The Weird Ones

Early fall was a time of vibrant colors and lots of action. Colors have faded a bit now. If you have lived in the north for a while, you may have come to appreciate the subtle gold of a tamarack swamp, or the rich browns in a grove of oaks as they extend the fall color season. But have you ever stopped to think about how weird those two trees are?

Tamaracks are conifers, bearing their seeds in cones just like their relatives the pines, spruces, and firs. But conifer isn’t our first choice word for describing pines – we’d rather call them evergreens. When we do that, though, tamarack doesn’t fit. It is the only deciduous (losing its leaves seasonally) conifer in Wisconsin. Oaks, in contrast, are in a group known as broad-leaf trees, most of whom are deciduous. Yet oaks cling to their leaves.

Why would a tamarack lose its needles? Why would a pine keep its needles? And why does the oak keep its dead leaves?

There is adaptive value in each strategy, otherwise they would not persist. Needles are really just modified leaves, better suited to low nutrient, low moisture situations. They have basically the same parts as a maple leaf, but everything is more tightly packed and protected. The stomata (pores for gas exchange) hide in a groove, protected from dry winds. A waxy outer layer helps to prevent water loss. By retaining green, chlorophyll-filled leaves all year, evergreen trees can take advantage of any warm days to photosynthesize, and save themselves the trouble and nutrient expense of growing new leaves each spring. They replace only about a third of their needles per year.

On the other hand, broad-leafed deciduous trees, like maples, grow large leaves with a lot of surface area for photosynthesis. The broad leaves also result in a lot of water loss. This is fine when it is raining, but not when it is frozen. Although trees use enzymes to protect leaves from freezing while they are still photosynthesizing, that only works for so long. Then, frost-damaged leaves would be a liability as an entrance for disease.

Why would tamarack combine the two strategies and lose its needles?

Well, we don’t know for sure, but my favorite theory is that it has something to do with how far north the tamarack’s range extends. On the Winter Solstice this year, Duluth, MN, will only have 8 hours and 32 minutes of sun. In Fairbanks, Alaska, near the northern edge of the tamarack’s range, the sun will shine weakly for 3 hours and 42 minutes. Most of the tamarack’s habitat is in the middle of that range. What good are green needles if there is little sunshine? By building more delicate needles that don’t have to withstand harsh winter conditions, tamaracks can save a little energy.

Tamarack needles and cones. Photo by Emily Stone.

Likewise, what good are the dead, brown leaves of an oak, even with sunshine? Oaks are a broad-leaf tree, but, oddly, they hang onto their leaves until heavy snow knocks them off. Most deciduous trees (including tamaracks) cut their leaves off by growing a protective abscission layer on the end of the twig, and then encouraging the leaf to skedaddle with digestive enzymes or a new layer of cells.

In contrast, oak leaves start to grow an abscission layer soon after new leaves form, but do not finish the process until the next spring. Scientists call this retention of dead stuff “marcescence.”

Plant physiologists agree that marcescence is a juvenile trait, associated with young trees and newer branches. This makes sense, since the young aspens in the field near my house are still holding onto their leaves. And understory trees, which tend to be younger, always seem to change colors later in the fall.

Marcescence also may be juvenile in terms of evolutionary history. In southern regions, some oaks are evergreen. Our northern oaks may be in transition from being fully evergreen to being fully deciduous. Maybe they are not done yet…or maybe they like where they’ve paused!

Although there are tasty new buds waiting to come out in the spring, this year’s dead, dry, crinkly oak leaves are not very palatable, and that may deter deer and moose from nibbling on the new growth. The tardily deciduous aspens probably gain that benefit, too.

Red oak leaves. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Another hypothesis is that the oaks are saving their leaves until spring. When the leaves fall, they will provide the tree with nutrient-rich mulch for the growing season, instead of the leaves decomposing throughout the winter. The leaves dangling from lower branches may also act as a snow fence, trapping extra moisture for the tree.

Of course, there is no way for us to know for sure just what the oak is “thinking” as it rustles its skirt of leaves in the middle of a blizzard. Nor do we understand what the tamarack is “planning” when it turns golden, and then bares its knobby twigs for the winter.

