itohan's Journal

I visited the nearby pine tree reserve and the reservoir. The weather today was colder than usual so I thought I would only find one type of metazoan/animal. I initially started looking for protostomes. Maybe if it rained, I would have seen my favorite annelids: terrestrial earthworms. Unfortunately, I didn't find any of the mouth first animals. I struggled to find insects much less mollusks.

However, I did find deuterstomes with the common theme of feathers (minus one furry exception). Not too far from a birch tree covered in mushrooms, I spotted a bald eagle surveying the area from really high. I also noticed 3 types of birds in the reservoir (mute swan, mallard, and Canada goose).

My final observation - a fifth vertebrate - was a gray squirrel. It was so fast but I guess it was too cold to be staying on the grass. Or maybe it was just relocating a nut.

In chilly weather, I became a botanist for the evening and visited the wild forest six minutes away from Hammond Pond. The ground was wet and the air was humid. The plants finally got a break from the unforgiving Sun's heat after last week.

I figured this nature walk would be relatively easy. After all, I was looking for the four main types of land plants, not the entirety of the archaeplastida clade.

The only group that gave me a hard time was the polypodiopsida or plants that are vascular but seedless.

My first plant was a popular bryophyta: the moss. Although leaves carpeted the forest floor, I could see mosses everywhere. So I mentally crossed off nonvascular plants from my list. Next, was an evergreen tree. These gymnosperms are hard to miss during the fall. The angiosperms were also easy to spot. The one I found bore tiny red fruit.

Finally, I found ferns. As I should have guessed while looking for the seedless plants, they were beside a tiny stream of water and shared space with some mushrooms and mosses.

On my way back, I took some pictures of some more mosses.

I mainly stayed in the Reservoir close to the nearby Pine Tree Reserve. The ground was soaked but once I got there, the sky was only sprinkling rain. It was pretty chilly but I mainly blame the large body of water.

Anyway, I went on a mission to find different types of fungi. Fungi are generally hard to find because they live in shaded, moist places but I had difficulty because the forest floor sort of blends together after rain. Luckily, the ones I found came in different colors. I found blue-green lichen on trees and on rocks. I found a lonely porous brown one. I found dark brown ones that look like cow skins. They were pretty smooth and floppy for lack of a better explanation. I even found a group of three tan mushrooms with a inverted bowl-like cap. Those were going to be my last ones but as I was walking back, I noticed a very flat, white mushroom/toadstool shielded by a bunch of leaves.

Fungi look very different from each others since they are a broad taxa: a kingdom. Also, since I'm learning about Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya, I think it's interesting that Fungi are eukarya like humans. I suppose that is why their infections are harder to treat than bacterial ones. Or maybe it's because some of them are parasitic. Maybe one of the ones I observed were parasitic. After all, they grow near everything.

I took advantage of the cool weather and went to the nearest pine tree preserve, which was about fifteen minutes away. I walked around for half an hour and took some photos of what can be categorized into three groups: plants, animals, and fungi.
One animal I saw was a sole black ant. I accidently came across its leafy home when I was trying to take a picture of the next animal - a gray squirrel. The squirrel was running with another but they eventually separated when the other climbed at tree. The fungi I noticed were completely different from each other. The lichens were fuzzy and they grew on a rock, while the earthballs looked spotted and they were shaded by some flat leaves. The plants I noticed were relatively thin oak trees. The branches wrapped some of them.
None of the organisms looked out of the ordinary so I doubt there was any polyploidization.