had to get to Seattle proper next, so we boarded another ferry. I find I quite like the city--considerably more vegetation that the Twin Cities--and anyplace that puts a gigantic statue of a troll holding a Beetle Volkswagen underneath an overpass can't be half bad. My one complaint would be the streets, which had near-vertical inclines, and were so overparked on either side that they were basically a one-lane affair. There were some hair-raising close calls.
We made it to our hotel intact (hotel Decca), and spent a little time settling in and exploring (I love old hotels, though the two elevators on a 16-floor building was not a smart design), before heading out for some Thai food. We found a great place (Tom's Thai), ordered out on the street (it was too small for all nine of us to fit inside), and were violently cussed at by some passing old guy in a dapper little white suit who was convinced we were clogging the sidewalk just to annoy him. The restaurant owner assured us that the man wasn't from Seattle. The Pad Thai was excellent (though a bit hot for poor Esther, who had hers switched around with Eric's, the Thai iced tea was weird, and the frozen yogurt we had later was refreshing. We were all pretty happy when we made our way back to the hotel, and I slept like a rock, thank God.

Friday, May 2nd
The actual field trips that were sponsored by the NOSB organization were the next day. Esther and I had signed up for the zip-lining tour, and so we were bundled into a bus with a bunch of other kids we didn't know and were shuttled off to the Bellevue zip tour headquarters. We learned that most of the other people in our group were from Virginia. There was JC, Cameron (the funny guy), the coach from Mississippi, and some other odd characters who I eventually got to know over the course of the trip. The zip-lining itself, when we finally got through the safety procedures, was fantastic. Esther, I found, is afraid of heights (which casts some doubt as to her reasoning in choosing that field trip in the first place), but she and I both overcame that innate fear of throwing oneself off a perfectly stable platform onto a metal wire. It was awesome--the sound of your pulley system buzzing across the metal chord did indeed 'zip', and it was exhilarating to watch the trees and ground fly away on either side of you as you hurtled by. I was sad when it was over, though it will definitely serve as motivation to come out there again sometime in the future.
There was another field trip after that--the Mercer Slough wetlands--which wasn't really that interesting after everything else we'd seen, and back at the hotel, we had some down time. When the others got back from their kayaking excursion, we all dressed up in our finery and headed of for the Seattle Aquarium, where the opening ceremony for the bowl was held and some prolific speakers went up to congratulate and motivate us all.
We made it back to the hotel, and thereupon discovered that our window whistles, shrilly, when there's wind. Slightly longer night than it should have been.

Saturday, May 3rd
Competition.
We began with the SEB (Science Expert Briefing), for which we'd been writing, editing, and practicing essays and abstracts that we'd written about a bill on ocean acidification that's about to be reauthorized. Somehow, that was the most terrifying thing I experienced on this trip--even over ziplining. We were made to sit in a line with our abstracts out in front of us, the five judges facing us. We had to read off our abstracts, and then answer questions posed to us about said abstracts. We were allowed to confer on the questions, but we had to answer individually, and a few of the questions were beyond anything we knew (Claire pulled some marvelous creativity on hers that I will forever be in awe of). I was so glad when it was over, though in truth, the competition was only just beginning.
From regionals to nationals, there actually wasn't much difference to the buzzer rounds. The format was the same, and for the first few rounds, we were actually winning by our standard amount. Later, though, we began facing off some of the harder, more aggressive teams. We made it through the Round Robin, but after lunch (and an attack by an aggressive beggar-duck that literally tried to take food out of my mouth), we entered the Double Elimination rounds. The other teams got quicker, and the questions steadily got more difficult until it was a matter of lucky guessing. We had our second loss three or four rounds in, and found ourselves bumped out of the competition.
Overall, we did pretty darned good. We got fifteenth overall, and twelfth place in the SEB. It was a bit of a disappointment to be out of the competition before the finals, but at the same time, that gave us time to go out for some Mexican seafood out near the docks and more frozen yogurt. There wasn't much to do after that, save for attending a panel some lady was giving on how to improve our SEBs. Unfortunately, she was a terrible and entirely unhelpful speaker; sort of reminded me of a politician.

