3:00 snapshot #701

Maggie and Alexis share the new chair.


Then Charlie and Maggie both get in there.


We assembled the new chair using the included hardware and pictorial instructions. The first step was attaching the front piece to the leg pieces. This involved turning an Allen wrench to tighten a bolt in the little groove scooped out of the wood. The hex wrench could turn 1/3 of a turn in there, then had to be pulled out of the head of the bolt, put back in, and turned another 1/3 of a turn. It could not be hurried, it could not be stretched. The bolts were two inches long and there were four of them. It was a two person operation: one person had to hold the wood pieces steady and level, and the other person had to robotically turn the wrench exactly 1/3 of a turn, finding the head of the bolt again in the shadows, and turning the wrench exactly 1/3 of a turn. Our marriage survived the chair assembly.

100 Species, #1: British Soldier Lichen

British soldier lichen Cladonia cristatella

I've been nervous to start this year's project, but it will be easier to start with a species I described a couple days ago. My goal, as usual, is to describe those species found around man-made environments, and explain why they are there, and what they do in the ecosystem. With this project, all the species will be found in the small plot of land on which I live; some in the house, some in the yard; some wild, some cultivated or domesticated.

This batch of British soldier lichen is growing on the shingles of the roof of our shed. The shed predates the house: the original owners of the house lived in the shed while they built the house. However the shingles appear to be relatively recent additions to the shed. The red parts of the lichens are the reproductive bodies, throwing fungal spores complete with captured algae (the species Trebouxia erici, the same alga species that partners with sunburst lichen) into the air. It takes 5 years of growth or so before the lichen produces these structures, so we know this lichen colony is at least that old. This batch of British soldiers was photographed after it spent a month under the heaviest snow load our region has seen in decades. This is a resilient, long-lived fungus.

Mycologist Tom Volk's post on this lichen.