Inertia at Year's End

With my accumulated years, the deepening gloom of late December brings a lassitude, an ebbing of motivation.  Writing a new blog post at year's end seems a daunting challenge.  In his old age, Walt Whitman acknowledged that, even as his heart still beat (hurrah) and the forces long celebrated in his poetry still moved him, he felt a "strange inertia/falling pall-like round me."  (A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine, Sands at Seventy, included in late editions of Leaves of Grass as an "annex.")

Wait . . . that's all much too bleak.  It's not hopeless.  I've found that the effort to put together a post at year's end can be fueled by exploring and learning something new.  And, if that doesn't provide the necessary spark, I can always resort to humor.  That seldom fails and I've turned to it on more than one occasion for a December post.

At the outset, it seemed possible that one of three recent papers might help me get down to business.  Here are brief blurbs about each, suggesting what I felt were some of the likely hooks in them.

#1

I thoroughly enjoyed the recent article by paleontologists Chase Doran Brownstein and Tyler R. Lyson, in which they identify a new species of fish, a giant gar, some 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) long from fossils found in the Fort Union Formation in North Dakota which dates from the Paleocene.  (Giant Gar from Directly Above the Cretaceous-Palaeogene Boundary Suggests Healthy Freshwater Ecosystems Existed within Thousands of Years of the Asteroid Impact, Biology Letters, Volume 18, Issue 6, June 2022.)

At least two aspects of these fossils are striking:  the size of the gar, which makes it one of the largest to have ever lived; and where the fossils were found - in the formation, a mere 18 centimeters (7.1 inches) above the K-Pg boundary (dating from about 66 million years ago) that marks the end Cretaceous extinction event.  Therefore, the authors estimate that this giant fish lived only 1,500 to 2,500 years after the extinction event.

Import of that?  At a very superficial level, I found it reassuring that so soon after the mass extinction, there were animals of this size going about their business.  But, as the authors explain, the implications of this are actually quite profound.  They describe the Lilliput effect (another of the wonderful adjectives used by paleontologist) which, based on the fossil record, shows that average body sizes in different taxa appear to decrease after extinction events.  Brownstein and Lyson note that many species with large bodies went extinct in the end-Cretaceous event.  Here, though, was a very large gar, an animal that could be alive only if there were an existing food chain capable of supporting it.  The authors suggest two possible explanations:  the freshwater environment in which this gar lived survived the extinction, or the local ecosystem rebounded rapidly after the event.  Further, they surmise that, given the size of this gar, under some circumstances the impact of the Lilliput effect could be limited.

I recognized that here were some topics that might be explored in a post.  For example, what other large bodied species are known to have either made it through this or other mass extinction events or that appeared soon after?  What's the background on the Lilliput effect - who first applied it, what extinction event was the focus, what's the dynamic that might be behind it?

#2

The previous post in this blog focused on the fossil record of the fossorial (burrowing) response of some mammals to challenging surface environments, either through hibernation or estivation (the latter a state of torpor to cope with high surface temperatures).  So I was primed for the recent article by paleontologist Calvin So and colleagues that analyzed fossils of a newly identified amphibian found in burrows in the upper Jelm Formation in Wyoming, a formation dating from the beginning of the Late Triassic, about 231 million years ago.  (Fossil Amphibian Offers Insights Into the Interplay Between Monsoons and Amphibian Evolution in Palaeoequatorial Late Triassic Systems, Proceedings of the Royal Society B,Volume 291, 2024.)

The climate in the Late Triassic, particularly in the low latitudes, was brutal, a time of periods of massive monsoons, and dry periods with lethally high temperatures.  So et al. posit that, without behavior adaptations, small animals could not have survived.  After exploring a large collection of these amphibian fossils in their burrows, the authors conclude that this taxon had evolved to burrow into the bottom of riverbeds and estivate in order to survive the hot, arid periods.  This is, they write, "to our knowledge, the first unambiguous evidence of vertebrate behavioral adaptation to extreme seasonality near the early-Late Triassic palaeoequator."  (p. 8)

The fossils of this species exhibit what the authors describe as a "wedge-shaped" skull and short forelimbs.  As a result, they posit that the animal dug its burrows with its head, not with its arms.  Further, they suggest that the fossils found in burrows were of individuals that died during their period of estivation, before the rains returned, ending the dry season.