Sunday, May 4th
Star Wars Day--May the fourth be with you.
The competitions went on without us, and for the most part, we hung around in the ballroom where the finals were taking place and watched the rounds. It eventually came down to two teams--Arcadia high school from Southern California and the Boise, Idaho team. The final two rounds were very close--at the halfway mark of one match, they were tied 49 to 49--and the questions were so tough that it was near-impossible for them to get the bonus questions. Boise was at one loss and Arcadia at zero for the first round. Boise won once, so the two were tied at one loss each, and the competition had to be decided in one more round (by this point, we were all starving because lunch was being put off until the games were over). The second round was even closer than the first, and it came down to one final bonus question that they managed to sneak in just as the buzzer rang. Boise won by the barest of margins.
After that was pretty much formalities. There was an award ceremony, during which presenters would go up, announce that they would keep it short, and then yammer about this and that before finally giving away first, second and third prizes to the winning teams. There was some sponsorship recognition, and then everything was pretty much over and we all dispersed outside to the hallways.
Since it was only halfway through the day, our gang decided we would head up to Pike Place Market for the rest of the evening, and since Mr. and Mrs. Huppert didn't want to tag along, the five of us piled in a van with Jim and Liz and took off for downtown Seattle. We stopped at a sculpture garden along the way (lots of modern art), and then we all unloaded at the market and dispersed our separate ways. Esther and I, of course, ended up together, and we mostly wandered around one or two blocks in search of something I could bring back for my dad to cook. Things were beginning to wind down, so there were no fish-throwers, but I did find some awesome, lavender-flavored pasta, and various other touristy items to bring back as souvenirs. When asked, the woman selling me the pasta told me that the biggest thing to see in the market was the "gum wall", which we of course had to see after that. Not entirely sure what to think of that--equal parts awesome and disgusting, I suppose. I can't help but wonder what happens when it rains.
The group met back up after awhile, and we all headed back for the hotel so we could go out for dinner with the Hupperts again. No one felt like experimenting by that point, so we went to E.J Burgers, where we were served the biggest, greasiest, drippiest bacon cheeseburgers I've ever seen in my life. I eventually had to decided that I would only use my napkin when juice began dribbling down my wrist, because it was a hopeless battle otherwise. It was great.
We went out for frozen yogurt yet again, and along the way ran into our cranky little old man in the white dapper suit trudging up a hill (apparently he is from Seattle). We briefly considered stopping in front of him to talk, but decided we'd end up being beaten with a cane.
We packed that night. It was hilarious watching Esther, because she always over-packs.

Monday, May 5th
Travel.
It was pretty unexciting. We made our way back to the airport, and eventually boarded our plane. I smugly managed to seize the window seat before Esther, thus completing the circle of airplane karma, and spent most of the rest of the trip repeating the words "imgoinghomeimgoinghomeimgoinghome" on a subconscious level to myself. We said goodbye to Liz and Jim in Milwaukee (many thanks to them both!), and then made it back to the Minneapolis airport with time to spare. A short limo ride (which was somehow longer than both plane rides put together) and a lengthy group photo-op later, I was riding home with my dad, and life was good.

Man, it felt good to use my own shower.




Anyway--happy mother's day, and keep an eye out for my next post: The Enigma of the Slug.

Happy reading!
S.R. Koch

New Book

My last book attempt died...miserably. I finally gave it up for lost and started on this one. I storyboarded for about a week, and I just recently started writing the beginning. I'd forgotten how nice it is to know and like where the story's going, and I haven't been working on much else since I started (other than the NOSB briefing essay that I have to do--don't worry. That post will be coming soon enough). Here's a passage from my new book, Jane and the Fire Lords--a tale of strange happenings in an even stranger school. If you liked Harry Potter and are hoping for a rehashing of that, I suspect this story will prove utterly disappointing to you...


