A Northwoods Almanac for August 4- 17, 2023

 A Northwoods Almanac for August 4- 17, 2023  

 

Sightings – Blue-spotted Salamanders, A Musky Tale, and Small-flowered Pond-lilies

             Greg Bassett in Hazelhurst moved a couple plastic containers in his woodshed and out from under them came three blue-spotted salamanders. He noted, “I've come across a single one this summer on two or three occasions, but the last time I have seen that many together I think was when I was a kid. Definitely one of my summer highlights!!”

blue-spotted salamanders photo by Greg Bassett

            I rarely see blue-spotted salamanders, so seeing three at one time is a fine gift. Blue-spotted salamanders spend their non-breeding time typically in forests beneath moist logs where they consume slugs, earthworms, snails, beetles and other invertebrates. They’re found throughout the state and most of the Midwest and Northeast, as well as Ontario and Quebec.

            Carol Pfister sent me a photo that her daughter Shawna took while out for a pontoon ride on Big Crooked Lake. Shawna saw a large dead fish floating near the surface, and when she got close enough to net it, found a 30” musky which apparently choked when trying to eat a bass too large to swallow – see the photo! I seldom write about fish in my column (so many others do it well already), but this seemed uniquely worth reporting.

photo by Shawna Pfister

            Many aquatic plants come into their prime flowering in late July and early August, so this is the best time to explore lakes and rivers for their flora. While paddling Moose Lake in Iron County on 7/25 with a group of adult students from Fe University, we came across a species of “special concern” in Wisconsin – small-flowered yellow pond-lily (Nuphar microphylla). Susan Knight, ace aquatic plant biologist, taught the class with me, so she was able to positively identify it. It was previously collected from Moose Lake (but has never been collected anywhere else in Iron County) by Stephen Meyer in 1964, nearly 60 years ago. 

photo by Eric Epstein

            Susan took a sample of the plant – it was relatively abundant in this one bay – and has since pressed it and will send it to the University of Wisconsin herbarium (see https://wisflora.herbarium.wisc.edu/index.php for information on plant collections and records from around the state).

            

Carnivorous Plants In Our Lakes

            What an absolute pleasure it is to slowly paddle a lake with a terrific botanist like Susan. We paddled Frog Lake on 7/24, again for Fe University (btw: “Fe” stands for “ferrous,” the chemical symbol for iron), and here we found hundreds of lovely purple bladderworts (Utricularia purperea) in bloom. Susan did her PhD on bladderworts, so we were treated to an in-depth look at this rootless, free-floating carnivorous plant that traps and consumes tiny zooplankton. You can’t pick a bladderwort flower because you’ll lift the whole plant when you pull it out of the water. 

Purple bladderwort, photo by John Bates

            Bladderworts capture minute organisms in a hollow bladder-like trap enclosing a partial vacuum that is triggered by hairs near its opening. The bladders work a bit like squeezing all the air out of a ball and then letting go, resulting in a sucking inrush of water. Tiny zooplankton like daphnia and rotifers brush against the bladderworts hairs, the compressed bladder releases and sucks in the insect, and an elastic trap door mechanism snaps shut preventing escape. Slick and quick, the whole process takes 1/460 of a second, making bladderworts the fastest moving plants in the world – they are the Usain Bolts of all flora.

            Charles Darwin described how well the trap door works, "I may mention that my son found a daphnia which had inserted one of its antennae into the slit, and it was thus held fast during a whole day.”

            Neltje Blanchan, author of Nature's Garden in 1901, wrote that a sign should be posted above the bladderworts reading, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

            On 7/26, we paddled a third undeveloped Iron County lake – Plunkett Lake – with more Fe students, and here the highlight may well have been how many carnivorous sundews we saw. I’ve written before in this column about these marvelous plants, so please recall that the drops of “dew” are actually sweet smelling and sticky drops of mucilage that the plant secretes in order to attract its prey. Bugs land on the plant thinking that they have found a sweet meal, but become stuck in the goo. The plant responds by folding its leaves around the prey with the rapidity of response depending on what is being devoured, with more rapid response when the victim is actively struggling. The captured insect then becomes digested into soluble materials that are absorbed into the leaf cells and later distributed to other parts of the plant. 

sundew photo by John Bates

            Charles Darwin was utterly fascinated by insectivorous plants, particularly sundews, and published a lengthy book on them in 1875. He is famously quoted as saying in 1860, one year after publishing The Origin of Species: “At the moment, I care more about Drosera [sundews] than the origin of all the species in the world.”

