While I deal with frozen pipes in a house I’m looking after for a friend, why don’t you go make a snowman?
New Year’s Resolutions: Studying Russian
I love learning languages, but I’m bad about starting and not ‘finishing.’ I know you never truly ‘finish’ learning a language, but I want to get to a reasonable level of competency, instead of just learning the basic structure of the language and colors, numbers, and food. I tend to put language learning on the back burner since it’s not directly related to my job or research interests. But I enjoy studying languages and speaking another language definitely makes you a more attractive employee in research. So this year, I’m committed: I’m making a little time for studying every day, just like yoga.
Image via Wikipedia
Languages I’ve started and not finished include: Spanish, French, Esperanto, Mandarin, and Russian. I got the furthest in Esperanto because it’s a made-up language with very regular rules and roots I’m familiar with. I’d still like to learn enough to do Pasporta Servo someday (What? You don’t know Esperanto?! Here’s the Wikipedia page, then.). I learned quite a bit of a dialect of Mandarin, mostly because I lived in China for a year and it was learn or only eat overpriced noodles. Someday I’m going to learn proper Mandarin; I want to participate in this program while I’m in grad school. Since I do want to work with Chinese researchers someday, it would make sense to focus on Mandarin this year. Since I want to travel with Pasporta Servo, it would make as much sense to focus on Esperanto.
But instead, I’m going to focus on Russian. I took 3 semesters of Russian when I started college. I did pretty terribly since I was dealing with near constant migraines. One semester, I attended a total of 4 classes (out of about 50). But I really loved it. One of the things I like best is the similarity between Russian and Latin grammar. I took Latin in high school and had so much fun.
- Image via Wikipedia
We ended up translating (badly) a fair bit of The Aeneid. Most people grimace when I tell them that, but it was AWESOME (especially the part where my Latin teacher pretended to be an enraged cyclops). Since Latin has super specific endings depending on what a word is doing in a sentence, you can put words in essentially any order for literary effect and still make sense. Playing around with word order doesn’t work very well in English, e.g. Work order around playing with in very doesn’t English well word. I’m not sure if Russian poetry is as flexible with word order as Latin is, but I enjoy the precision of the language. Plus, I think Russian sounds lovely, even if all the bad guys in the movies have Russian accents. It reminds me of my grandfather, who most certainly was not a bad guy. (He wasn’t Russian either, but my fuzzy memories of Polish aren’t distinguishable from Russian.) I’ve also been interested in Russia for as long as can remember because of an article I read about Lake Baikal when I was kid. I’d still love to do research there.
I’ve got some good tools to get started with that didn’t hurt my wallet, thanks to the internet and some friends. I’ll start watching movies and TV shows in Russian right away to get a better feel for the language. In a few months, I’ll start reading a book I’ve read in English in Russian. I’m thinking Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Grad school application #1
I just submitted my first grad school application. Satisfying, but expensive.
Now I’m going to play in the snow that shut down all the roads in and out of town yesterday!
I40, sort of open (Jake Bacon/Arizona Daily Sun)
Mount Elden
This tired earth
Gathering the Coca Plant (Erythroxylum coca) in Bolivia
After only a week in the fields listening to the farmers, we realized that the crop substitution program, a key component of the American effort to eradicate coca, was a fantasy. Harvested by hand every four months or as often as six times a year if fertilized and sprayed, coca outperformed every other agricultural product in the valley, earning eight times as much per acre as coffee, twenty-five times more than cacao. Ideally adapted to the poor well-drained, and highly eroded slopes of the montaña, and suffering from few natural pests or predators, it flourished where most other cultivated plants could not even grow. At a hacienda in the upper reaches of the Santa Ana valley, we asked a group of farmers whether it might be possible to substitute other crops for coca. The men laughed aloud and then inquired who would possibly want to do so. One of them bent to the ground and grabbed a handful of dry soil. Letting the dirt fall between his fingers, he said, “Es imposible. ¿Qué es lo que podemos sembrar en este suelo cansado?” What else could we possibly plant in this tired earth?
From One River, by Wade Davis.
Mistletoe in a juniper tree
Continuing to wander through the park led me past this tree:
How odd! It looks like it has two different colors of foliage. And the darker foliage seems to form very distinct clumps. That’s weird enough to warrant a second glance. A second glance reveals that those dark clumps aren’t part of this poor juniper tree – they’re mistletoe!
Mistletoe, probably Phoradendron juniperinum, in a juniper tree
The mistletoe growing in this juniper isn’t the mistletoe traditionally associated with Christmas, Viscum album. But like Viscum album, Phoradendron juniperinum is a hemiparasite in the sandalwood family. Hemiparasites aren’t totally dependent on their hosts; while these mistletoes get water and nutrients from their hosts, they can make their own sugars. I identified this mistletoe as P. juniperinum because it’s the only mistletoe I could find associated with junipers in the western US. If you know of a more likely mistletoe, let me know.
Now that I’ve got a tentative id for the mistletoe, it’s time to pin down what kind of juniper we’re looking at!
