North Shore Naturalist

We made our way to Tettagouche Lake to go ice fishing with Kurt Mead today. The lake was pretty slick with ice and essentially no snow, it was a lot of fun to skate around in our boots. On this sunny day, you could really hear the ice shifting from the temperature differential, especially with no snow to cushion the noise, it was pretty cool but also somewhat alarming at times.  Overall, we caught quite a few fish - I believe 9 was the total number, all northerns. Some of the northerns were slightly infected with black spot disease (Neascus sp.), a flatworm which is a rather benign parasite. Like many parasites it has quite a complex, interesting life cycle. Eggs enter aquatic ecosystems in bird poop. When the eggs hatch they infect snails, then as they begin to mature they find their fish hosts (affecting all species of fish in MN to my knowledge). Finally, when a bird eats an infected fish the parasites mature and begin the cycle all over again. It's amazing how evolution selecte...

The most enigmatic trees in MN can be found along the rocky shoreline of Lake Superior. Here these trees eek out a living with little soil to retain moisture and nutrients. They must hold strong against the strong winds and battering waves that crash along the shoreline. In the winter, this water freezes and as it thaws and refreezes these shifts can cause great damage, scouring trunks and snapping off weak branches. The rocks experience extreme temperature swings, growing hot in the day and cooling quickly at night. Few plants can tolerate the extremes of the LKu43 ecosystem of rocky coastline along Lake Superior. Many of these plants are highly adapted to these conditions, often growing very slowly and never growing very large, a way of coping with the high disturbance and lack of resources. Only the hardiest of trees can survive, things like white spruce and white cedar. They may survive, but they do not go unscathed. These trees develop a growth pattern known as Krummholz which is...

It's amazing how many Diplolepis are on the prickly wild roses (Rosa acicularis sayi) at the Knife River Marina. I stopped there and did a little exploring and watched the sunset before heading back home. This was by far the most D. radicum galls I've ever seen in one location. These galls are formed on the stolons, which are usually underground, but I've seen them on sandy beaches and highly eroded hillsides above the soil line. I'd guess that this species is actually quite common, you just never normally see it because it's out of site and who's going to go around digging up roses to find it, not me! It was cool to see so many, from small ones that must of had only one or two chambers, to large ones with many, many larva. Since the adult wasps must crawl through the soil to mate, I'm guessing they really prefer loose, sandy soil like that found here. Based on that assumption, it seems fair to say that they should be abundant in sandy prairies further west ...

One of the reason I am so fascinated with lichens is their extreme diversity. Lichens are diverse in their colors: red, yellow, orange, black, gray, green, brown, blue... Lichens are diverse in their form; crustose, foliose, and fruticose are the big three, but there is also leprose, squamulose, calicioid, placodoid, gelatinous, filamentous, cladoniform... Lichens are diverse in the substrates they grow on: rock, soil, bark, wood, lichens, fungi, resins, concrete, metal signs... Lichens are diverse in their ecosystem services: moisture retention, nitrogen fixation, medicinal uses, dyeing, weathering rocks, food source...  I could probably come up with a hundred lists showcasing the diversity of lichens. Today, my observations forced me to reflect on their phylogenetic diversity. The fungal-algae symbiotic relationship that we know as a lichen has independently evolved on multiple occasions. On the fungus side, it has developed in two of the main phyla, the Ascomycota and Basidiomyc...

Over the weekend we had a crew make our way over to the bog for a field trip. Leah, Logan, Leaf, and I woke up earlier than the rest and made a detour on the way to try and see some great grays. Leaf and I feel asleep almost immediately, and the others didn't see any owls. Once we got to the bog we hit up some of the bird feeders and saw lots of species, Canada jays and an American martin were the highlights for me. Later in the morning we met up with the rest of the crew and Clinton gave us an overview of FOSZB as an organization and what they do. He brought us on a tour along the boardwalk behind the welcome center; we mostly focused on sphagnum mosses and some of the others learned about how to identify some of the common bog specialists like tamarack, black ash, leather leaf, and bog Labrador tea. We went to a couple boardwalks and ended the day looking for some great grays. Still no luck, but we did see a northern hawk owl.  Clinton showing us some Sphagnum moss species While...

 I started my morning by heading into Two Harbors to get some groceries. Of course I made plenty of stops on the way there and back to get out and explore. Like usual these days, I found myself really focusing in on the lichens; it's hard not to when you go walking along the shore for any amount of time. All the stops along the shore between Finland and Two Harbors look pretty similar, dominated by nonvascular plants and lichens, with scatterings of vascular plants, and the odd shrub/tree here and there. They all have the same usual cast of characters: three toothed and shrubby cinquefoil, white and hairy goldenrod, harebell, and tufted bulrush among others dominate the vascular plants; there are a few moss species that I don't know enough about to ID; elegant sunburst lichen, rock posy, and gray reindeer lichen are some of the common lichens; rhyolite and basalt dominate the geology; the climatic effect of Lake Superior has a big impact. All in all very similar. But, if you pa...