Carnivorous Plants

Last week, Gemma asked why some living things have mouths and some don't, which led to a discussion about meat-eating plants, which led to us watching multiple YouTube videos of Venus flytraps eating insects (and one of a Venus flytrap eating a pancake)...

...which led to my best friend and her husband surprising Gemma with three carnivorous birthday presents: two Venus flytraps and one octopus plant.

Yesterday, she sat on the ground with a pair of tweezers, catching ants to feed to her new "pets."

Nature Walk

Pink Melaleucas, also known as Western Tea Myrtles, grow in our "backyard" - Palisades Park, the bluffs overlooking the Santa Monica Beach, less than a mile from our house. Some day, long after Gemma has explored these eucalypts with her hands and feet, we will paint the trees' twisted horizontal branches in nature journals.

Impatiens

We got the idea to germinate these impatiens seeds a month and a half ago, after our first Classical Conversations meeting. The science lesson was about seeds. So, we germinated impatiens seeds in a ziploc baggie with wet cotton balls. They took about 5 weeks to sprout.

This is an impatiens in a pot on our patio. I'm not sure what species. I scattered a mix of wildflower seeds a couple of years ago, and the impatiens keep coming back because they reseed themselves.

A flower's job is to make seeds, which my daughter learned from Ruth Heller's book The Reason for A Flower.

Impatiens make seed pods that pop open when you touch them, and for this reason, they are nicknamed Touch-Me-Nots.

POP!

Nature Study: Bees

Earlier this month at the Fresno Fair, I got a lesson from a beekeeper (not the one pictured above) at the bee booth in the agriculture building. Bees are fascinating.

If you're a Charlotte Mason homeschooler, you've probably read the bee section of Anna Botsford Comstock's A Handbook of Nature Study, but I'm telling you, Comstock does not do the bee justice.

Each hive has one queen bee. (Below is my daughter looking at the queen. She had a white dot on her, and she was surrounded by worker bees, grooming her.)

The queen is the only fertile female in the hive.

All of the worker bees are female, but they're sterile. The females are the ones that gather nectar and pollen, and females born in summer have a much shorter life span than females born in winter. In winter, fewer plants flower, but in summer, there is an abundance of pollen, so the females work themselves to death, dying with tattered wings.

Male bees are drones, and their job is mating with the queen. Bees mate when it's over 70 degrees Fahrenheit, so in winter, males are useless to a hive. They physically can't do anything but procreate. They don't have a proboscis suitable for gathering nectar and they don't have a stinger to defend the colony. Instead of letting them hang around, eating up all of the hive's resources, females pull them out of the hive and pull their little bee belongings out after them.

(Male bees die after mating. Click here to find out why. Ouch.)

This is what a beehive looks like in nature:

We had just finished reading A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, so I, of course, thought of Pooh trying to get honey by pretending to be a little black rain cloud. 

This hive was was huge. The beekeeper said it was home to approximately 75,000 bees and contained between 50 and 70 lbs of honey! (A hive will have tens of thousands of workers, but only hundreds of drones.)

My daughter feeling beeswax for the first time

As you can see in the poster above, a queen goes from egg to adult faster than workers and drones.

I was really curious as to why a bee becomes a queen bee, instead of just a worker, or a male. The beekeeper explained that the worker bees feed her differently. 

A queen is not fed honey or pollen (she's fed royal jelly) --> she doesn't get phenolic acids --> certain genes are activated  --> the activated genes make the proteins that build the rest of the queen bee body. 

Worker bees do get honey and pollen, and as a result, do get phenolic acids. So, even though workers and queens have identical genetic material, workers become workers and queens become queens.

(For a great article from Wired about what queen bees eat, click here, and for more information on the life cycle of the honeybee, click here. For some general information about bees from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - for beekeeping in Africa - click here.)

It's also extremely interesting to me that the queen lays the egg of the queen who will possibly kill her to replace her.

Queen bee cells are much larger than the cells of workers and drones.

Nature Study at Temescal Gateway Park

My daughter volunteered to carry the coyote pelt around for people in last night's Temescal Campfire audience to pet.

The topic of last night's campfire was Diversity. The lesson was about how the area where we live is home to a lot of different animals including mountain lions, coyotes, opossums, raccoons, and skunks.

