"You are not an animal, you are an ecology"
Well, my dream of counting the Bahamas field course as a core bio requirement was crushed today. I really had my fingers crossed on that one...but of course it would have been too perfect if it had worked out. But, I am very pleased to be taking Biological Diversity this quarter with LaBarbara who is an AWESOME teacher. He's so knowledgable, humorous and entertaining it makes taking a 9:30am class extremely worthwhile. I think I'll take invert zoology with him in the spring and just have that count as core bio. We'll see.
Ghosts, Larvae, Hip Waders & SCUDS
Yesterday for biodiv lab we went to the Jackson Park Lagoon and the Wooded Isle to study the biodiversity of the wetlands there. It was the best lab I've ever had. We met on the Clarence Darrow Bridge, which coincidentally has some interesting history behind it that I just heard about. Clarence Darrow, who represented Leopold & Loeb as their lawyer in their famous murder trail, was a lifelong Athiest and promised his friends that after he died he if there was such thing as an afterlife he would come back on the anniversary of his death and reappear on the bridge as proof. Since then, people have been on the lookout and some have said to have spotted his ghost.
The lagoon is just behind the Museum of Science & Industry, and has been around since the creation of the Museum for the 1893 World's Fair. It is just a 12 minute walk from campus towards the lake down 57th or 59th, but surprisingly most University of Chicago students don't even know that it exists. The Wooded Isle (the Paul Douglas Nature Sanctuary) is an island in the middle of the lagoon. It's rather large, and hold's Chicago's Osaka Japanese Garden on part of it. The Japanese Garden has a simple layout with a small pond, waterfall, pagodas, and grasses and trees landscaped around. It is a tradional "stroll garden" with paths meandering around the pond. The fence surrounded the garden and the gate marking the entrance are unique because no nails were used in their construction, making them very espensive to make ($400,000).
Truly, I've found that Jackson Park place is the closest thing you can get to nature in the city of Chicago. It's fairly quiet even though LSD and Cornell, both traffic-heavy streets enclose it on two sides. There's lots of fish, and on a few visits I've spotted Great Blue Heron, ducks, and other feathered creatures. Unfortunately, a storm this year blew over 336 trees (like Washington Park)--the oldest and biggest of which being a 273 year-old bur oak (65' tall and 90' wide, it was healthy before the storm and could have possibly lived for 250 more years). The wood value alone is valued at over $50,000 but it is being left toppled on the island in hopes that in a couple of decades it will turn into a nurse log.
Yesterday was pefect weather for exploring the lagoon: bright sun, 60s, sweatshirt/nocoat kind of day. Meeting on the bridge my lab group put on hip waders, grabbed some dipnets, buckets, jars, seines, and a snack and then walked along the shore of the lagoon. With every step we made the water turned brown as the lake sediments diffused into the water. I thought this would make it hard to find stuff, but as we swished our dipnets around and pulled them back up out of the water they were full of very tiny (mm to 1cm length) organisms. Snails, larvae, fish, clams and a ton of unidentifyable stuff (to us at first glance). Lots of bugs of all shapes and sizes swimming around happily in the murky water. We only had an hour to collect as many things as we could and get a 2liter mud sample. The time went really fast. We walked along the shore in the bushed on the east side of the lagoon overturning wood chunks, rocks, using our dipnets and digging through leaves and other organic material for any aquatic creature we could find. We didn't have a pan to collect the sediment sample, so we walked over to the bridge crossing over to the island where most of the rest of our lab was. Walking under the bridge near the shore I was surprised to find a somebody's home under the bridge. Tucked up in the rafters was a folding chairs, some pots and pans, toothpaste, and where the soil met the metal under peeking out of a plastic bag covering I could see a sleeping bag and some other stuff. It was all neatly organized, and looked like a pretty cozy place to be (at least in warm weather)--it would be the kind of hideout I would want as a little kid. You could catch fish and fry them up as food, and have great blue herons stop by to say hi. But imagining someone living hear yearround is another story. Right next to the lake, on the water, in the freezing cold snow wind and rains that blow in...this person must be miserable in the winter. Most of the class hadn't been under the bridge like I had to check out the shoreline there as I had, but I felt bad that we were so close....I felt like I was invading someone's private space.
After the short time of collecting we walked back to the BSLC to continue on with the lab and try to identify what we had caught. Unfortunately the time left was really not very much and using a dichotomous key my lab partner Diane and I could only key out 2 of the animals before I had to leave: a scud, and a dragonfly larvae. All in all though, I had such a great day!