As with humans, the weirdest organisms are often the most interesting.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Lovely Slugs

These damp, gray days of fall can get a little dreary sometimes. When I don’t have time for a big hike, I take my camera for a walk along my driveway. Strolling slowly, I let my focus soften as I wait for something to catch my eye. Earlier this month, a lichen-covered stick, brought to earth by precursors of the gales of November, made me pause.

Dampness cooled my fingers as I lifted softened wood out of the limp maple leaves. In order to make sense of the small log, I assumed the hunched posture of nearsighted people everywhere. My field of vision narrowed, and I became immersed in an alien world. Orange, gray, brown, yellow, wrinkled, dusty, lumpy, smooth, round, and branching, the variety of shapes and colors colonizing this stick were dazzling!

In various outdoor teaching resources, I’ve read about an activity called a “micro hike,” where students are given a short string and told to blaze an ant-scale trail across the forest floor. Although I have a baggie full of yarn strands in my teaching tools, I’ve never found the time to pull them out. Now, both my eyes and my camera bushwhacked across the lichen-covered barrens of the stick, forging a path of discovery.

Suddenly, something wet and shining loomed ahead. As I watched, the slug extended their beige-colored form and undulated across the lichen field on their single, body-length foot. Their movement was surprisingly graceful. When I looked up the species, the name was lovely, too: dusky arion. Never mind that they are introduced from Europe and often become garden pests. I’ll resist judgement if they resist my tomatoes.

Slugs don’t see the world; they touch, and smell, and taste it. The four dark tentacles—two short ones down low, two long ones on top—stretched and explored with delicate fascination. Using pale, glossy lips infused with chemoreceptors, the slug gently touched and recoiled from the lichens’ wrinkled surfaces. Yeasts sometimes join the lichen partnership and produce antifeedant chemicals to repel herbivores. The slug’s lips may have been sensing those.

A few times, the slug seemed to pause and gum the lichen, like a toddler trying a new food. Were they using their sandpaper-like tongue called a radula to scrape up algae who had colonized the lichens’ many surfaces?

When that slug reached the end of the stick, I put them down and picked up another section of the fallen branch with yet another slug glued to its surface. This slug wasn’t traveling, but they were moving. The slug squeezed and contorted their whole head region, and opened and closed a hole in their side. Out of that hole snaked a string of mucus with little brown dots suspended within. Slug scat!

The scat was extruding from near the slug’s head, and there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. Slugs are evolved from snails, and a snail’s anus must be located far enough forward on their body to easily get the poop outside of their shell. The trait has carried through.

Why would a slug get rid of the beautiful, cozy, humidity-controlled, predator-resistant house that snails still possess? Shells require a lot of calcium to build, which is in short supply in our sandy soils. Shells also prevent their owner from squeezing into hiding places like soil tunnels and rotting logs, two habitats that contain enough moisture for a slug to survive. The loss of a shell broadens a slug’s options, and in the Arion genus, all that is left are a few calcareous grains under the rear of the mantle.

Laying that slug and stick back on the ground, I picked up a new one. This slug was resting even more tranquilly. Only their pneumostome (which translates to “air-mouth”) moved. The small, football-shaped holed opened to let in air, then slowly closed, then opened again. When a daddy longlegs explored too close and stepped on their mantle, the slug squeezed their pneumostome shut as we might scrunch up our whole face in response to a tickle.

As this dusky arion slug rests on a lichen covered stick, noticed the undulating foot along the length of their body, as well as the mantle of different textured skin near their head. You can barely see a tiny dimple that is their closed pneumostome or breathing hole. Photo by Emily Stone.

These first three slugs were all roughly an inch long, but farther down my driveway the whimsical yellow cap of an Amanita mushroom caught my eye, and on its creamy white stem were three smaller slugs, half as long and much more slender. Babies! An individual slug, at least in the Arion genus, lives about a year. Eggs hatch before winter and they hibernate as teenagers, then become active early in spring—in the mirror image of this cool, damp weather—to finish growing up. Slugs are hermaphroditic. When they find a partner, they each inseminate the other and both lay eggs. Then, often, they die.

Baby slugs on an Amanita mushroom

Standing to straighten my back, I was surprised to find how short my walk had been. Having explored through the exotic tufts of lichens and mosses, and observed these alien creatures, I felt like I’d been in another realm. And soon, those slugs will be entering another world I’m curious about. As they make plans to spend the winter hunkered down beneath the snow, I’m making plans to follow them into the Subnivean Zone. I’ll be sure to tell you what we find.