The campfire leader told a story about a mountain lion named P-22, and whenever he said the words mountain lion, coyote, or skunk, we had to make animal noises. Then he told us what to do if we ever saw a mountain lion (face the mountain lion and back away slowly, making yourself look as big as possible); I don't ever want to have to try that out. Some of the children, like my daughter, got to carry pelts around the audience, and then we played animal charades. It was all very fun.

After the lesson, the leader led everyone in singing silly songs like Boom Chicka Boom, and we roasted marshmallows for s'mores.

Some of my friends and our kids ventured off in the dark to "look for Batman's cave," and wound up hiking around for half an hour on a narrow and sometimes treacherous trail. Though we didn't find Batman, we did find the parking lot, so we considered it a success. A good time was had by all. :)

Nature Study at the Sea: A Worm Shell

Have you ever found one of these at the beach?

I found this one a few weeks ago. It's the shell of vermitidae, or worm snails.

They grow in colonies, fused together. I think the colors are beautiful, the palest purples, pinks, greens, and yellows.

Nature Study: Campfire at Temescal Canyon

Mmmm, s'mores.

Tonight we went to Temescal Gateway Park for their Thursday night campfire.

Here's how it works:

• Campfire starts at 7:00 pm, so get there at 6:30 pm to picnic.
• Park on the street for free, or park in the park for $7.
• Bring a picnic dinner and beverages, a blanket, sweaters, graham crackers, and a king-size Hershey's chocolate bar. (Marshmallows & marshmallow-roasting-forks are provided.) (Some people even brought hot dogs for roasting.)
• A naturalist will do a lesson. (Tonight's lesson was on water; this summer, there have been lessons on predators/prey, ground squirrels, etc.)
• Silly campfire songs are sung.
• The marshmallow-roasting forks come out. Everyone lines up and gets a fork and a couple of marshmallows and circles up around the fire. (You can bring your own sticks and marshmallows and skip the line, but the line moves so fast so it's not necessary.)

Campfire lasts about an hour. After, you can go down and listen to the frogs, and look for bats. Don't forget that you can use your phone as a flashlight. ;)

Playing Henry the Heron in the campfire skit about the water cycle

Sing along time

Yum.

Nature Study at the Sea: Chiton

This is another creature we saw on our trip to Leo Carrillo Beach a couple of days ago. It's called a chiton (ki-tun).

Some facts about chitons:

• A chiton is a mollusk, meaning it has a soft body and no backbone, and (usually) lives in a shell.
• A chiton has a dorsal shell made up of 8 separate shell plates. (Count them!)
• A chiton also has a "girdle" (tissue) that encircles the dorsal shell and holds it together.
• When a chiton dies, the eight shell plates come apart, because there is no longer any tissue holding them together.
• This chiton's girdle is ornamented. (See all of the furry-looking things around the shell?) Scientists think that the chiton's girdle ornament is for defense or camouflage.
• They can curl up in a ball (like a roly-poly!).
• Chitons do not have heads.
• Chitons make magnetite. They are the only mollusks that do. Their teeth are coated in magnetite, making them harder than stainless steel.

Nature Study at the Sea: Sea Hare

This is a sea creature I saw at Leo Carrillo Beach yesterday. 

When we visited Abalone Cove, I mistakenly captioned a picture I took as being that of a sea slug. Well, yesterday, after watching the creature pictured below open and close its parapodial flaps, I noticed something lighter in color inside it. I put my finger between the flaps and felt something hard. Because I thought it was a sea slug, an animal that doesn't have a shell, I was surprised and confused. I had to know why it was opening its flaps and what the shell was.

I discovered that the animal I thought was a slug was actually a sea hare, named for the its hare-like "ears." The sea hare does have a shell inside, to protect its heart and gills. It has an input siphon and an output siphon for its gills, and I'm pretty sure now that the opening and closing of the parapodial flaps had to do with the sea hare breathing.

The sea hare is hermaphroditic, and it has a very bizarre way of mating. Here is a link to a National Geographic video explaining how the sea hare reproduces.

Field Trip: Natural History Museum

I took this photo yesterday at the Natural History Museum's butterfly pavilion.