Well, my dream of counting the Bahamas field course as a core bio requirement was crushed today. I really had my fingers crossed on that one...but of course it would have been too perfect if it had worked out. But, I am very pleased to be taking Biological Diversity this quarter with LaBarbara who is an AWESOME teacher. He's so knowledgable, humorous and entertaining it makes taking a 9:30am class extremely worthwhile. I think I'll take invert zoology with him in the spring and just have that count as core bio. We'll see.
Ghosts, Larvae, Hip Waders & SCUDS
Yesterday for biodiv lab we went to the Jackson Park Lagoon and the Wooded Isle to study the biodiversity of the wetlands there. It was the best lab I've ever had. We met on the Clarence Darrow Bridge, which coincidentally has some interesting history behind it that I just heard about. Clarence Darrow, who represented Leopold & Loeb as their lawyer in their famous murder trail, was a lifelong Athiest and promised his friends that after he died he if there was such thing as an afterlife he would come back on the anniversary of his death and reappear on the bridge as proof. Since then, people have been on the lookout and some have said to have spotted his ghost.
The lagoon is just behind the Museum of Science & Industry, and has been around since the creation of the Museum for the 1893 World's Fair. It is just a 12 minute walk from campus towards the lake down 57th or 59th, but surprisingly most University of Chicago students don't even know that it exists. The Wooded Isle (the Paul Douglas Nature Sanctuary) is an island in the middle of the lagoon. It's rather large, and hold's Chicago's Osaka Japanese Garden on part of it. The Japanese Garden has a simple layout with a small pond, waterfall, pagodas, and grasses and trees landscaped around. It is a tradional "stroll garden" with paths meandering around the pond. The fence surrounded the garden and the gate marking the entrance are unique because no nails were used in their construction, making them very espensive to make ($400,000).
Truly, I've found that Jackson Park place is the closest thing you can get to nature in the city of Chicago. It's fairly quiet even though LSD and Cornell, both traffic-heavy streets enclose it on two sides. There's lots of fish, and on a few visits I've spotted Great Blue Heron, ducks, and other feathered creatures. Unfortunately, a storm this year blew over 336 trees (like Washington Park)--the oldest and biggest of which being a 273 year-old bur oak (65' tall and 90' wide, it was healthy before the storm and could have possibly lived for 250 more years). The wood value alone is valued at over $50,000 but it is being left toppled on the island in hopes that in a couple of decades it will turn into a nurse log.
Yesterday was pefect weather for exploring the lagoon: bright sun, 60s, sweatshirt/nocoat kind of day. Meeting on the bridge my lab group put on hip waders, grabbed some dipnets, buckets, jars, seines, and a snack and then walked along the shore of the lagoon. With every step we made the water turned brown as the lake sediments diffused into the water. I thought this would make it hard to find stuff, but as we swished our dipnets around and pulled them back up out of the water they were full of very tiny (mm to 1cm length) organisms. Snails, larvae, fish, clams and a ton of unidentifyable stuff (to us at first glance). Lots of bugs of all shapes and sizes swimming around happily in the murky water. We only had an hour to collect as many things as we could and get a 2liter mud sample. The time went really fast. We walked along the shore in the bushed on the east side of the lagoon overturning wood chunks, rocks, using our dipnets and digging through leaves and other organic material for any aquatic creature we could find. We didn't have a pan to collect the sediment sample, so we walked over to the bridge crossing over to the island where most of the rest of our lab was. Walking under the bridge near the shore I was surprised to find a somebody's home under the bridge. Tucked up in the rafters was a folding chairs, some pots and pans, toothpaste, and where the soil met the metal under peeking out of a plastic bag covering I could see a sleeping bag and some other stuff. It was all neatly organized, and looked like a pretty cozy place to be (at least in warm weather)--it would be the kind of hideout I would want as a little kid. You could catch fish and fry them up as food, and have great blue herons stop by to say hi. But imagining someone living hear yearround is another story. Right next to the lake, on the water, in the freezing cold snow wind and rains that blow in...this person must be miserable in the winter. Most of the class hadn't been under the bridge like I had to check out the shoreline there as I had, but I felt bad that we were so close....I felt like I was invading someone's private space.
After the short time of collecting we walked back to the BSLC to continue on with the lab and try to identify what we had caught. Unfortunately the time left was really not very much and using a dichotomous key my lab partner Diane and I could only key out 2 of the animals before I had to leave: a scud, and a dragonfly larvae. All in all though, I had such a great day!
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