St. Thomas Shuffle

I took pictures of the family (hubs, me, Floyd) on a walk the other night. I was inspired by so many other bloggers' safaris and walking tour pictures that I figured I would give it a go. So come join us for a sunset... island style!

A cruise ship leaving the harbor was the inspiration for the walk together WITH camera. This was the beginning of the sunset from my porch.

Floyd was anxious by the door. We have to have a leash for her because SO MANY PEOPLE are afraid of dogs here. It's okay, it adds to her street cred.

This is an unidentified, side of the road, weed. I haven't looked it up yet. Soon. I promise...
Pretty though!

The sky lit fire and you could see Culebra and Vieques. After so much rain recently, I was surprised to see some neighboring islands!

I hope you have enjoyed a sunset with me.


The first for picts are by me. You can use them, just give me credit somewhere. The last one is copyright my husband, N. Zambrano, under creative commons also.

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Sexless Insects

Since most of you may not know, I work at The Butterfly Farm. This is a 10,000 sq. ft. enclosed tropical garden PARADISE for many species of neo-tropical butterflies. The location in St. Thomas is just over a year old but we have already had a great impact on the community and have helped to start local butterfly breeding programs at various schools and educate people on backyard butterfly gardening. This will explain why I am such an avid reader of Q's Corner, Bug Girl's Blog, and My Wildlife Sanctuary. You three give me hope for butterflies the world over... and your pictures, oh my!

So since so many of you love butterflies so much, I am going to give you a very brief rundown on our caterpillar friends and why they are important even though many think they are a nuisance.... Bug Girl, you are the expert so feel free to correct me.

Parthenos sylvia, Common: Sylvia or Clipper


I have no caterpillar pictures today, as I am horrid at taking them, but I am posting some of my friends from the farm.



Caterpillar Facts:

First off, we sciencey types refer to them in this stage as "larva." I always tell people it is because caterpillar has too many letters to type!

1. Caterpillars (on average, mind you) have eight pairs of fleshy appendages that most consider legs. Really only the first 3 pairs are legs. We are trying to convince ourselves that they are insects and insects have 6 legs, like butterflies do. The other legs are "prolegs."
   
2. Caterpillars have 6 pairs of very pathetically weak eyes (ocelli) right around their mouth so all they can see is the food in front of them. This is good since they are voracious eaters. Compare this to the butterfly again and notice butterflies have 2 very complex compound eyes on either side of their head.
3. Since all they do is eat for 2 weeks, they are sexless (hence the title of this post). No need for males and females if you aren't mating!
   
4. Caterpillars can consume 20 times their weight in food a day. That is approximately half a ton for an average 7 year old.
   
5. Since they eat so much, they also "poop" a lot. We call this frass. Frass is good for your garden! It's free fertilizer. Believe you me, any of you with monarchs around know, monarchs make A LOT of frass.
   
6. Caterpillars grow approximately 2,700 times their original size in their average lifespan of 2 weeks. If we had a newborn eight pound baby that ate as much as a caterpillar, that baby would be over 20,000 pounds at the end of 2 weeks. That is 10 tons of baby fat!
   
7. MOST IMPORTANT THING TO KNOW!!!!! Caterpillars all turn into butterflies or moths. I know this seems obvious, but it bugs me (no pun intended) when people come in and tell me they hate caterpillars and kill them all the time but then the next breath mention how they don't see as many butterflies as they used to.... gee, really?!?!
   

The fact is, caterpillars will destroy certain plants, to an extent. We know what these plants are, so do yourself a favor and plant an area that is butterfly friendly... sacrificial plants, if you will. I don't mean a butterfly bush here guys. I mean host plants. You find a caterpillar on your dill, you move it to the dill in the butterfly safe zone. They can't hurt you and they will stay there since there is food. This will lead to more butterflies in your area because you will not only have flowers for them to get their alcohol (more on that later), but host plants to lay their eggs on. This, in turn helps to pollinate your garden and others the world over, increasing the overall genetic diversity of plants, making them stronger.

Butterflies are super-pollinators. Without them, we would starve to death.



















Idea leuconoe, A rare butterfly in the wild, breeds well in captivity
Common: Paper Kite, Tree Nymph, Rice Paper Butterfly







P. sylvia and I. leuconoe by M. Moya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Transgendered Dog

I know this is a strange title for a post, but it is not without reason. Today's topic is my dear doggy, Floyd. I realized that 1) I will never think my footage on my dog is good enough for a video (she deserves better!); and 2) you haven't been formally introduced to my "child." So all my readers (all 3 of you), meet Floyd (Canis familiaris). Floyd was an "acquired" dog. Her previous owners did not like her. How could you not like this cute thing?!?!