            Carniverous plants play a wonderful role reversal in nature, the plant eating the animal, that would be lustily cheered by plants everywhere could they but shout. We were cheered just to see them and to understand a bit about how they live their lives.

 

Update to Voyageurs Wolf Project – Wolves Fishing

            Excerpted from the Voyageurs Wolf Project: “Big takeaway from our newly-published research: wolves hunting and catching fish is almost certainly a widespread behavior in places similar to the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem. That means wolves are very likely ‘fishing' in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and beyond each and every year!

We first learned of wolves hunting fish (spawning suckers) in 2017 when two wolves in the Bowman Bay Pack ‘fished’ . . . This was the first documented observations of wolves hunting freshwater fish in places like Minnesota . . . 

            “Zoom forward 7 years and we have now documented wolves hunting and catching fish every year except 2022 (when we had large flooding which likely made catching fish very difficult). That means we have documented wolves fishing 6 out of 7 years since 2017!

            “We have used an assortment of approaches to document this behavior including GPS-collar data, a single firsthand observation, trail cameras deployed at creeks, and a camera collar deployed on a wolf.

            “Using all this info, we have observed wolves from 5 different packs (and one lone wolf!) catching fish at various creeks and rivers in our area . . 

            “Based on this, we conclude that wolves ‘fishing’ is almost certainly a widespread behavior and that wolves in many similar ecosystems very likely hunt and catch fish every year, [though] wolves only fish for a relatively short period of time (a few weeks).”

 

Celestial Events

            August 6^th marks the midway point between summer solstice and fall equinox. We receive 14 ½ hours of sunlight this day.

            Look before dawn on 8/8 for Jupiter about 3 degrees below the moon.

            The famed Perseids are building to a spectacular peak on 8/13 that could boast roughly 100 meteors per hour. Viewing conditions will be nearly perfect, too. Predawn is usually best.

            The new moon occurs on 8/16, and it will be at apogee, the farthest from the Earth in 2023 – 252,671 miles.

 

Only Getting Hotter

            June 2023 was Earth's hottest June on record. Ocean surface temperatures hit a record high for the third month in a row as global sea ice shrank to a record low for June. 

            Canada helped add to the data. After experiencing their warmest May on record, Canada also had their warmest June on record along with drought conditions which have fed all the fires they are experiencing. 

            Meanwhile, the heat in July has already been so extreme that it is “virtually certain” this month will break records “by a significant margin,” the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and the World Meteorological Organization said in a report published on 7/27. 

“We have just lived through the hottest three-week-period on record.”

            And the surface ocean temperature in the waters of Manatee Bay at Everglades National Park around the Florida Keys soared to 101.19°F on 7/24, the temperature at which people typically take a hot tub. At this time of year, the water should be between 73 and 88 degrees.

 

Sales in 2023 up 47% for Electric Vehicles 

            Some good news – in the first half of 2023, U.S. customers bought 556,707 electric vehicles, which was up 47 percent from the first half of last year, according to Kelley Blue Book.

            EV market share was 7.2 percent of the U.S. market for cars and light trucks, which was up from 5.7 percent in 2022 and 3.1 percent in 2021.

            Electric vehicles are a harder sell up here in the Northwoods with our long winters and long distances between small towns. But in cities with kinder winters and numerous charging stations, they make a ton of sense. Our eldest daughter lives in San Diego and just installed solar collectors on her roof. She says her next car will be all electric, fueled for free from her rooftop array. Gotta love it.

 

Quote for the Week

            “We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” – Wendell Berry

 

Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail me at manitowish@centurytel.net, call 715-476-2828, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47, Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com.