Definitely not a dead shrew

Why is it that when I Google images, specifying, "upright round stem hairless pink flower," what I get is yellow broom, white mushrooms, a map of Australia, and organpipe cactus, but no pink flowers with upright round stems?

Maybe I was confusing Google with too many criteria? How about, "single stalk hairless pink"? Would that work? Well, if I had been looking for a dead shrew, maybe. Or a live shrew (on a different site). Google also thought that maybe a deer, or an armadillo would match. And, of course, it gave me more yellow broom.

On examining the photo I was trying to match, I decided that red was more accurate. Trying "red" instead of pink, got me green beans and celery, assorted bugs, dogs, a map of Eastern Canada, and the Colosseum in Rome. And after a few dozen yellow, white, blue, and pink flowers, a few red ones, on leafy or hairy stems.

I give up.

We saw this plant in the grass at the edge of Centennial Beach. Does anyone out there know what it is?

Blade-like basal leaves (yes, I Googled this, too), round hairless stems, about a foot tall.

And one red or deep pink flower per stalk.

Help!

I'm back. Did you miss me?

Yesterday, something went awry, and suddenly, I could no longer access Google, or Google-linked sites. I was reading my e-mail, went to the next one, when, *blink*, the world out there disappeared.

Where's that "Don't Panic" button when you need it?

Of course, I did all the normal things; rebooted, unplugged the modem and set it up again, changed browsers, called the internet uncomplimentary names, ditto for my laptop, did everything again, panicked.

What was strange was that the computer worked fine, and I was connected to my ISP properly, but Google had disappeared. And with it, anything that used Google. Blogger, G-mail, Google Reader, (all you wonderful people out there; gone!) YouTube, Facebook, parts of ScienceBlogs. I couldn't contact my browser people; I'm using Google Chrome. Twitter worked, except that it has deleted a bunch of the people I follow. I could get Wordpress, when I remembered the urls (they're all on Google Reader; inacccessible). BugGuide and Flickr were fine.

I spent half an hour on the phone, trying to get through to my ISP. Hopeless; they were backed up. Other people were panicking, too. That was a relief; it wasn't my problem, maybe.

Two people responded on Twitter to my calls for help. No suggestions that worked, but again, I felt connected. Deep breath.

Finally, at midnight, I got through to the ISP; they were "working on it". Good; it was a SEP. I went to bed.

This morning, everything works.

Long story. There are two things that stand out for me.

1. Half the internet is linked to Google somehow. When Google dies, civilization will follow.
2. I missed all of you, out there. A major part of my world is online. It's awfully lonely here without you.

Hi, y'all!

Aphid in Sheep's Clothing

I will never grow up. I am still asking small-child questions: "What is this?" "What does it do?" "Why?"

The green bugs Laurie brought me the other day have been keeping me busy. Google was little help, this time; I had nothing to go on, other than "green bug, alder, cottonwood". I posted my photos, such as they were, on Bug Guide; the next morning, a commenter said they looked like "woolly aphids". Back to Google, to research woolly aphids on alder.
First, I discovered that woolly aphids produce their own "blanket"; it is not cottonwood fiber, even though it looks similar, and is also coating leaves in the vicinity. Instead, it is a waxy substance that they exude from the anus, as other aphids exude honeydew.

I compared a cottonwood twig, with seeds and fiber, with the fiber from the bugs. The cottonwood was not quite as white, silkier to the touch and more "feathery". Fiber from the suspected aphids was sticky; cottonwood fiber was sticky only when it had already come into contact with the leaves where the bugs were. So that checked out.

But then I ran into problems. The woolly alder aphid is common in BC, is covered with a white, sticky fibrous blanket, migrates from maple to alder in early summer, and eventually covers the leaves with a sticky nectar which leads to the growth of a blackish mold. Check, check, check, check and check. Except that all the photos of woolly alder aphids without the coating were nothing like mine. Wrong colour, wrong eyes, wrong shape.
A close-up of my bug, shorn of its "wool". Note the little wings or wing covers; he beat those winglets, but never managed to fly with them. Also note the absense of visible mouth parts or pincers. And the "goggles"; black circles around the eyes, as though written on with a felt pen. The tail is black, but in two sections, with the rear-ward one being slightly greyer. You can see where the wool is produced; a small bit still sticks there. (Ignore that red fiber: it's a piece of my carpet.)

I looked at hundreds of photos of woolly aphids, of all sorts; none of the denuded bugs were anything like mine.

Could something else mimic these? Something that, under the disguising blanket, turn out to be another beast? A predator? A "wolf in sheep's clothing," in miniature?

In the New Westminster Library, I searched the indexes of insect books for "woolly aphid". Mostly, it wasn't there, or referred to one or two lines of text. But there was a new (to the library; it's from 2003) book: For Love of Insects, by Thomas Eisner. And it has 20 pages on woolly aphids, a mimic, and its interactions with the aphids and the ants that "farm" them.

The green lacewing larvae prey on woolly aphids. Some of these are known as "trash bugs"; they purposefully coat themselves with bits of debris, including food leftovers. Eisner discovered some of these that took the waxy fibers from the woolly aphids, and covered themselves with them, until they could pass for a large aphid themselves.