They didn't even know she was a "she" and named her Floyd. When I (took) got her, I went straight to the vet and everything she could possibly have wrong, she did. Heartworms (Dirofilaria immitis) so bad, she had to get TWO treatments, UTI, severely underweight, and she was afraid of barking or jumping (things I consider normal dog behavior) to boot. The last thing I needed to do was change her name too! She is my Floyd and it suits her.



She's an adventurous sort, like her parents/owners, and goes to all the weird hikes and locations with me. I can't wait to bring her on vacation with me to Utah. I think she would love it.



She is a special breed of dog, known in North America as "mutt" and here on island as "coconut retriever."

She is a bit confused in that she seems to really be a bit of a lesbian and will "mount" other female dogs at the beach. It's quite funny. She doesn't like most men either... though with her previous owner, I don't blame her.



She didn't make a sound the first two weeks we had her and the first time I heard her bark, I thought a bigger dog was trying to eat her. She has a FEROCIOUS bark for a mid size dog. It's cute. It only comes out rarely and when it does, she means business.

Also like me, she is insatiably curios and loves to nap on rainy days. Oh, and she steals fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. I know chocolate is bad for dogs, but try telling her that. The puppy dog face she makes when I scold her for it... sheesh!

Well I hope you have all enjoyed meeting "Pobresita" Floyd (what my husband calls her).

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Debate! Open Access for the Public

Now surely, just because of my cerebral flatulence (science jargon for "brain fart") over the weekend didn't mean I wasn't going to get under your skin again. When I have a discussion with someone that is science based, I write it down as a topic for later debates. These are already picking up more steam so now on to this weeks topic.

Reading my blogroll is like stepping into the mind of a bipolar (what do you know, I AM!), since all the blogs are all over the place. One of my faves, however, is A Blog Around the Clock. I'm not sure what it is (the fact that I am a super dork?), but I am addicted to it and love to read up on his stance on open access. Now for those of you who are wondering whether or not this affects you in any way, just know that already lots of our tax dollars have been spent discussion legislation pertaining to this.

What is OA?

Well, quoting a segment from the PLoS website:

The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship,^[2] as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use....

This continues, but pretty much means that everyone has access to the publication. In science this is important. For a long time, if you wanted to read up on science news or get background information for research, you had to hope that the media got it right, have a subscription to a few journals ( there are thousands though, so you are missing out), or be lucky enough to work at an institute/organization that gives you access to journals online and has a few (hundred) bound copies. Before legislation was passed to make NIH funded research available to the public after a year, no one really knew what was going on in the world of research and development.

This sounds great for some, but for scientists and certain publishing houses, this is a topic of much contention. In fact, OA was in recent legislation again! So I guess the question up for discussion this week is...do you think research should be made available to the public for free or is this going to destroy tiny publishing houses and let the big ones float? How will this affect genetics testing and privacy of subjects? How do you feel about open access?

You can find out more here, here, here, and here.

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SCORE!

I went in to my university library today to renew a book that I found called "The World's Famous Orations." It is actually part of a volume of, yes you guessed, the worlds best speeches. The books were published in 1906 and are in good shape for being over 100 years old. I am a sucker for old books. While I was talking to the librarian about my passion for antique books, she mentioned that many of the university's books were being discarded due to age. Well, lo and behold, what is this tattered, taped together, gold leafed edged book I see? Why, it's "The Origin of the Species" printed in 1927! It's abused but lovely. I am typing this from the library now or I would already have the picture up! The best part was the cost: FREE.

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Suckling Pig...

Well, I am still here. I know it has been a few (not that many, I think) days since I posted anything, it has just been weird around here and I just have been coming home from school and work with my brain fried. Really. Like an egg. Because of my lack of ability to think of anything at the moment, I leave you with this... A pig nursing three tiger cubs: a new way of interpreting "suckling pig." So cute.

I will post something... don't worry. I write down all my post ideas, sometimes they just don't come out right!

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Reggae Riddims

Click to Play

Heard an interesting song today. Special audio only post because I love you guys so much and I don't want to torture you with bad videos today. Intro/outro music is King Tubby and Harry Mudie, Jungle Dub Walk. Here is a link to the radio station I mention, WSTX. Enjoy!

You can find King Tubby music here.

You can find Cocoa Tea music here.

