Chrysalis – KNOMO CHOICIUS

Arrow

Yesterday, I finally got back to my Mid Michigan Word Gatherers Writing Group after quite a while. It was great to see old friends and meet a new person. It was interesting to write creatively, after my long stretch of non-fiction. Here’s goes!

Gravity’s arrow points downward.

While Motion’s follows a forward push.

Entropy’s arrow flies away, always away.

But Mystery shrouds the arrow of time.

Outer and Inner

Apple paints itself red outside.

Meat bleeds red from within.

Leaf makes its own green, which

Caterpillars ingest and excrete,

eventually the Monarch’s color their chrysalis with the green tint.

Noon sky from inside is blue.

Tiny dots pierce the black night sky.

But from inside or out?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Flammarion.jpg

AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The anonymous author is of the photo. The original artist for the engraving was French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion. It is from his “L’atmosphère : météorologie populaire,” published in 1888 by the . Wikipedia

Candlelight

One pink candle pokes its white helices

out of the baby’s cake, while the flame

eats downward and the family sings.

One red and one green candle stand proud

on the table. The autumn evening calls for

mother to strike the match.

One white candle sputters.

The old woman gasps, glazed eyes close.

Her niece holds her hand, and whispers

Good-bye.

Mother Nature is Cruel to Female Spongy Moths

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA: This has to be one of the ugliest things Mother Nature ever made. Seriously. Why hairy protrusions on the shell of the transformation chamber!

In July of 2022, I found this hard segmented shell stuck to the bricks that framed the door to my workplace. Hanging from it was the outer skin of a hairy caterpillar. The whole assemblage was lightly covered in a ragged group of silk fibers, attached to the anodized aluminum door frame. I’m not sure why so many insects find this north facing door so attractive. Two days later, it was out. After hours of internet searching, I determined that it was a female Gypsy Moth, now renamed in politically corectness to “Spongy Moth.” Note that she has crawled up the brick approximately ONE BODY LENGTH from her original position. This, sadly, is as far as she will ever go in this form.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA: She herself is not so bad looking.

One hour and four minutes after the above photo was taken, an unknown time after she emerged, she has attracted a mate.

Note the beautiful feathery antennae on the male, half her size. Note also how her face is completely covered by fuzzy stuff. She doesn’t need to see, because she is going to die here in place. Hence, my title. So here below, we see the tan colored egg mass. The “Spongy” stuff.

Well, I don’t really know what’s spongy about it. After a few days, I transferred some of the material to my microscope stage. And the view was remarkable. Tiny transparent balls, held in short strands of silk. The pairs of bright spots on most of the individual eggs are reflections from my microscope lights. Why is one pink? Is it dead? Did some other insect parasitize her egg mass?

These kindof look like tiny bearing balls.

The green arrow shows the developing baby caterpillar, and the beat rolls on. However, I euthanized the entire batch, but not before taking this photo of two of the early hatchlings. Or maybe there are something else. They don’t really seem to be the same shape as the forms inside the eggs.

And this is the sad end of the life of a female Spongy Moth. Even sadder than the life of a barnacle, which has been discussed elsewhere on this page. To end, I will show this beautiful, flaming red bolete mushroom. And below, my giant tomato next to my moderately sized, but very delicious, sweet and fragrant, cantaloupe.

Pink Sauerkraut

Merlot Variety of Napa red cabbage, regular green cabbage, carrots, garlic and ginger sauerkraut! YUM!! Good luck finding this at the grocery store!

Last spring, the weather was unsettled, and my seedlings were started late, because I was traveling overseas for all of January. But, I still managed to grow enough tomatoes, peppers, cukes, parsley, garlic and nasturtiums, among other things, to put away around 200 servings of frozen veggies to be Vita-mixed into a private blend V-8, V-9 or V-12!

Note the funny nose on the salad tomato. That’s fairly common with this early variety. I can’t remember if it’s a Sub-Arctic Plenty or an Oregon Spring. The purple onion is a Welsh Bunching variety that I cut the seed head off to allow it to form a larger bulb. I bought a packet probably 20 years ago and still have them. There’s a beefsteak tomato in the back, and a light green Armenian cuke, which grows with fancy scallops. They are delicious and stay tender even when ridiculously big. Like 2-3 feet long and 4 inches in diameter. The striped cukes were new for me last summer. Delicious and tender, but like many of my cukes the last few years, they are getting killed off by a fungus or virus. Along with the garlic, the beets did GREAT. I really liked the first time for me Red Cloud variety. Very uniform and clean.