The article had me at the word "fossorial" in its abstract.  Further, a blog post on this article might prompt much more digging into available resources on the origins of the name given the new species:  Ninumbeehan dookoodukah.  The name is in the Shoshone language, which is a way, the authors write "to pay tribute to the Eastern Shoshone people, their language and the land to which they belong."  They note that "the name results from a collaborative partnership between the authors of this publication and the seventh-grade students from the Fort Washakie School."  That partnership begged for exploration.  How did it come about?  What did it consist of?  Is it ongoing?

#3

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud has penned a beautifully poetic essay about, of all subjects, metamorphic rocks.  (Roaming Rocks, Aeon, December 17, 2024.)  The story she tells is captured in the adjective in the essay title, "roaming."  Metamorphic rocks are incredibly well traveled, undergoing profound transformations in the process.  Bjornerud makes the journeys of these rocks mesmerizing.

There seemed to be much in the essay to inspire a blog post.  At a minimum, I might search my collection of rocks and minerals for examples showing some of the transformations.  Even better would be a road trip to nearby places that feature metamorphic rocks with the expectation that I could find very photogenic examples of what Bjornerud describes.  I could delve into the history of what was once thought about the genesis of these rocks and how (and who) offered the actual narrative.

In any post that might come from this, I probably would provide examples of Bjornerud's graceful prose.  For instance, I might draw attention to her graceful description of the metamorphic journey which begins with sediments from eroded rocks, accumulating on the seafloor, being transformed by growing pressure into mudstone and shale.  Then, as she writes:

Millions of years pass. The geography of the world changes with the neverending dance of tectonic plates. One day, the shale finds itself in the vice-like squeeze of colliding continents, folded deep into the interior of a mountain belt. The pressure at such depths is extreme. The fine clay minerals in the shale, now far from the shallow marine waters in which they formed, can no longer hold their shape. Their chemical bonds weaken, their grain boundaries become diffuse, and a remarkable transfiguration begins. The elements within, previously part of a rigid crystal scaffolding, are now free to wander. Atoms of aluminium, silicon, magnesium and iron, surprised at their unaccustomed mobility, form new alliances and reconfigure themselves as minerals comfortable at these depths and temperatures: shiny black biotite, wine-dark garnet, and sky-blue kyanite.

Her language is irresistible.

***

There . . . three possible jumping off points for a new blog post.  Enough to shake me into actually working?

Mulling over which of these pieces seemed most promising, I wandered to my cluttered office.  I sat there for a while.  As I did, my attention drifted to a disorderly pile of materials on the floor; the violet cover of a journal caught my eye.  Improbably, it was the November/December, 1992 issue of The Journal of Irreproducible Results:  The Publication of Record for Overly Stimulating Research and Ideas (Volume 37, Number 6).  (Some of the background and tangled publishing history of the JIR can be found on Wikipedia.  JIR has been cited previously in this blog in a post about scientists as humorists.)  I idly flipped the pages of this issue until I came upon a letter to the editor by P. Finbar Duggan, D.Sc., Ph.D., F.R.S.C., F.I.C.I., M.R.I.A, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.  I experienced an epiphany of sorts as I read esteemed Professor Duggan's brilliant missive.  In a single, tightly argued paragraph he resolved the dilemma I faced with my pending post.

I quote the letter below in full:

Dear editor:

I became extremely enthusiastic when I saw your call for papers for the special JIR issue on inertia.  I immediately put pen to paper because I have some interest in this topic.  To begin with, I had better explain why I thought it worthwhile to do so.  Even though I am not really interested in inertia in all its facets, nevertheless I would be letting the side down if I did not make a contribution.  For these reasons, therefore, I feel that, reluctantly, I must set out my thoughts even if they are become somewhat unfocused.  I do feel the onus to

Bumble Bees' Year Comes to a Close

 At this time of year, bumble bees are well advised to get their affairs in order, for only the young queens who have mated will winter over and see a new spring.  The rest, including each nest’s founding queen, will slow and eventually die, repeating a cycle that has persisted for eons.

