3 Urban Species

This morning I saw a house sparrow and a fledgling catbird picking at a patch of dogvomit slime mold. I had no idea that birds ate slime molds.

Vacation next week

I just figured out the first place I'm sure I wanna go on my vacation:
http://www.capbridge.com/

Try to look at that without saying "Holy S--t!"

Bad Natural History

Okay, so when you watch a movie with animals acting like people (you know, talking and such), you must suspend some of your disbelief. I'm okay with that--it has been this way since Aesop.

But these days the filmmakers are mixing in lots of actual Natural History with animals acting like people. For example the fish in "Finding Nemo" look (and to some degree behave) real, but they don't eat one another. In "Antz," there are both male and female worker ants. (This movie, which I am only halfway through, is the reason I'm posting. There's an awful lot that I could say, positive and negative about it, but I need to finish it, and I probably have to watch "A Bug's Life" for comparison, and the go see "The Ant Bully," too.) Even the bug scene in "King Kong," while exciting, is laughable from a Natural History standpoint (beyond even the bugs' great size--I'm talking behavior).

I want to know this, from you all:

At what point does faulty Natural History interfere with your enjoyment of a movie?

365 Urban Species. #208: Pigskin Earthball

Photo by urbpan. Location: the Riverway, Boston.

Urban species #208: Pigskin earthball Scleroderma citrinum

There's more to puffballs than you might think. Sure, they are more or less spherical mushrooms with internal spore-producing tissue, wrapped in leathery hides that open when mature, dispersing clouds of millions of spores when raindrops strike their surface; but there are many different kinds. Importantly, for mushroom foragers, there are edible kinds and poisonous kinds. One group of closely related fungi that produce tough-skinned, poisonous fruiting bodies with dark spore masses is distinguished from the true puffballs with the name "earthball." The most common species, bearing a pebbly texture resembling uncured leather, is Scleroderma citrinum, the pigskin earthball. Like Russulas and the amethyst deceiver, they are mycorhizzal, and grow only in association with the roots of trees--in the east, usually oaks. Molecular identification techniques show these mushrooms to be more closely related to certain cap-and-stem mushrooms than to true puffballs. Other common names for this mushroom include "common earthball" and "poison pigskin puffball."


Photo by cottonmanifesto.