For videos of these three slugs, check out the Natural Connections Nuggets playlist on the Cable Natural History Museum’s YouTube Channel.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Midnight Mystery Sound

Chiiiiirrrrp!

A single, loud noise rang through the dark. My eyes popped open. “I don’t know what that was,” I whispered into the tent.

“Well, it’s never good when the naturalist doesn’t know what made a noise,” joked my friend as they rolled over, sleeping bag rustling. While they fell back to sleep, I scrolled through a species list in my head. Still, no luck in matching the sound to an animal I’d heard before. But wait, a few years ago I watched a couple videos of cheetahs chirping. Do other big cats—like cougars—ever chirp? I wondered. (Yes!)

A poem Mary Oliver wrote about seeing a bear track popped into my sleepy brain. “But not one of them [stories about people seeing bears] told what happened next—I mean, before whatever happens—How the distances light up, how the clouds are the most lovely shapes you have ever seen, how…Every leaf on the whole mountain is aflutter.” And indeed, the thought of a cougar in the forest made it feel just a little more alive.

Deciding not to worry about it, I also rolled over and let the steady rasp of beaver teeth from across the bay lull me to sleep. This was the first night of a quick weekend trip to the Boundary Waters, and I wanted to thoroughly enjoy my stay at the best campsite on Winchell Lake.

We woke up to a white-shrouded dawn, but a stiff breeze chased the mist away while we ate breakfast on the beautiful rocky point. The wind I’d listened to all night had returned in full force. Not wanting to linger and let the waves build even more, we packed up camp, loaded the canoe in the lee of our point, and struck out down the lake.

Despite the lateness of the season, we spotted a few different solo loons bobbing in the waves, identifiable by their distinctive silhouette. The sun’s glare off the choppy water made it difficult to tell if they were adults or juveniles, but either way they still had plenty of time to migrate before ice-up.

Despite the headwind, we made good time on another big day of travel. After a late lunch at our new campsite on Caribou Lake, we swam, and set up camp, and pulled out Devotions by Mary Oliver. “And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.” The wind slackened with the setting sun, and we were soon enveloped in layers of darkness, nylon, and down.

Chiiiiirrrrp!

The mystery noise had followed us! But since we survived it the previous night, I assumed we’d survive again.

Sure enough, we woke to another white-shrouded dawn. Just off our campsite, the silhouette of a water bird faded in and out of the fog. Our visitor’s pointed bill and graceful neck were reminiscent of a loon, but their overall stature was more petite and delicate. Just like a loon, the bird thrust their face beneath the waves to peer beyond the surface glare. Seeing something tasty, they dove gracefully and then reappeared. Then, chiiiiirrrrp!

We looked at each other and laughed. Here was the source of our midnight mystery sound.

By the general shape and size, I was pretty sure that the waterbird was a grebe. Like loons, grebes dive to avoid danger and to catch fish, which they swallow head-first underwater, and have legs so far back on their bodies that they are awkward on land. Their newly hatched chicks also find refuge on Mom or Dad’s back.

Unlike loons, grebes sometimes emit a single, loud chiiiiirrrrp! Grebes also have lobed toes instead of webbed, and ingest a lot of their own feathers, which form two separate balls inside their stomach. Scientists think that the feathers may protect their digestive tract from sharp bones or fish spines. Grebes have more habitat flexibility than loons, since they are able to take off from smaller lakes, and they build up open, bowl-shaped nest structures on emergent plants or in shallow water, and therefore don’t have to rely on finding the perfect shoreline location.

Based on my Sibley Guide to Birds, my memories of the bird, fuzzy smartphone photos, and encounters in previous years, I think this neighbor was a red-necked grebe. They breed mostly in Canada and Alaska, but can also be found on shallow lakes in northern Minnesota. While they migrate through the Great Lakes, grebes tend to spend the winter on the shallow estuaries and bays of northern New England.

A red-necked grebe spotted on Alton Lake in late August 2020.

The grebe had disappeared by the time we finished breakfast and packed up camp, but the thought of that little bird being the source of the mystery sound made me chuckle several times as we paddled out. With just one odd note, that grebe had created a permanent place for themselves in my Boundary Waters memories.

The final portage into Poplar Lake.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.