The cabbage crop, the second most important after all the juice ingredients, was pitiful. The heads were not solid and I ran out of time in the fall. The two year old neighborhood “Kraut Party” was delayed when the usual participants got CoVid and then RSV. But come January, I figured I would make a small batch of kraut with the Chinese (Napa) cabbage that had been quietly reposing in the produce drawer of my fridge. Since this was a solitary effort, I put in more garlic and ginger than my friend would have wanted, along with the Suzuko variety Napa cabbage and carrots. I didn’t get a photo, but it tasted pretty good. I was surprised at how the unique Napa cabbage flavor was brightened, even with the strong overtones of garlic and ginger, delicious all together, with the extra garlic and ginger intended as anti-inflammatory to heal the after effects of the RSV.

After transferring the green / white Napa kraut to a smaller jar, I decided to try, despite my neighbor’s warning not to mix red and white / green cabbage in the same batch, to do just that. I used the Merlot variety Napa cabbage, and a small regular green cabbage head, along with what would probably be considered an excessive amount of garlic and ginger, as well as carrots. I did not know what to expect for a color, but certainly I was not expecting PINK!

Half gallon Ball Canning Jar at Left. A nice serving of fiber and probiotics at right. My arthritic hand was tired after slicing the Napa cabbage, so I chopped the green cabbage in the Vita-mix, as coarse as I could, but that was still pretty fine.

Since I cut out almost all the sugar in my diet after coming home from the hospital, I found myself really enjoying the flavor of the kraut for my bedtime snack. So once this batch was done, I got out the last of my cabbages, both small red heads, and made the last batch from last summer’s harvest. After two weeks, I put this garlic and ginger heavy batch in the fridge yesterday. Yet to be tasted.

The garden is a wonderful place and wonderful activity. I actually had a good year for fruit. First time the tart cherries produced enough / the birds left them for me that I could make juice. It was delicious. The cherries are technically tart, but are pretty sweet. The batch shown was about half of the harvest. Not huge, but it’s just me. So much better than buying the stuff at the grocery store. My Canadice red seedless grapes were also quite productive and I made and canned some juice from them too.

And then, at the end of the summer, there were quite a few Monarch Butterflies that came to get nectar from the Echinacae flowers.

It was a good season for the coleus plants, too.

Beautifully Black: Chrysalis of 2020

The Monarch caterpillar hung itself from my trashcan, the week I forgot to take the almost full container out to the street to be emptied. So, I was sad to miss its exit Wed., but glad to find the chrysalis empty when I got home, so I could put the very full can out Thursday.

Monarch Chrysalis the morning just before it split. A few strands of spider web decorate the shell.

Monarch Released

OFF WE GO!!!!

She flew in three circles and then landed for a breather on the top of the spruce at far left.

Fenced In

Where am I going? North, south, east and west
have no meaning.

Where am I going? Up and down, out and around
are equally meaningless.

I am fenced in by my freedom. Because the
geographical direction, and distance from the
center of the earth are not the point.

The real point is that since I newly don’t know
who I am, there’s no I to go anywhere, so the
invisible, non-existent fence is all it takes to
hold me in place.

I used to think I knew who I was. Cowardly in
the outer world, powerless, I try to use the
little freedom that is my lot.

Tried to use it and thus fertilize it. Let it grow.
So who am I?

The swallowtail chrysalis appears unchanged from
last week. It had turned brown,
to match the coffee filter it was looking
at when it shed its skin, after first revealing the green of
the parsley it had consumed.

The monarch chrysalis has no such tricks up its sleeve.
It doesn’t need to. Its nature is to transmute itself in
place, on the milkweed, while the swallowtail needs to
be flexible, in case it’s caught by chill, and needs to
overwinter on dry vegetation.

My current confusion, I hope, is another step on the
road. The apparent inactivity of the chrysalis.

The swallowtail still hangs, brown, from the drying
parsley stem it chose, rather than the sturdier plastic
spoon I offered it. But the monarch chrysalis, overnight,
or at least since yesterday morning, has turned black.
That means that the chrysalis has actually clarified.
Become its namesake’s material, while the insect
within has formed, its black and orange pattern now
visible within, if you know how to look.