He pulled the covering off some of these, the same way I had with my bugs, and watched. They immediately set about covering themselves again, grabbing pieces and twisting around to place them on their spiked backs until they were completely disguised again. (I went back and looked at the bugs I had stripped the day before; they were also back to normal, sheep ready for the shearing.)

Ants are well known for their talents as aphid farmers. They will stand guard over their herd of aphids, protecting them from wasps and other invaders, including humans, and "milking" the aphids for honeydew by stroking them with their antennae. The woolly aphids also produce this honeydew, along with the wool, and are shepherded by ants for this purpose.

The green lacewing larvae escape the notice of the ants by stealing the waxy fibers from the aphids they will be preying on. Eisner and his staff stripped the larvae and placed them back in the colony of aphids; ants attacked them right away. Some they killed outright, others they carried away and threw off the branch. A few were eaten. But an ant that bit a larva coated with fiber got a mouthful, and retreated to clean himself off. After a few attempts, they ignored the larvae.

So: were my bugs lacewings? If so, it was odd that I hadn't seen any lacewing eggs anywhere; these are noticeable, because they lay them one at a time on top of a 1/2 inch stalk. To me, they would look at first glance like one variety of slime mold, which I keep a lookout for.

And none of the lacewing larvae looked anything like my bugs, either.

Besides, all the lacewing larvae that I could find, and all the descriptions, mention the large mouthparts , the "powerful jaws" "like ice tongs". My bugs have no visible mouthparts at all, no matter what position I prodded them into. And smooth bodies, with no spikes.

So, what are they? I still don't know. For now, I'm going with "woolly aphid". But not the woolly alder aphid, nor either of the two invasive woolly aphids here in BC, the woolly balsam aphid and the woolly hemlock aphid.

A "normal", non-woolly aphid, on another leaf from the same tree, for comparison purposes.

A terrible, stark beauty

Sometimes I let my mouse do the walking. On Google maps.

A few days ago, I went north. To the far Canadian north, at the very edge of the satelite views.

These are not trees; they are rivers. With no vegetation to slow them, shield them from view, they become sharp-edged trunks and branches.

More "trees":
Flat mud plains. What looks, to my eyes, like ridges, are really indentations, small valleys. I can't seem to convince my brain of that, though, and I still see concave plains with upturned edges.
Jagged chunks of ice, at the mouth of a river. This one still has the scale at the bottom; it measures off 1 mile.
More ice, rugged valleys, sharp peaks. Impossible country. Imagine hiking over that!
The glaciers flow just like wet water, only more slowly.
I don't know what to say about this country. It fills me with a wordless awe, it humbles me more, even, than gazing into a starry sky does; it's closer to home, but somehow feels more terrible, colder, more alien. And yet I have rarely seen anything so beautiful.

It's not just these representative views; it was also the effect of wandering, mouse-walking, step by step over endless brown terrain, lifeless and silent. Except, of course, for the roar of waters, the crashing of rock, the ping! of splitting ice. And probably the howl of wind. But no birdsong, no whisper of pines. Screen after screen of ever-different sameness. It gives me the shivers, and not from the imagined cold.

Where are these sites? Here, at the markers.
(And don't forget to click on these for a full-size view.)

Notes along the way: Bioblitz homework

Later tonight, animalia from my lawn.

But for now, bits and pieces picked up as I organize and fill out my notes:

• Centipedes have one pair of legs per segment. Millipedes have two (mostly). They move them in sequence, so it looks like a wave moving down the body. So the one I found in the vacant lot was a centipede. One closer to home (and smaller) was a millipede.
• Sow bugs and pill bugs are not the same. Pill bugs form a ball when disturbed; sow bugs do not. (And I always called them all wood bugs, rolled up or not.)
• Google images works, unless you don't know what you're looking for. It helps to have at least a genus name.
• It was Montia exigua. Was. Now it's Claytonia exigua. At least I found it.
• Carex macrocephala is red-listed.
• Something weird: I am not in the least squeamish about assorted bugs and beasties, but whenever I see a photo of a millipede on someone's finger, I shudder involuntarily.
• Bug Guide is a great source. Of bug id, naturally.
• "Although they look white to the human eye, many springtails are beautifully colored. Since they are so small, people can't see the colors without a microscope." From The Field Museum.

Save the Pigeons!

Sure, we all use Google, but did you know that Google keeps pigeons cooped up and working -- hard -- for their living? That they abduct free-living pigeons? That they run press gangs to take young, innocent, impressionable pigeons off their home roosts?

You didn't? They admit it; see!

"Google uses only low-cost, off-the-street pigeons for its clusters. Gathered from city parks and plazas by Google's pack of more than 50 Phds"

Look here!

This one has escaped the PhDs, so far.

All about the truth (or Google-bombing)

Just doing my part in a web experiment. Linking to the truth .

What is this all about? This will explain it.

Google supposedly has defused the Google-bomb.(wiki)

A Google bomb is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.[1] Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text.

Which would be a pity, sort of. It was fun while it lasted. But I guess it did make things difficult for serious searchers. Which of course we (you and me, anyway) are, right?