For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Listening to a Boundary Waters Night

Wind whooshed through the pines and spruces who bristled across the spine of our rocky point like quills on a porcupine. I snuggled more deeply into my sleeping bag. The day had been gusty, our paddling fierce and steady against whitecaps, with white lines of foam streaming down the lakes. Once the sun rose again, we’d be paddling upwind into a three-and-a-half mile fetch. Would the breeze slacken or strengthen overnight? I tensed at each gust and relaxed in the quiet, trying to foretell the future.

You would think that after 25 years of paddling in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, I’d be pretty good at sleeping in a tent up there. But no, I often find myself listening in the dark. Sometimes the vigilance is because I’m responsible for the safety of a group. Other times it’s just a by-product of a sore back or snoring neighbor. Cracks of thunder and howling winds are the only sounds that truly carry a measure of risk. But even quiet nights find me lying awake. It’s not all bad.

During a pause in the wind, the faint rasp of gnawing teeth slipped through the thin nylon walls of my tent. Micro-bears (mice) might not be dangerous, but they do have the potential to ruin gear or my treasured bag of gorp. I opened my eyes in the darkness and tried to imagine the campsite layout. Was the sound coming from our food pack, hung high in a white pine tree away from regular bears? Or was it coming from under the rain tarp, where a few items of gear were avoiding the off-and-on drizzle of the evening?

Then my tent-mate’s bladder chimed in on the problem. When they started undoing the series of zippers – there is no silent way to open all of those zippers! – between them and night air, I decided that I might as well get up, too, and take care of a couple of sleep deterrents at once.

Relieved, I determined that the gnawing was definitely not coming from within our campsite. In fact, it seemed to be coming from across a small bay. Sound travels astoundingly well over water, but still, those had to be big teeth to make a sound that would carry. I smiled at several memories of hearing this same sound at different campsites – beaver!

Since we were up, and the moon was up, and the wind was down, we grabbed jackets and headlamps and made our way down to the point. This slightly sloping spit of rock on Winchell Lake, with its level landings and artistically disheveled jack pine trees, is the foundation of one of the most desired campsites in the Boundary Waters. When I worked for the Forest Service in this area, we never saw this campsite empty during the height of summer. This afternoon it had been our reward for braving the wind and rain when almost no one else did.

We spoke in whispers while slipping the canoe into the water. The moon played peekaboo with the clouds as we turned into the bay and paddled toward the dark shadows of the trees. Then we paused to listen. Paddles dripped. Waves lapped gently against Kevlar. And there it was: a rough and rhythmic gnawing from the far shore. We paddled a few strokes closer.

Splash! Shriek! Laughter.

I’d been expecting a beaver to slap their tail at us, warning their family that something suspicious was afoot. I’d been trying to brace for it. But when the noise actually came it startled an embarrassing noise out of me all the same, and I shook with mirth in the dark. Four more splashes, conducted in surround-sound, told me that we we’d probably disturbed this family of beavers enough for one night.

After the screech of zippers, the rustle of sleeping bags, and the hiss of breathing subsided, my ears again found the rasp of beaver teeth on wood cutting through the night air. Now, because I knew our food and gear were safe, the sound was soothing and familiar. Darkness began to seep behind my eyelids, too, and quiet the synapses that kept me awake.

I wonder if Sigurd Olson, champion of wilderness, once slept at this campsite? If he travelled through Winchell, he surely did. A bit of wisdom from his book Reflections from the North County, filtered through my drifting memory: “If we can somehow retain places where we can always sense the mystery of the unknown, our lives will be richer."

Chiiiiirrrrp! 

A single, loud noise rang through the dark. My eyes popped open. “I don’t know what that was,” I whispered into the tent, not very much liking what this mystery of the unknown suddenly added to my life.

But that’s a story for next week.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Listening in Elk Habitat

Morning mist hung low in the sky as a dozen elk ran across a clearing. A similarly sized herd of Museum members held our breath and grinned at our good luck. It was luck 3 billion years in the making.

All morning we’d been listening intently. The Museum has been hosting this annual Sounds of the Elk field trip since long before I arrived on the scene. First it was Laine Stowell who used his bulky radio telemetry equipment to locate collared cow elk and lead us down the logging roads to get close to a herd. He’d pause occasionally to use the receiver dangling around his neck, then he’d mew like a cow or bugle like a bull. Some years a haunting, high-pitched trumpet would echo through the woods in reply. In many years, silence.