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Some Photography

At the gentle nudging of SeaLaura, I am posting some pictures to submit to the weekly "Thematic Photographic" over at Written, Inc.'s blog. This weeks theme is nature so I am pulling out some of my faves...

First up is a lake in the Tetons on the Wyoming side... I can't get over this view. The clouds were amazing that day and really is one of my favorite pictures of that location. This was over 3 years ago.

Next is some of my favorite reef in Lerkenlund. This was an amazing bait fish experience. They were all making highways around this coral head. Blew me away. I know SeaLaura wanted me to post an iguana pict for this, but I have a few more that I want to share with you guys later! I hope you have enjoyed my asides today.



Thematic Photographic: Nature by Marizela Moya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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Debate! Physician Conscience Act

I can't believe I didn't realize yesterday was Wednesday... well, a day late, but I am still going to rile your tail feathers. That is what Debate! is all about.

This weeks topic is about the Physicians Conscience Act. Now while it may sound all nice and dandy this could have possible repercussions on health care in America.

Here's the basic rundown: This act would allow anyone in the health care profession to use their own discretion and/or belief system to determine how they want to treat you. I found out this was STILL an issue (this came up years ago) on Bug Girl's Blog.

Now while this sounds sweet and respectful, it pretty much means that I could get refused to get written a prescription to birth control because the doctor is Catholic or a pharmacist could deny me my lithium because he doesn't believe in psychiatry. Now a lot of people on the more... erm... "religious" side of the debate state that this means we can't force doctors to perform abortions. Okay, great, that is one plus...I guess. I don't agree with this either, but hey. I am not here to pass judgment, I just like intellectually stimulating arguments and love to flex my debating muscles.

Read up on it. What do you think? Is it okay for a doctor to deny you treatment because he feels it is morally wrong? Do you think this will lead to doctors not treating people because they are Wicca, or whatever and that, to them, is also morally wrong? Where does this stop?

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Iguana Drive You Crazy!

Since I don't even want to think of my stupid exam today, but I do need to teach (yes need... it's a compulsion) something, we are gonna talk about the pretty little guy (or girl?) that was in my post last time, the green iguana.

Like I previously mentioned, the scientific name is Iguana iguana and these guys are super common in the Caribbean and Central and South America. I am also pleased to announce that this guy holds the current record for being the largest lizard in the US.


Eating Habits:

Now I know these guys are really prehistoric looking and have GIANT CLAWS... but they won't bite you or eat bugs or any other protein (unless you feed it to them). They are herbivorous... you know, made to eat vegetation. They love bananas, old mangoes, and hibiscus flowers. This guy here is going after my papayas (right).

Habitat:

They love hanging out in high branches and soak up some sun. They are exothermic, meaning they can't regulate their own body heat like us so they love to bask. I don't blame them... the sun here is perfect for basking in!

Now this is all the information I am gonna give you because when I get enough footage for my iguana video, I do not want you to be bored! HAHA! That is what you call a free sample! I think I may be a bit manic today....


Iguana Make You Crazy! by Marizela Moya is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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grumblings about class

I don't even feel like being grammatically correct or anything... so excuse the following post as a scientist-in-progress moment of venting furiously while pounding on her keyboard. Phew! I have a few qualms about a certain professor and their knack for disclosing faculty information to us, the students. One, we don't care who you do and don't get along with. I will find that out at the bar with my other professor friends, not in class. Different setting. I paid for lecture here! Two, don't tell us on Monday that we have an exam in lab on Wednesday. What? We haven't even technically had lab and I don't remember learning anything and we have a test WEDNESDAY?!?!?! I am so grumbly right now. It would not bother me so much if we had a syllabus! We don't even know what this professor's email is! Somehow, however, the other professors NOT giving them a copy of their syllabi for this class is a race issue. I don't get this. Said professor cannot POSSIBLY accuse the professors here of being racist. I go to a HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY! We are ALL minorities. The professors know this and teach here... in the Caribbean. They are NOT racist. The racist ones don't last a semester. Most of our professors have been here for 10 plus years! Why? Because they love the Caribbean and love teaching here! OMG! I wanted to strangle them. Thank goodness I can vent into cyberspace. Notice how I leave out what class it is this professor teaches and gender. I am hoping they are not one of the people in the VI who reads this thing. If this professor is, maybe they wil see the humor in it. Maybe they won't realize it's them.

To make me feel better, I am enclosing a happy iguana picture. The iguana (Iguana iguana, yes that IS the scientific name) is wild in St. Thomas and throughout the Caribbean. We don't keep them as pets here, but there are tons everywhere and they are so much fun! I mean look at this guy... he knows how to live in the tropics.

