3:00 snapshot #753

One of the responsibilities of my job is to treat all of the storm drains and catch basins with mosquito larvicide (a synthetic hormone that prevents mosquito larvae from growing up into bloodsucking disease spreading adults). Every year I have to find them all, every year I surely miss some, and every year I find some new ones. Last year I got a copy of a blueprint for the zoo, so that I could create a map of the storm drains. But the blueprint is huge and unwieldy--how can I make it portable. I remembered back when I published a comic book, and I haunted reprographic places; they made blueprint-sized copies on giant machines at some of them, but they were very expensive. They basically used a big camera to take a picture...oh, right.

I realized that technology has changed in the past 18 years, and that I actually had the means to do the same thing, right there in my office. I took a series of photos with my digital camera, uploaded them and printed them. The quality isn't great, and I'll need to take some detail shots of areas of the zoo where the drains are densely packed, but I can't believe it took me so long to figure it out.

100 Species #54: Dead man's fingers

This dead man's fingers fungus (Xylaria polymorpha) emerged from the well around a basement window. This revealed to us the presence of an old stump. Strange place for a tree to grow.

Dead man's fingers is a wood-digesting fungus that is variable in appearance (thus the scientific name). The fruiting bodies are always thick and more or less finger-like, sometimes fused into a hand-like group, sometimes separate and more elongated. This time of year the mushroom is coated with blue-green asexual spores (conidia). They persist through the summer into fall, developing sexually produced spores as well.

Dead man's fingers appeared in this blog previously as 365 urban species #181.