Biomes HW #2

Reuniting a River

"Copco No. 1 Dam is one of several Klamath dams in Oregon and California that together provide clean power for up to 70,000 homes. But dams block salmon runs and may degrade river water quality. Conservationists and Indian tribes want to raze four of them—an unprecedented removal project."

Does the government consult anybody before putting in these dams? Do they ask local people and look at predictions of the surrounding ecosystem? 

Seriously, they need to do some research before they put these things in. I wonder if Jerry Brown is going to continue with the Governator's water plan with all the dams. I think its a good idea to remove the dams. Salmon are a part of the ecosystem and if they get stuck upstream, those downstream don't get any.  Yeah "you get the water you need." The government always lies. I can't imagine what you'd smell like if you were sorting onions all day. Whew. Holy smokes. I'm pretty sure green water is dirty water. 

"A late-summer moon rises over a Karuk war dance. "The dance is a ceremony that seeks solutions between families, individuals, and villages," says Ron Reed, cultural biologist of the Karuk Tribe. "

Its cool that native people are still kicking and passing down their traditions.

Life in the Desert

"Don't be fooled by this desolate stretch of the Sonoran Desert's western boundary-the Pacific coast of the Baja peninsula. The Sonoran, one of North America's four great deserts, has many faces. Stretching across 100,000 square miles (260,000 square kilometers) of southern Arizona, southeastern California, the Mexican state of Sonora, and most of Baja California, it encompasses six biotic communities-some wetter, some hotter, some hillier-that together provide habitat for thousands of Earth's most exotic plant and animal species."

Can the Sonoran Desert be a desert and a beach at the same time? 

I wonder how many different types of species live in the Sonoran Desert?

"In a rush of wings whipping the night air, as many as 500 bats a minute exit a shallow cave in the Pinacate and Grand Altar Desert Biosphere Reserve, a protected area within the Sonoran Desert just south of the Arizona border. Some 200,000 female members of this species-the lesser long-nosed bat-gather at this cave each April before giving birth to their pups in May. At night the mothers-to-be venture out to feed on the nectar and pollen of cactus flowers, including organ pipe, cardon, and saguaro. Come winter, these bats will migrate to central Mexico, where they will pollinate the flowers of agave plants, which are used to produce tequila and mescal."

That would be cool if they could harvest the bat guano somehow for fertilizer. The cardon cactus of the desert is like the towering redwood of the forest. 

Why is it you have to live more than a 100 years to get really big? 

Did dinosaurs ever get found in the Sonoran Desert?

Why is it that in the Cretaceous and the Triassic and all that everything was huge and it took so long to get little only to then take so long to get big?

I'm just glad I don't live there. 

Permafrost

"Cold is powerful. It freezes subsurface water, which can force frozen ground upward to form cone-shaped mounds with cores of ice—pingos—on Canada’s Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula."

Water is the shaping force of the earth. In fact it is the earth. The blue planet and all. Must suck getting stuck in a bog. 

The freezing and melting and freezing does it remove minerals from the soil if the water is constantly running of?

"Vast reaches of the planet have been locked for millennia in stunning permafrost formations. But perhaps not permanently."

"Like scars and wrinkles on an aged face, polygon troughs mark Norway’s Spitsbergen landscape."

Permafrost sure creates some pretty weird shaped soil.

Why does water expand when it solidifies when everything else becomes denser?

How long will the permafrost last with global warming on its way?

Great Animal Migrations

"Tens of millions of bison once rumbled across the Great Plains on a quest for grazing. By the late 1800s nearly all had been slaughtered. Today most of the half million remaining bison are in captivity, like these on the Triple U ranch in South Dakota."

If they live on a ranch where do they migrate to?

How come we are so good at destruction and destruction of other species?

Everyone says we should have peace but we should also make peace with nature. 

"Millions of monarch butterflies travel to ancestral winter roosts in Mexico's shrinking mountain fir forests. Surfing winds from southern Canada and the northern U.S., they travel thousands of miles, taking directional cues from the sun."

I actually walked through a monarch storm once. They migrated through my elementary school and they were all over the place. 

"A border wall along the lower Rio Grande in Texas divides nations as well as habitats, hindering essential daily movements of animals in the area. Bobcats would normally cross the border to find mates or catch dinner—this one caught a rat. The wall also blocks the daily rounds of ocelots, another member of the cat family."

There are ocelots in Texas?

"So researchers who want to tag males with geolocators catch them by playing a recording of a male's call, which to human ears sounds like the chirps of R2-D2, the robot of Star Wars fame."

R2-D2 could take them all.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/11/great-migrations/sartore-photography