When paleontologist Manuel Dehon and his colleagues recently described a Miocene compression fossil found in lake deposits in La Cerdanya, Spain, they made a welcome addition to the meager fossil record of the bumble bee.   The fossil dated from the Miocene’s Tortonian age, making it some 12 to 7 million years old.

(Wing Shape of Four New Bee Fossils (Hymenoptera:  Anthophila) Provides Insights to Bee Evolution, PLOS ONE, Volume 9, Issue 10, October 2014.  The image shown here is from the article and can be found at Wikimedia Commons.  It is reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)

The Paleobiology Database lists only 17 collections with fossils of purported bumble bee species, all dating to the Miocene epoch (approximately 23 to 5 million years ago).  In fact, the world may have borne witness to the activities of bumble bees for a bit longer than the fossil record would have it.  Evolutionary biologist Heather Hines concludes that the bumble bee genus originated probably some 25 to 40 million years ago (at some point from the late Eocene to the middle of the Oligocene).  The climate at the time was growing colder which favored this animal which had attributes that served it well in temperate regions.  Bumble bees now (and presumably then) have the capacity to thermoregulate.  That is, by shivering with their thoracic muscles, they generate internal heat, sufficiently greater than the ambient temperature to enable them to fly.  (Historical Biogeography, Divergence Times, and Diversification Patterns of Bumble Bees (Hymenoptera:  Apidae:  Bombus), Systematic Biology, Vol. 57, No. 1, 2008.)

To my untrained eye, the fossil Dehon et al. described is quite clearly a bumble bee.  They named this new species Bombus cerdanyensis.  Its species name recognizes where the fossil was found.  Appropriately they placed this species in the longstanding bumble bee genus which bears a name that . . . well, a name I consider one of the most wonderful genus names ever.  Savor the word . . . Bombus . . . a delight to say and to hear.  So beautifully onomatopoetic, coming originally from the Greek bombus meaning “a buzzing” (Donald J. Borror, Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms, 1988, p. 18).

With the wedding of their sound to their colorful fuzziness and their bouncing travel among flowers, bumble bees are irresistible.  Walt Whitman certainly found them so.  In Specimen Days, in a passage written one May, he extolled the bumble bee: 

Nature marches in procession, in sections, like the corps of an army.  All have done much for me, and still do.  But for the last two days it has been the great wild bee, the humble-bee, or ‘bumble,' as the children call him. . . .

As I write, I am seated under a big wild-cherry tree - the warm day temper'd by partial clouds and fresh breeze, neither too heavy nor light - and here I sit long and long, envelop'd in the deep musical drone of these bees, flitting, balancing, darting to and fro about me by hundreds - big fellows with light yellow jackets, great glistening swelling bodies, stumpy heads and gauzy wings - humming their perpetual rich mellow boom  (Is there not a hint in it for a musical composition, of which it should be the back-ground?  some bumble-bee symphony?)"  (Dover edition, published in 1995 as a republication of the original edition issued in 1883, p. 85.)

Bumble bees have been a constant for me this summer.  Earlier this year, some Agastache (Blue Fortune) was planted on a slope in my backyard.  Commonly known as giant hyssop, this member of the mint family features tall, lavender plumes of flowers that drew myriad pollinators, foremost among them, Bombus impatiens, the common eastern bumble bee.

It’s this species that sparked my interest in the bumble bee.  As I weed among the Agastache plants, the bees pay me little heed, going about their business of drinking nectar and gathering pollen.  These docile bees are here in startlingly large numbers, so much so that, even when the wind dies down, the hyssop flowers are in constant motion, dancing as the bees land, explore blossoms, and lift off.

In the Guide to the Bumble Bees of the Eastern United States (USDA Forest Service, FS-972, March 2011), biologist Sheila R. Colla and her colleagues have produced one of those rare treats that the web offers up:  an authoritative, beautifully assembled and edited, free resource.  It’s a highly useful introduction to the 21 Bombus species found in the eastern United States, which are just a small portion of the grand total of 250 species worldwide.  In addition to this publication, I have consulted An Identification Guide:  Bumble Bees of North America by Paul H. Williams et al., 2014.