Laine Stowell Bugling for Elk in 2014

Silence was a historical fact, too. Elk were extirpated from Wisconsin in the 1880s due to unregulated hunting and a rapid decline in habitat. In 1995, twenty-five elk were released into the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest near Clam Lake. Ninety-one more elk arrived in the Clam Lake Elk Range from Kentucky in March 2017 and 2019. Additionally, sixty-three elk were released in Jackson County in 2015 and 2016 to establish the Black River Elk Range, also using elk from southeastern Kentucky. The new elk continue to improve the genetic diversity and expand the size of the herd. A hunting season was initialed in 2018 and revenue from hunters funds almost the entire project. The DNR now estimates that the population has surpassed 500 animals, with about 350 in the Clam Lake Zone!

Laine, who led the reintroduction, retired a few years ago, and Joshua Spiegel is the current Wisconsin DNR Wildlife Biologist who leads us in search of elk. On this morning, in between Josh’s calls, we heard no elk reply. The morning was very warm, he explained, reducing rutting activity. Fifty-eight degrees at dawn doesn’t feel like fall to an elk. But the woods weren’t silent.

Josh Spiegel led this year's elk bugling adventure.

A red squirrel scolded incessantly, as they do. Blue jays shouted their name. Spring peepers piped up sporadically in a phenomenon called “fall echo,” where they are triggered by day length that reminds them of their spring breeding season. The hollow croaks of ravens drifted musically over the forest. Breathy half-songs came from the treetops, too, like someone whistling through their teeth. “Confusing fall warblers” (a technical term) are on the move south, and must have been gleaning bugs from the foliage for breakfast. And, as we walked, I picked up on the characteristic melancholy-sounding swee notes of a flock of goldfinches that earned them a Latin name tristis, which means sad. But we didn’t hear any elk.

Even when we saw our first elk, I couldn’t hear her. With the old tracking equipment, Laine might have heard the beeping of her bright orange collar through the receiver, but Josh’s GPS makes no sound. We’d walked into a second location—a long strip of open grassland bordered by forest—and spotted a couple of cow elk off in the brush. She looked right at us. So much for the element of surprise! As she put her head down and walked off, though, I didn’t hear any leaves rustling. There was no twig snap. The 500 pound animal just vanished.

We've been spotted!

It’s fitting that we should be listening in this particular wide swath cleared through the forest, since at one point submarines were listening to sounds originating here.

The clearing is on the old ELF line. This U.S. Navy project used extremely low frequency (ELF) radio waves to communicate with deeply submerged submarines throughout the world. The transmitter operated from 1989 to 2004, and consisted of two 14-mile transmission line antennas in the shape of a cross, with the transmitter station at their intersection. The lines were removed in 2008. Its legacy is that some of the clearing that was once mowed for maintenance is now kept open for wildlife habitat. The elk like the freedom of movement and tender new growth that the cut area provides. It is one of the main reasons that this area was chosen for the elk reintroduction in 1995.

And the bedrock here was one of the main reasons that this area was chosen for the ELF. As I confirmed with my Flyover Country app, the bedrock under Clam Lake is mapped as 3.2 to 3.6 billion-year-old gneiss from the original Superior Continent (learn about it in our current exhibit!). The rock is buried by glacial sediments here. That’s why our Geology of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula field trip visited an outcrop of basically the same stuff near Republic, Michigan—which is where a second ELF transmitter was located. This is no coincidence! These rocks of the Laurentian Shield possess qualities that channeled the ELF currents deeper into the ground, increasing signal efficiency.

Looking up from the bedrock map on my phone, I saw the perked ears of a cow elk peeking up over the hill, visible because of the mowing still done to maintain the open, grassy concept of the ELF line. Josh motioned for all of us to creep forward. Two cows watched us. Then, they jogged across the ELF line to the right, and more elk appeared. Now I could hear them. Hooves pounded and brush rustled as ten females ran and milled and crossed the clearing. A stately bull brought up the end of the line, and he paused as if to let us admire him before trotting across on the heels of a cow.

Two elk watch us from the old ELF line.

Now that the spell was broken, we talked excitedly about what we’d just seen. We no longer needed to listen intently for the elk. And no one is listening to the ELF, either. But we still feel the impact of that 3 billion-year-old rock.

