Esplanade

On Saturday my dad visited, so I took us over to the Esplanade, the park that runs along the Charles River. There were lots of college students picking up trash for Earth Day.

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3:00 snapshot #1970: Saturday

Me and the wife wishing it was a bit warmer.

280 days of Urbpandemonium #22

Last fall we had a Norway maple cut down. It doesn't quite know that it's dead yet, and has been spending the early part of the spring oozing sap up to the stump. This weekend I noticed this swarm of ants gathering to lap up the sweet juice.


The two nodes between the thorax and abdomen, along with their size and color, strongly imply that these are Tetramorium sp., commonly called pavement ants. Pavement ants are native to Europe, but have become very common in New England, adapting readily to urban ecosystems (note the common name).

280 days of Urbpandemonium #23

During the last Ice Age, glaciers pushed down from the north and scrubbed New England of terrestrial life. As the world warmed, birds flew back, frogs and turtles crawled and hopped back up from points south, mammals moved in to reclaim newly thawed habitat. Earthworms were probably working their way way back for a few thousand years, when all of a sudden, tons of European dirt was dumped along the coasts. Soil ballast was offloaded at New York, Boston, Salem, etc., containing all the soil organisms from Holland and Great Britain. North American worms never quite made it back to New England before European ones took over.


This plump red earthworm is probably Lumbricus terrestris, known around here as the Canadian nightcrawler--a misnomer for this European native. It lives in deep soil burrows, coming to the surface to grab leaves and other vegetation down into its lair to feed. These worms are bred in captivity for bait for fishing.


I dropped this individual into our compost; go for it baby, eat up and grow large.

280 days of Urbpandemonium #24

As a naturalist, one of the great joys in my life is discovering that some gross goo or scum that forms on something is evidence of a living thing with a name and natural history. This nasty orange film growing on the Norway maple stump is a yeast known as tree stump slime or Cryptococcus macerans. It's feeding on the sugars in the tree sap, while using antifungal and antibacterial chemicals to keep competing microorganisms at bay. Beta-carotine provides the color.