I’ve already identified a juniper along this walk. The giveaway for that juniper was the bark – there’s no mistaking an alligator juniper! The bark on this juniper (visible in the background of the mistletoe picture) doesn’t look a bit like alligator hide. It’s gray and fibrous instead. So we can knock alligator juniper off our list of possibilities. There are only three other kinds of juniper found in this area,
- Juniperus scopulorum (Rocky Mountain juniper)
- Juniperus osteosperma (Utah juniper)
- Juniperus monosperma (one-seed juniper)
Could it be a Rocky Mountain juniper? Nope! As you can see in the first picture in this post, our juniper is a shrubby little tree with lots of stems. Rocky Mountain junipers are rarely multistemmed. Plus Rocky Mountain junipers have brown bark that breaks off in plates. Our juniper has grey, fibrous bark that shreds.
That leaves Utah juniper and one-seed juniper. Unfortunately, these can be tricky to distinguish. If I’d noticed juniper berries on our tree, this would be a snap because Utah and one-seed juniper have different colored berries and a different number of seeds in each berry. (Bet you can’t guess how many one-seed juniper has!) Unfortunately, all I noticed were the male strobili – where pollen is made. The male strobili aren’t mentioned in the Flora of North America descriptions for these species, most likely because they aren’t very helpful for identification. Even the phenology isn’t particularly helpful here: Utah juniper releases its pollen in early spring and one-seed juniper in late winter.
Immature male strobili
Despite the lack of berries, I’m pretty certain that this is a one-seed juniper because it’s got several main stems that branch at the base. Utah junipers tend to have short main stems with a rounded or conical crown. The absence of juniper berries on our tree is another piece of evidence supporting a one-seed juniper identification: one-seed junipers are usually dioecious, whereas Utah junipers are almost always monoecious.
BOTANY-SPEAK TANGENT: The root -oecious means ‘household.’ So dioecious species comprise individuals with only male reproductive parts or only female reproductive plants while monoecious species comprise individuals with both male and female reproductive parts. (If we used botany-speak for animals, (most) people would be dioecious and worms would be monoecious.)
So, lets call this Juniperus monosperma. I’ll be sure to keep an eye on it – if I find berries, I can make a more conclusive id.
Identifying an Alligator Juniper to variety
I went for a walk around a park near my apartment today. After being indoors cooking and eating all day yesterday, a nice long walk on a cold winter day was absolutely perfect. I was planning to do some work on my grad school applications when I got back, but ended up identifying the plants along the walk instead. I’ll make up for it by adding ‘compulsive botanizer’ to my CV.
The first thing I identified was an alligator juniper. Most junipers have very distinctive scale-like leaves that pretty much cover the twigs. The drawings below show fruit and scales of the four Juniperus species found in the Southwest. [UPDATE FOR NITPICKY BOTANISTS: Gymnosperms like junipers don’t actually have fruit in the botanical sense. Instead of the ‘berry’ being derived from ovary tissue, juniper berries are female seed cones that have merged fleshy scales.]
Drawings of fruit and scales of four Juniperus species, cobbled together from The Arbor Day website
Juniper scales and fruit look pretty similar between species and their weird little scale leaves make them jump out at you. As most botanists will tell you, the easier it is to identify something to genus, the harder it is to get it to species. Most botanists will also tell you that the exception is the rule. The junipers in the southwest aren’t actually hard to tell apart once you know what to look for. I like to start with the bark.
Alligator juniper bark
The bark on alligator juniper (Juniperus deppeana) gives the game away. This tree is actually named for its resemblance to alligator hide. That was almost too easy, so lets keep going and identify this Juniper to subspecies variety; J. deppeana has five. From Wikipedia:
- Juniperus deppeana var. deppeana. Throughout the range of the species. Foliage dull gray-green with a transparent or yellowish resin spot on each leaf; cones 7-12 mm diameter.
- Juniperus deppeana var. pachyphlaea (syn. J. pachyphlaea). Arizona, New Mexico, northernmost Mexico. Foliage strongly glaucous with a white resin spot on each leaf; cones 7-12 mm diameter.
- Juniperus deppeana var. robusta (syn. J. deppeana var. patoniana). Northwestern Mexico. Cones larger, 10-15 mm diameter.
- Juniperus deppeana var. sperryi. Western Texas, very rare. Bark furrowed, not square-cracked, branchlets pendulous; possibly a hybrid with Juniperus flaccida.
- Juniperus deppeana var. zacatecensis. Zacatecas. Cones large, 10-15 mm diameter.
At first glance we can knock robusta off the list – I wasn’t anywhere near Mexico, or a climate like Northwestern Mexico. We can eliminate sperryi for reasons of geography and the difference in the bark. I didn’t notice any cones, so we can’t use the cone size to distinguish between pachyphlaea or deppeana and zacatecensis. Even if I had seen cones, there’s a bit of overlap in size that could make the comparison a bit dicey. I didn’t carry a ruler with me anyway.
But looking at the scales makes it very clear that this is pachyphlaea.
Juniperus deppeana var. pachyphlaea foliage with white resin spots on each leaf
The foliage is super waxy (glaucous) and there’s a spot of resin on every single little scale. That means it could be deppeana or pachyphlaea, but since the resin is a brilliant white, not yellowish or transparent, we can call it pachyphlaea with certainty.
There was another kind of juniper on my walk totally infested with mistletoe, but you’ll have to wait another few days to see that one!