This 3+ billion year old bedrock facilitated the placement of ELF lines near Clam Lake, WI and Republic MI. The clearings for the ELF lines facilitated reintroduction of the elk.
That's 3 billion years of habitat development!

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Turtles All the Way Down

In the misty afternoon I decided it was time to get out for a walk. With raindrops still sparkling on everything, I slipped my little macro camera into my pocket, just in case some beauty caught my eye, and headed up the gravel road.

A bright spot gleamed, and I peered into the damp forest. White baneberry berries floated at knee-height in the gloom. Each of the six pearly berries had a dark spot in the center where the flower had attached, and the effect was like disembodied eyes looking back at me. Spooky! For good reason, they are also known as Doll’s Eyes.

The spooky vibe continued when two cars came creeping down the road toward me, much slower than the usual locals. The windows rolled down… ”Emily?” a voice came from the depths. And then I got a good look at the faces. My mushroom people! Who else would be driving slowly down a gravel road just days before the Annual Northwoods Foray put on by the Wisconsin Mycological Society but a bunch of the board members scouting locations? There was a seat open in the back, so naturally, I hopped into the car with them.

It was great to catch up with the crew as I guided them to the trailhead they were thinking of but couldn't quite remember how to get to. The mist thickened as we set off, but it didn’t deter anyone. Mushroom people like dampness just as much as the fungi they seek, and these folks were rehydrating after being in hot, dry weather farther south.

Out on the bog boardwalk at the Forest Lodge Nature Trail, I pointed folks toward a little patch of spoon-leaf sundew off a corner of the observation deck. These carnivorous plants catch insects in the sticky “dew” drops held at the tips of little hairs, and then digest them with enzyme-rich “dew.”

I was taught that these plants don’t need mycorrhizal relationships with fungi on their roots, because they could harvest nitrogen and phosphorus from insects. New DNA sequencing techniques have confirmed that they do indeed have a relationship with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, who penetrate their roots. The fungi probably gain sugars from the plant, and the plant might get nitrogen from the fungi.

As we were walking back on the boardwalk, some unusual brown patterns against the green of the Sphagnum caught my eye. Looking closer, I found some wrinkly, fuzzy, brown fungi. Later I’d discover these to be in the genusThelephora, sometimes called Common Fiber Vase because of the narrow base and wide top, the spiraling cluster of layers, and the fuzzy edges. These fungi partner with pine trees – or maybe the spruce in this boggy forest – but unlike the arbuscular fungi who infiltrate the roots of a sundew, these ectomycorrhizal fungi form a web around cells in the tree root in order to trade nutrients.

From gazing out through the forest, to scanning the patch of fungi, I now picked up a single mushroom and looked even closer. A bright spot gleamed, and I peered into the damp brown layers. The small white grub had six legs and several rows of tiny black spots down its back. iNaturalist called it a Twenty-spotted Lady Beetle larva, and I’m not one to argue.

These insects are in Psyllobora, the genus of “fungus-eating lady beetles.” Most lady beetles are carnivores who eat other insects, and especially aphids, so this vegetarian option was news to me. Both the larvae and the adults eat powdery mildew, the white film that is the bane of many gardeners. Maybe they also eat the Fiber Vase? Or maybe a powdery mildew was growing on the brown surface beyond the reach of my eyes.

As I photographed the white larva, I noticed that an orange spot on their back had legs! A mite! When I asked a friend for an ID, he suggested that it might be a phoretic mite. Phoretic isn’t a species, but a lifestyle in which one critter hitchhikes on another but doesn’t parasitize them. This larva wasn’t going anywhere fast, but the beetle it will eventually become will fly away home.

Feeling squinty, I lifted my head to let my eyes rest on the soft greens and browns of the forest again. The tender light on the glistening surfaces made it feel like a fairyland. As my mind wandered around all of the living beings hidden in that scene, the phrase “turtles all the way down” popped into my head.

Realizing I had only a sense of what it meant, I looked up the phrase. It is an expression of the problem of infinite regress. For example (according to Wikipedia) “a belief is justified because it is based on another belief that is justified. But this other belief is itself in need of one more justified belief for itself to be justified and so on.” The reference to turtles is based on the story of the Earth being built on Turtle’s back. When asked what the turtle is standing on, the answer is “turtles all the way down.”