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Physics Phor Phun: One Dimensional Motion

I have a test on Friday and I figured the best way to review is to teach. If I can teach you anything in the next few minutes without totally losing you as a reader, I must know my stuff. Wish us both luck and let's get started.

Introduction to Physics and One Dimensional Motion

First things first. Physics is the understanding of the physical world and an attempt to explain the visible world. Pretty much everything has physics based reasoning behind it. Keep in mind, however, like all true sciences, it is a continuous work in progress. The whole point of science is to test and retest and DISPROVE theories. Yes. It's true. We are trying to DISPROVE things. All the time. Weird, I know.

Physics really has always been studied without meaning to be but leaps and bounds were made when our friend Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) started dropping things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show the constant acceleration of gravity.

By the way, constant acceleration of gravity means that everything falls to earth at the exact speed. It's true. The only thing that slows an object down is friction with the atmosphere. If you ball up a feather so you reduce the friction, it will fall at the same speed as a lead pellet the same size. In case you were wondering what this acceleration actually is... it is 9.8 meters per second per second. That means every second, the object falling picks up speed at at rate of almost 10 meters per second more than the previous second. Phew! Just leave me questions if you have any.

Back to Galileo... this really taught us a lot about one dimensional motion (you know, just forwards and backwards in a straight line). Now, to understand one dimensional motion, there are a few "terms to know."

Frame of reference- a starting point. If I look at the problem starting from the ground, but you see the problem starting from the rooftop, our approaches will be very different because our reference frame is different.

Distance- how far you (or an object) travels in a given amount of time.

Displacement- how far from your original starting point you are. This is not the same as distance traveled. If you leave the house in the morning, go to work, and come home, you may travel 40 miles, but your displacement is zero.

Average speed- total distance/total time. It is division so if you traveled a total of 40 miles in 2 hours, you have an average speed of 20 miles(distance) per (/) hour (time). I know I am anti- English system, but I am keeping it in these units to not confuse my American readership! It works the same in SI.

I think that is enough for today. If you wanna get into physics on an easy scale, there are tons of books you can buy that will help you on your quest to becoming an everyday scientist!

The image is a painting of Galileo Galilei facing the Roman inquisition. The artist is Christiano Banti. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Large Hadron Collider Funnies

The Large Hadron Collider has been in the news a bit recently. A lot of people have said some crazy things like, "we are going to create a black hole and the earth will end." Okay, these people know nothing about science. Good thing us science types have silly senses of humor.

First things first... What is the LHC?

It is a 16.5 mile (27 km) underground ring (100 meters underground) below the Swiss/French border. It's purpose is to fling particles at each other and make them collide. Hopefully this will give us some insight to the milliseconds after the big bang. It is pretty much the NASCAR of the physicists community. If you wanna know who is involved (111 nations), click here.

I think this will give you the best summation of what this all entails...



NOW THAT IS FUNNY!

...and if you want to know if the LHC will bring the end of the world, go to Has the LHC Destroyed the Earth? website.

I love science humor!

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Endangered Species Act Update

The National Wildlife Federation posted a video on their blog about the Endangered Species Act and why it is so important. You may remember I did a previous post as a call to action for everyone. Well, in case you missed it the first time.... Go. Write. Letters. Now. This is dreadfully important in so many way and the video does a better job of describing what I tried to... I am not good at putting things in easy to understand terms. I'm working on it. In the meantime, make sure we keep our protected lands protected. Thanks.

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Debate! Creationism in Classrooms

Do you believe that creationism should be taught in school science classes? Do you think evolution should be taught in classes? Is there a compromise that can be reached?

I, personally, have my own way of looking at things and teaching things. What most people think of as evolution is quite wrong. Darwin never said we came from monkeys. He just stated that we all came from a similar prehistoric ancestor. Knowing what I know about how caterpillars break down and butterflies rebuild themselves a la primordial soup just, in my mind, verifies that. Does that mean creationism isn't real? No. Creationism isn't really something you can prove or disprove. It just means evolution is real and can be proven. Science is about proving things not just believing in them. It is about working with tangible data and information and replicating results. I believe in various things but science is not where I talk about those... They are separate to me.

What do you think and why?

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Some Storm!

A very scary set of clouds moved in. This worries me because my husband is out on the water spearfishing right now. I haven't heard from him.

The clouds are very beautiful but ominous. I love the way they turn the light silver.

SOOOO to distract myself from the scary thought of my husband in a scary storm in the middle of the ocean, we are going to talk about weather!