"I.." the man said, sweeping his arms open so that the cloak of glittering stars and nebula fluttered and curled dramatically around his beanpole figure. "...am Mr. X! I am the head professor of the arts of magic here, and as such, it is my greatest pleasure to welcome you all to the Griffinspoint high school for young and aspiring mages! I'm sure you've all been wondering when you'll get your chance to tour the ground properly. Rest assured, after we've finished with registration, you'll be taken around the school by various professors and staff to be introduced to the facilities. I will be conducting you all to the grand hall, where you'll be given your I.D. lanyards and divided into groups for the tour. Are there any questions?"
There was a slightly stunned pause, during which time the great Mr. X turned in a slow, dramatic circle, confident that the'd covered everything with sufficient pizzazz to leave them all meekly stunned for the rest of the day. He was a little perturbed, however, when a hand somewhere out in the audience shot up into the air. Annoyed, he nodded his head regally towards it.
"Yes?" he asked.
"What's with the ducks in the vents?" asked the kid--a shortish, curly-haired ginger with a face like a baby. A couple other voices chimed in in agreement, wondering aloud why they were supposed to ask about the ducks. Mr. X blinked in surprise, not sure how they knew about the ducks, and then on a hunch, turned around to look back at the school. His shoulders slumped a little when he saw the bedsheet hanging out the fourth-floor tower window with the message painted in red across it: "Freshmen! Ask Mr. X about the ducks in the vent!"
"That..." he grumbled, annoyed. "...Is my senior magics class. I think we may safely dismiss them as a bunch of wild hooligans, and move on instead to more pressing matters. Are there any more questions?"
A couple more hands went up.
"...That pertain to the subject at hand," he concluded.
The hands went back down.
"Very well. Everyone, through the doors, if you please."

Cyrus

Have you ever had an English teacher who forces you to delve into every little bit of symbolism in a piece of work? How the solitary tree in the middle of a field stands for 'the character's sense of alone-ness and need to stand guard over his family...' or something to that extent. Have you also ever just wondered if the tree was just supposed to be there for shade?

My thoughts upon completing this story ran along the lines of, "Ha! Let's see them figure out the symbolism in that!"

...Mostly because I haven't a clue what it's supposed to mean myself. 

Make of it what you will.

Cyrus always wore his backpack. Aside from that, there was never anything unusual about him. He was a tallish blonde boy, with gray-blue eyes, a cheerful face, and a sense of style that was somewhere between a Victorian gentleman and an English professor. The backpack was an old, ratty, black nylon thing with a golden star sewn crookedly on the front pouch, with a zippered pocket on either side, a small pouch for books in front, and one main pouch that fastened with a buckle. He never went anywhere without it, and there was something alive (or very close to being alive) inside it.

No one had ever seen the thing in Cyrus' bag. Not properly, anyway. People heard it from time to time--vague growling, squeaking, and shrieking noises that echoed in a way they shouldn't have--but no one had ever seen what the thing actually looked like. When asked, Cyrus always replied that it appeared exactly the way you would think it would and left it at that. Whether that meant what one would think it meant (or not) is unclear. 

Cyrus brought his backpack and the thing inside it to school on the first day he arrived in my hometown. One of the teachers asked him to put it in his locker, and he refused. The thing itself then demanded, in whatever gargling, roaring, squeaking language that it spoke, to be allowed to stay. The teacher said no more on the matter, and rumor has it that an e-mail was sent around warning all teachers to leave the backpack alone.

I sat with Cyrus at the lunch table and we talked about video games. From time to time Cyrus threw and apple core or one of the less identifiable chunks from the school meatloaf into the bag, and they would disappear with a satisfied smacking sound. I asked him if I could try, and he said I could. I threw in the top bun off my hamburger, and I snuck a quick peek into the mouth of the bag when Cyrus opened it for me. All I could see were two golden pinpoints of light with dark slits down their middles. I asked Cyrus if they were eyes, and he told me they were exactly what I thought they were. I didn't know if that meant yes or no, but I do know that, if they were indeed eyes, the rest of the animal that belonged to them would be far too big to fit inside that bag. 

Cyrus never took off the bag. He would have worn it to his dying day, if he'd ever died, but for whatever reason, he's gone on living for two hundred years now since I met him. I'm long-dead now, of course, but I still see him from time to time, walking down the street in his Victorian/English professor outfit and with the even rattier black backpack with the golden star hung over his shoulder. There is still but one person in the universe who knows what's actually in that bag, and he will never tell anyone for as long as he fails to die (which, I suspect, is forever). 

THE END

Yeah, studyhall. 