Swallowtail Butterfly Caterpillar

This year I have found BOTH a Monarch and a Swallowtail butterfly caterpillar.

I could not figure out why the Monarch mother laid her eggs on some parsley that I nearly put in the blender to make vegetable juice, before noticing the caterpillar. Lucky for both of us, I did not have extra protein in my juice!

I finally did research and realized this was NOT a Monarch, but that the dill and parsley I had planted had succeeded in attracting a Swallowtail. The next day I found a Monarch.

I had them both for about a week when they spun threads to hang their chrysalli, and then shed their skins. The Swallowtail matches its color to the surroundings, in this case an unbleached coffee filter!

Eastern Swallowtail chrysalis above the coffee filter I had used to make it easier to clean out its “frass.” But it soon stopped eating and pooping, and went into this phase.

Detail of swallowtail chrysalis. Eyes are at right. Note the threads anchoring the pupa at both the tail (left) and abdomen areas.

A Confident Monarch

Early August, and I and a friend decide to take off for the north. I’ve lived in Michigan for 33 years, and never been more than a mile or so past the north end of the Mackinac Bridge. This time, we got as far north as Whitefish Point. We rode in separate cars, and I had to wait while he finished a business meeting before we hit the road. I went to the poor, rocky “private” beach advertised by the cheapest motel we could find by the time we tried to reserve for the last minute trip. And there awaited a Monarch sipping nectar from a thistle. What a beautiful site. I took some photos with my phone, as I hadn’t bothered to bring my good camera while I killed time. Slowly, I moved closer, expecting Mona to fly away at any moment. But she did not.

Monarch on a thistle, undisturbed, for the moment, by the human.

I think these are the “thick webbing” patterns, indicating female. But now I know what to look for. Time to sip some daisy juice!

Beautiful Bio-Luminescent Luciferase

Daily Prompt: Luminescent

Firefly Image with Flash (above) and its own light. Attribution: Emmanuelm at English Wikipedia

Way back in 1974, I was already a nerd. I had a summer internship at the National Bureau of Standards (now called the National Institute for Standards and Technology or NIST). My posting was to the micro-calorimetry lab, where I got to work on a project to determine the heat of reaction of the luciferase based chemical reaction that happens in the tail of a firefly.

At one point, we actually put a live firefly- (this is not the kind we used) in the calorimeter, and watched the heat being given off by the insect. It was a very sensitive instrument, and the energy graph was pretty ragged. But then there was a big spike. The whole unit was opaque, so we couldn’t see anything, but we figured that the firefly was lighting up at that point. Who knows, maybe it was just mad at us and trying to get out. We released it, unharmed. Not so lucky were the ones that got killed for their tails. I wondered if they paid little kids to go collect them.

I was informed of the chemical reaction that allowed the fireflies their trick. That had already been figured out years ago!

It was a fun summer. I realized then that I did not have the patience to work as a scientist, and decided to go to engineering school instead. Twenty years later, I ran across an article in a technical journal about how scientists had finally managed to do something practical by using this compound to make a field kit to measure oxygen levels in streams and other bodies of water.

What I had realized years before was that the scientists were just having fun.

Nothing wrong with that. So did I. And I am still working in the field.

They didn’t pay us much. If we didn’t have family need, we got I think $12.00 a week. It almost paid my part of the gas money I gave to the janitor and the technician who gave me a ride out to Gaithersburg. The janitor was a down to earth, friendly guy. The technician was more of a grouch. I wonder what they thought of me. There were not too many females in technical fields then. Even less than today.

Daily Prompt: Luminescent

Explore

Bee Head (Scanning Electron Microscope)

There is always more to explore.

You can look out.

You can go out.

You can look in.

You can go in.

Look up, or down.

But if it’s exploring, you have to see things in a new light, even if the things you are seeing are not new, or even new to you.

Every day, our experience reinforces some characteristics of who we think we are, and also offers us the chance to change.

I like to explore insects that I find lying around dead, using my microscopes.

Insects have fascinating structures. Here is a series of scanning electron microscope photos of a bee head, zoomed in to see the ball joint that lets the bee control the position of its antenna.

Note the varying length of the hairs. Those that would cause interference otherwise are shorter!

This last image was obtained at 500x original magnification. Note the 100 micron scale in the upper right. That is 0.1 mm.

When you are looking at something at even 50x, there’s a lot to see! You have to learn to see what’s interesting.

Daily Prompt: Explore