What is a hurricane?

It is an ENORMOUS storm that can reach sizes of 600 miles in diameter with wind speeds between 75 and 200 miles per hour. They move in a counter-clockwise direction around a calm "eye" The spin is caused by Earth's rotation and the Coriolis Effect. They need water temperatures of 80 degrees Fahrenheit or more to intensify.

What was the strongest to hit land in recent history?

The top three are Camille, Andrew and Dean in that order. I lived in Miami for Andrew and I must say, it was intense. Maybe that is why I have no fear of hurricanes anymore. I am just always ready!


That is all I can handle. I am going to watch my video and make myself laugh.

All photos protected under Creative Commons. You can use them, just give me credit ok?

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Western Adventure: Part 2

Click to Play

This is the second part of my western adventure. This episode teaches us about screes, random animals you can see out west, and gives information on the Absaroka-Bearthooth Wilderness Area. I hope you enjoy our little western journey. Keep checking in for more!

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An Up and Coming Wildlife Host

... and no it's not me. This is what I get for not having a TV. I found him surfing the web today... Apparently there is this syrupy sweet boy who does his own wildlife minis also and they are really good. If I had a television perhaps I would have caught his appearances on various shows. His name is Enzo and his show rocks. His show is ENZOology and is quite popular apparently. I was blown away. It makes my videos seem pointless... *le sigh* What he is doing is amazing though. I really wish more children viewed the outdoors and sciences this way. You should go to his website. It really is awsome. Yay, Enzo!

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So gloomy...

Since it is so gloomy out and has been for the past week and a half (thanks to Gustav, Hanna, and Ike tail bands) I needed to remind myself how beautiful and sunny it can be here. These were from a recent trip I took to Virgin Gorda, a nearby island.

I think this palm tree sums up my life in the Caribbean nicely.



This is me in front of one of the amazing boulders at the Baths and the beautiful Caribbean Sea. And no, the photo has not been altered.


The Baths are an unusual occurrence of large granite boulders forming grottoes and pools everywhere. Their formation is subject to debate, but many believe it to be molten rock that bubbled to the surface, or such extreme amounts of erosion that this is what was left behind.

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Sound of eBay

To those of us "in-the-know" there is a group of individuals behind two "hacker-artists" that creates songs using eBay arbitrary information. These guys are responsible for GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself), an exhibit that has been seen in galleries world wide. While it does seem strange, it's always interesting to see what your song will sound like. I did mine in June and it is very Euro-tech. Makes me want to play 16-bit racing games. Apparently mine is quite boring because I don't buy much. If you want to do your own, just because curiosity got the best of you, go to the Sound of eBay website. Be wary, however, the pixilations on the Sound of eBay website are lewd when viewed from afar. Up close they look like nothing. If your hubs is a ways behind you though, he will see it as quite a bit scandalous. Those crazy artist types have a wicked sense of humor. The link to my personal eBay song, however, is just an mP3 link so nothing scary to see. The whole piece (as it is "art") is called The Sound of eBay, Teletext porn, Human Needs.... and the corresponding images have numbers.

Please do not get mad at me if you click the link to the main site and are offended. It is art and art has the tendency to push envelopes. I just thought the technology behind this was amusing. The other 2 links are fine ("mine" and "GWEI").

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Debate! Designer Babies

I think I would like to do a weekly or bi-weekly discussion on this blog about controversial scientific issues. Of course, I will see how this goes over first. So now presenting this weeks debate!


The hubs and I were having a conversation last night about what fields of science I distrust the most and I told him biotech or bioengineering. I have many reasons for my distrust of these fields, one being the whole "designer baby" thing. I don't really believe in gene manipulation of any sort. I know that gene therapy can potentially help us avoid children with Duchenne dystrophy and things of the like, but even that I still have my qualms about. Maybe I am a bit alone in this aspect, but I think nature's way of human population control is disease. Biotechnology wants to extend our lifespans. We all have the longest lifespans in thousands of years, or ever depending on who you talk to, yet we want more. I don't think people realize the ramifications of living that long. That just means a HUGE increase in populations and more people to feed around the world. This also means, more waste, more consumption, more economic strain... I don't know. This is my opinion, remember. I also know that bioengineering has taught us about fermentation and DNA sampling. I can plays the Devil's Advocate for this as well. I do, however, want to hear your opinions on these topics. What do you like/dislike about bioengineering?

brewing is a form of biotechnology.

While no longer in print, The Impact of the Gene: From Mendel's Peas to Designer Babies is an excellent read on this topic.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

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