I'm back at the Angelo Reserve this weekend. Today while looking for algae I watched a dragonfly take flight for the first time. Dragonflies live most of their life in the water as a nymph. In rivers and streams they are predators that eat other insects and small fish. Eventually they emerge from the river as adults to mate and become the aerial predators we are more familiar with. You can see the remains of the nymph exoskeleton below the adult dragonfly. In the first photographs the wings are over the abdomen, then later the dragonfly moved them to their functional position perpendicular to the body. I watched this for 20 minutes until eventually the wings started fluttering and the dragonfly took off.

Bridging the Science-to-Society Gap

This is a thought provoking blog post from the folks at nature.com blogs discussing science in society.

At one point the article states scientists are, "paid to produce and collect the knowledge that is relevant to the world." This definition bounds scientists to produce certain kinds of knowledge. The authors do not see scientists as the individuals in society who engage in the unfettered pursuit of knowledge. I think this blog post offers much to think about, and I hope you have time to read it. Enjoy!

Epiphytic Algae

The photos below are taken through a microscope at 1000x and illuminated with ultraviolet light. They show bacteria stained with acridine orange to make them more visible. The bacteria were shaken off of Cladophora, a freshwater macro-algae, from the Eel River in Northern California. This summer I will conduct experiments to investigate the relationship between epiphytic bacteria and diatoms and their algal host Cladophora.

The photo below shows bacteria upon a diatom. I imagine the diatom is dead or dying and the bacteria are consuming the organic molecules from the decaying cell.