Here in this forest, the sequence isn’t all turtles. It’s spruce trees and raindrops and fungi and ladybugs and mites and weird friends and all the senses we have to perceive them. Throughout the entire universe, it’s relationships and connections all the way down.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Microscopic Minerals by Kali Sipp

Guest writer Kali Sipp is from Wild Rose, Wisconsin, and recently graduated with a degree in geoscience from Northland College in Ashland, WI. Kali’s senior project included taking photomicrographs of slices of rocks in the geo lab. Those photos grace the hallways of the Museum, and they write about them here. Kali was a Summer Naturalist/Geology Intern at the Cable Natural History Museum.

Kali Sipp spent countless hours at this microscope setup last semester making images of minerals in thin slices of rocks. Their work is currently displayed at the Cable Natural History Museum. Photo by Emily Stone.

It was 7 o’clock at night at the Northland College Geology Lab, and for the past four hours, I had been peering down a microscope, absorbing the stunning images of a rock cut so thinly that light leaked through it. The microscope I had been using magnified the tiny sample hundreds of times, revealing hidden intricacies between grains mere tenths of a millimeter in size. Each view was a tiny stained-glass window. However, magnification alone was not what made this mineral thin section so colorful and vibrant.

Light, normally chaotic, is forced to be orderly as it passes through a slotted filter called a polarizer. The light then goes through the crystals of the sample, where the light changes speed and direction within their matrices before exiting back out and through a second polarizer, perpendicular to the first. The result seen is an image of crystals on the slide, now dyed in new colors that changed when you spun the thin section around.

Even when viewed with the naked eye, this sample of gabbro has visible crystals. When sliced thin and placed under a microscope with supplemental light, it is stunning! Photomicrograph by Kali Sipp.

It was a feast for the eyes. But this polarized light microscopy was not just a light show, it was a method for study. Individual quartz crystals that would otherwise appear as a clear mass in plain light suddenly sprung out in a rainbow of colors. Other minerals produced only a small array of colors. Some, like garnet, turned completely black under the polarized light. Using polarized light would prove useful for this particular sample.

It was a rock I found in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan: a mere curiosity when I collected it as a greenhorn geologist. I wanted to know more about it. The garnets in it were evidence of drastic changes in its lifetime, as garnets only form under high heat and pressure, ultimately altering the original structure and composition of the rock. So, it begged the question: what was this rock before its transformation?

I set out on a study with my professor, Tom Fitz, to find out. Our hikes across the Northwoods to find other outcrops of its kind yielded nothing. But we did not give up hope. Instead, we sent our sample away to get a thin section cut out of this rock to study it much more closely. The result was marvelous.

When I spun the microscope’s turntable, biotite crystals shimmered with a brown hue. They were accompanied by quartz grains that raved in different colors. Hornblende and feldspar also flashed with each turn of the slide. Chlorite stubbornly remained green, even under polarization; while in contrast the garnets turned opaque under the polarized light, only to become transparent in comparison to the hematite that sat next to it unchanged when the polarizer was removed.

All of these minerals were vexing, as they were not what we were expecting to find in the sample. So, for several weeks, I pored over studies published by other scientists about the geology of the U.P. of Michigan to see if anyone else had documented a rock similar to mine. The online search yielded nothing for a while, but then, a breakthrough!

One study described the geochemical makeup of a rock they had collected, very similar to mine in both location and chemistry. But it was the thin section photographs the study provided that would cause me to declare I had found a probable match. The photomicrographs displayed rocks that could have been a sibling to mine! Together with the geochemistry, it was enough to convince me I had figured out what my rock was: a metadiabase sill—fancy talk for a rock that cooled from magma in between two other layers of rock, then was metamorphosed by heat and pressure.

Thin section photomicrograph of a garnet. Photomicrograph by Kali Sipp.

I could not have figured out what my rock was without the microscope. It was a tool that transformed my way of thinking and looking. Now, everywhere I go, I see rocks and wonder what they would look like under the scrutinizing gaze of the microscope. What minerals lay hidden? What structures or other hidden features are sequestered away from prying eyes, waiting to be revealed?

The more I learn, the more I want to explore the unseen world that surrounds us.

Want to learn and see more? Watch these two videos on the Museum's YouTube channel!

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open through mid-March. Our Fall Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.