The adaptations for survival in an extreme environment can offer an opportunity for innovative design by organisms. Look at the remains of this sea star, its body bleached white in the Baja California sun. Examine it closer yet, the protective spiny covering of skin has failed this specimen. Exposed now are the intricacies of internal articulation, keeping the skeletal remains intact. The finer points of tube feet have been lost to churning surf, the complex pattern of a pebbled surface is all that remains to be admired.
We walked amongst a framework of trees and shrubs which seemed to be skeletons themselves. A scaffold on which to build a plant. The leaf-less shapes reached skyward, patiently waiting for rain. With those rains the bare bones of trees will be festooned with leaves and shortly after, perhaps flowers. But today they wait, enduring and naked.
Survival in this environment cannot be accomplished alone easily. Slim green stalks of milkweed grew in the sandy arroyo. From these stalks dangled clusters of creamy pink flowers. Landing on these flowers were iridescent blue-black tarantula hawks, a wasp with fiery orange wings nearly as long as its body and an audible buzz loud enough to make you look twice and duck. The wasps as adults are nectar feeders, and a key pollinator for the milkweed. The seed pods developing thereafter burst open when ripe and an explosion of fluffy white parachutes float gently downwind. Each parachute carrying a single seed away from the parent plant.
When the wasp is ready to reproduce, she will seek out a tarantula, or at least a sizeable spider. Her goal is to paralyze the spider, stuff it in a burrow, lay a single egg on it and leave with the satisfied mind that the developing larvae will have sufficient resources to develop as it consumes the tarantula and ultimately emerge from the burrow as an adult.
From krill we grow blue whales, from milkweeds we grow wasps, from rains come flowers and nectar which nurtures hummingbirds and carpenter bees. The creativity and resources used for survival are as diverse as the inhabitants of the desert and the sea themselves.
We walked amongst a framework of trees and shrubs which seemed to be skeletons themselves. A scaffold on which to build a plant. The leaf-less shapes reached skyward, patiently waiting for rain. With those rains the bare bones of trees will be festooned with leaves and shortly after, perhaps flowers. But today they wait, enduring and naked.
Survival in this environment cannot be accomplished alone easily. Slim green stalks of milkweed grew in the sandy arroyo. From these stalks dangled clusters of creamy pink flowers. Landing on these flowers were iridescent blue-black tarantula hawks, a wasp with fiery orange wings nearly as long as its body and an audible buzz loud enough to make you look twice and duck. The wasps as adults are nectar feeders, and a key pollinator for the milkweed. The seed pods developing thereafter burst open when ripe and an explosion of fluffy white parachutes float gently downwind. Each parachute carrying a single seed away from the parent plant.
When the wasp is ready to reproduce, she will seek out a tarantula, or at least a sizeable spider. Her goal is to paralyze the spider, stuff it in a burrow, lay a single egg on it and leave with the satisfied mind that the developing larvae will have sufficient resources to develop as it consumes the tarantula and ultimately emerge from the burrow as an adult.
From krill we grow blue whales, from milkweeds we grow wasps, from rains come flowers and nectar which nurtures hummingbirds and carpenter bees. The creativity and resources used for survival are as diverse as the inhabitants of the desert and the sea themselves.