Happy Reading!

S.R. Koch

Things from the Shelf--Cats

No, I do not have a stuffed cat on my shelf of natural history. However, I catch the little twerps up there often enough that I think cats are fair game as subjects for a Things from the Shelf post.

Cats are the ultimate enigmas. Even by the time we've explored and cataloged the deepest depths of the ocean, I doubt we'll have completely figured out cats. We've tried, of course, but cats are a species that will always defy understanding for the sheer spite of it.
Of the things we have managed to figure out, the physics of the aerial righting reflex are probably the most studied. We've all seen it at some point or other--some cat will slip and fall headfirst off a roof, only to miraculously twist in midair and land perfectly on its feet. From the standpoint of Newton's first law of physics (an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted on by an external force), it doesn't seem possible from the outset that a cat could do this. There's nothing for them to push against in midair, and there is no apparent external force to cause them to spin. Physicists like Destin from the Youtube channel Smarter Every Day, however, have employed the powers of physics and high-speed cameras to figure that one out.

I cite Destin's video on flipping cats here, because physics are beyond me.

The external force that we see acting on a flipping cat's momentum comes from a combination of inertial momentum and abdominal muscles. A falling cat will divide itself into two axis, centered around the stomach area:

When it begins to fall, it will pull in its front legs and extend its back legs, which decreases its inertia in the front (think of spinning on a swing--pull your legs in, and you spin faster) and increases the inertia in the back, thus giving its abdominal muscles something to push against and causing the front half to spin faster.  Once its front paws are underneath it, it reverses the process; extending the front legs and pulling in the back legs so that it can get its rear paws underneath it:

A common myth is that it's the tail that they use to twist around, but one has only to look at a bobtailed cat to realize that's not true; bobtails pull off the aerial righting reflex as well as any other cat. As a general statement, cats are very well-adapted for making this move. They're very flexible--particularly along the vertebrate--and thus they can make those death-defying twists in midair more easily and absorb more shock upon impact without injury. In fact, cats who fall greater (though still reasonable) distances tend to land in better condition than those who fall only short distances because they have more time to right themselves.

Now, there's more to the enigma of cats than flipping physics. Researching strange qualities of cats, I ran across a widespread theory as to why cats purr that struck me as extremely odd and (from the outset) rather improbable. Most people believe that cats purr to express contentment. From an evolutionary standpoint, that seems a rather useless trait to develop, but some scientists have theorized that the purr is actually employed as a healing mechanism. Seem far-fetched? It kind of is, but let me explain; Everything has a resonant frequency--a pitch at which a system oscillates at maximum amplitude--including bones and muscle tissue. When the resonance of a system is in disharmony, it's called "disease", and scientists have figured out how to restore harmony in a system by matching the natural frequency (a process called "entrainment"). The theory on cat purring is that they utilize a similar process to restore the natural frequencies of their bodies.
The frequency of a cat's purr is somewhere between 27 and 44 hertz, and scientists studying the effects of resonance on bone density have discovered a positive effect of this general frequency range on human bones. Similar studies have been done using ultrasound technology, which uses sound to generate heat to improve circulation and bone density in a human system. Cats may be capable of utilizing the properties of this frequency to stimulate bloodflow and improve circulation in their bodies, thus aiding the healing process and adding to the long-lived myth of the nine-lived cat.
No one knows for sure if this is how cats do it, but it would explain their quick healing capabilities and the veterinary myth that a cat, if left in a room with all its bones, can reassemble itself. Certainly, it piques a good deal of theorizing from curious minds, and maybe one day it will lead to discoveries and technology that could help with ailments such as osteoporosis.

In the meantime, I will leave you to ponder the enigma of cats, and to enjoy the mud and flowers.

Happy reading!

S.R. Koch



Resources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtWbpyjJqrU (Smarter Every Day)

http://www.alleycat.org/CatBiology

http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/catspurr.html

http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/purring-cats/

http://www.svpvril.com/svpnotes/P/PURR,_138874.html

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/TreatingPain/story?id=4047863

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-cats-purr/

http://www.newmindrecords.com/scienceharmonics.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/24/why-cats-always-land-on-their-feet-_n_1828748.html