In general, bumble bees are social animals spending their lives inside and out of a nest composed of a queen, female workers, and, later in the summer, males and potential queens.  (Of note, there is a subgenus of these insects which is a parasite.)  In the spring, the fertilized queen wakes from a dormant state and emerges from the hidey-hole in which she spent the winter.  She feeds and searches for a place to begin creating a small nest.  Some species nest above ground in tall grasses, others (B. impatiens among them) nest in such locations as abandoned rodent burrows, crevices amid rocks, and openings in manmade structures.  With a nest chosen, the queen lays some eggs.  When the larvae hatch, they are fed on a mixture of pollen and nectar; the larvae then pupate and subsequently emerge as adults.  The whole process from egg to adult may take five weeks.  The first adults to emerge are female workers, some of whom forage for food while others tend to in-nest duties that include attending to larvae, pupae, or honey pots.

Later in the summer, males and possible queens begin to emerge from a colony’s broods.  As the year moves into the fall, the denizens of the nest begin to die off, until only young queens who have mated remain.  These find a hiding place (in rotting logs, mulch, etc.) and go dormant until the following spring when they wake and continue the process once again.  This annual cycle has gone on some 25 million times or more.

Colla’s Guide provides phenology charts for each species of eastern bumble bee, delineating the timing of the appearance and subsequent death of each category of bee:  queens, workers (females), and males.  This is the one for B. impatiens:

I do quibble with Colla and her colleagues over one passage because they seem to rob the Bombus of a behavior that is intriguing and remarkable.  They write that bumble bee colonies are “comprised of several different ‘castes’ who divide the reproductive, foraging, defense, and other tasks necessary to their survival.”  (p. 8)  It’s that word “caste” that bothers me because it suggests a rigid or hierarchical division of labor which, it turns out, does not describe how tasks are divided among B. impatiens in-nest workers.  The reality of how chores are undertaken in at least this species is quite different.

In several studies of the interaction among the in-nest B. impatiens workers (that is, those not primarily engaged in foraging outside of the nest), zoologist Jennifer Jandt and her colleagues have shown quite clearly that responsibilities are not fixed for in-nest workers, unlike some other social insects where age or body size dictates duties.  Instead, although workers tend to repeat the same activities regarding care of larvae, of pupae, or of honey pots from one day to the next, in the long run, they change their activities to ones unrelated to what they were previously doing.  “That is, they switch tasks randomly.  We suggest that if bumble bee workers do exhibit specialization within in-nest tasks, it is weak specialization.”  (Weak Specialization of Workers Inside a Bumble Bee (Bombus impatiens) Nest, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Volume 63, Number 12, October 2009, p. 1833.)

How is that accomplished?  It turns out that the in-nest workers are likely to live their entire lives within specific regions of the nest, regardless of their size or age.  Within the small nest, larvae, pupae, and honey pots – the foci of in-nest activities – are "disorganized," meaning that they are scattered and, as a result, are all in close proximity to any individual worker regardless of where she lives.  This supports workers easily shifting among different tasks.  Quite intriguing.  Are these bumble bees switching tasks instinctively in response to some stimulus in their environment or, perhaps, are they “choosing” what to do next?  Jandt’s use of the adverb “randomly” is suggestive.

Finally, one must acknowledge how critical bumble bees are to many ecosystems, doing what they were doing in the apple tree beneath which Whitman relaxed – pollinating.  They are among the most prolific and important pollinators of wild flowers and crops.  Colla captured this latter aspect of their activity in a wonderfully long, though incomplete, list of the crops bumble bees can pollinate:

tomatoes, peppers, raspberries, blueberries, chives, cucumbers, apples, strawberries, alfalfa, blackberries, soybeans, sunflowers, beans, cherries, apricots, plums, almonds, nectarines, peaches, rosehips, eggplants, and cranberries (p. 9).  