Yesterday we visited the Natural History Museum with some friends.

Here is a photo collage of the pictures my daughter took in the Edible Garden...

(clockwise from top left) kale, strawberry, squash, gourds

In the garden, there were freshly picked apples and peaches for the taking. Yum.

I love this chalkboard outside of the butterfly pavilion! Isn't it beautiful?

The guide

Here are some of the butterflies that were flitting around us. :)

I'm pretty sure that these are (from left to right) a Cabbage White, a Malachite, an Atala Hairstreak, another Malachite, and a mystery butterfly that isn't on the guide.

In the butterfly pavilion gift shop, I let my daughter buy salt & vinegar flavored crickets.

She licked one, and then fed me a couple. They taste like sunflower seeds. They're not bad, but I don't think I'll be developing an addiction to this snack.

We also visited the Nature Lab. I like this exhibit because it shows all of the animals that live in Los Angeles. Being a city dweller, I sometimes think that the only animals we have are the well-dressed lapdogs people push around in dog strollers. 

A katydid. I wonder what it tastes like... ;)

Hang on kids!

Why can't we have nice little animals for nature study, instead of bedbugs, cockroaches, and opossums?!

We finished up our tour in the bird exhibit. Here is our group getting a lesson from Professor Pelican.

Also, I ran into Jane Pisano, the NHM's president. She was coming out of Age of Mammals, which had been closed off because they were filming something. She's been president for over 13 years, and in that time, has transformed the museum (the gardens, the Nature Lab, Dinosaur Hall, etc.) and doubled its membership. It was a bit like running into a rock star. She was very nice, and bent down to ask my daughter about her favorite part of the museum. My daughter said, "I like everything here, but -" And then she told Ms. Pisano that she didn't like that Age of Mammals was closed because she wanted to use one of the interactive displays in that exhibit. Fortunately, the film crew had just finished up, and Age of Mammals was reopened.

Field Trip: Wildlife Learning Center

The Wildlife Learning Center, an animal sanctuary, is in Sylmar, California, about 45 minutes from us.

 

My dear friend Anita gave my daughter this experience as her birthday present. It was a super-secret-surprise-adventure!

 The WLC's office is home to Zeus the screech owl. (Can you see him up there behind the WLC staff member?) Zeus is blind, and he has a condition that makes his eyes look like a starry night sky.

Just outside the office is a sensory table...

Some of the things people can touch: casts of animal tracks, snakeskin, and fox fur.

There is a bobcat, two lynxes, and some servals. A serval is an African cat, and if you google serval, you will find websites selling them as pets! I'm pretty sure that's how these servals ended up at the WLC. Servals live on the savanna and are nocturnal hunters; they can grow up to 26 inches tall (shoulder height) and weigh up to 40 pounds.

 Porcupines have such sweet faces.

Have you ever been this close to a bald eagle?! We got to see the larger one fly from where it was perched at the back of the enclosure, to the branch it is perched on in this picture!

This is a fennec fox, an African animal from the Sahara. Again, if you google fennec fox, you will find sites like this about keeping fennecs as pets. Fortunately, that site does not make owning a fennec sound like a good idea. It explains how they are much more work than a dog, high energy, loud at night, and are never fully litterbox trained. But they sure are cute.

 This alligator (the real one, the one in the cage) was kept as a pet in a bathtub.

 They also have tortoises...

 

 ...and squirrel monkeys.

(My mom did have a squirrel monkey as a pet when she was little. She ordered it from the back of a comic book for $19.95! And she can attest that these are not good pets.)

 This picture speaks for itself.

 How many walking sticks can you find in this picture?

 I love this picture! It's the underside of a red-toed tree frog! Look at those toes!

Here is the top-side of the tree frog.

 This is Irwin the alligator.

 Did you know porcupines could climb a chain link fence?

 That is a sloth, hanging upside down, his favorite position.

The WLC has reptile shows every hour. This is a legless lizard. Did you know that lizards can blink, but snakes can't? Or that lizards have ear holes, but snakes don't? This legless lizard is Lester. A legless lizard can regrow its tail one time. If he loses his tail a second time, he has to live without it.

I highly recommend visiting the WLC! I look forward to returning for an "animal experience."