Their success as pollinators may be due to at least a couple of attributes.  They are generalists, not specializing in certain plants, but seeking out nectar and gathering pollen from a broad array of flora taxa.  Further, they are dedicated and persistent foragers.  This I discovered when I turned on my sprinklers to water the Agastache on which they were feeding.  The falling water did nothing to dissuade them from stubbornly flying from flower to flower.  Colla notes that, unlike other pollinators, bumble bees not only ignore rain, but persist in their appointed rounds despite clouds or cold.

So, it is with regret that, as the year moves into deep fall, I say goodbye to these busy, furry, summer companions.

Words of Reassurance

In which the blogger stretches the reach of this blog and offers a few word-treasures extracted from the geological depths of language.

As I anticipate many hours of wind and rain from Hurricane Irene, and know that our electricity will go out (possibly for days), I wonder what would be best to read by our battery-powered lamp during the long, dark night before me, something to distract me, reduce my anxiety.  A masterful biography of a great scientist?  A detective novel oozing atmosphere set in Victorian England?  An engrossing tale of science fiction weirdness written for “young adults” (a category awash in amazing literature)?  An essay by a once robust poet, now slipping away?  Will the written word suffice, offer me a literary hug machine?

At the moment, with the electricity still on, perhaps the act of composing a blog posting might distract me for awhile.  As usual, I’ve been collecting words new to me and, perhaps, a brief offering of a trinity of those in the vault might do the trick.  Admittedly, only one of these words holds any kind of explicit link to the general focus of this blog.  So be it.  Here they are in no particular order.

Pococurante

The boy, often called Bobby by members of his family and sometimes Charley, earned the nickname Gas from his classmates at his boarding school because of the chemistry experiments he conducted at night with the gas lamp that lit the shabby, overcrowded room in which the boys slept.  In Bobby’s own account of his life, he noted that the headmaster, upon discovering these illicit activities, applied a different name to him:

He called me very unjustly a ‘poco curante,’ and as I did not understand what he meant it seemed to me a fearful reproach.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd edition, 1996), a pococurante is “one who does not care.”  The word comes from Latin, via Italian (poco meaning “little” and curare meaning “care”).  But, that’s not quite how the headmaster was using the term, according to science historian Janet Browne who recounted Charles ("Bobby," "Charley," "Gas") Darwin’s exploits with gas in volume one of her definitive and wonderfully readable biography of the man (Charles Darwin:  Voyaging, 1995, p. 33).  “Pococurantism, in his day, meant someone who was only interested in trifles.”  Indeed.

Patterer

Novelist Anne Perry introduced me to this word in her Victorian mystery novels.  In A Dangerous Mourning (1991), Perry described the streets outside a courthouse where a trial is underway (a carryover from a previous novel, The Face of a Stranger, the marvelous first volume of the William Monk series).  She wrote, that, amid the large and excited crowd,

Running patterers recounted the whole case, with much detail added, for the benefit of the ignorant – or any who simply wished to hear it all again.  (p. 40)

Oral recounting of the news of the day served a population in a time and place where literacy was not universal and, of course, there was no television.  Those who offered that service were patterers.  The 1907 New American Encyclopedic Dictionary offered this definition:

One who disposes of his wares in the public streets by long harangues.  (p. 3033)

Though I knew the noun patter (“glib, rapid speech”), I’d never encountered patterer.  The origin of this constellation of words is most delightful.  These words come from the Middle English patren which is derived from Paternoster, Latin for the Our Father or the Lord’s Prayer.  This use presumably was inspired by the mechanical, rote way in which the prayer was often intoned.

Fantods

The fantastically (I chose this adverb carefully) inventive mind of author William Sleator blinked off earlier this month with his death at age 66 (yes, the books still remain).  Sleator created aliens of grotesque features inhabiting worlds where the rules remained unclear for vulnerable teenage humans, an uncertainty with potentially deadly consequences – worlds all too familiar to his intended audience of so-called “young adults” (and to a host of others outside that demographic).

Sleator loved words, and the beings who inhabit his novels (e.g., the classic Interstellar Pig) play or wrestle with them.  His collection of autobiographical stories (Oddballs) makes clear that he grew up in an environment where words, real or invented, were loved and used to great effect (his sister Vicky, particularly, was a consummate artist with words).

But, it’s not a word from his books that I offer here.  Rather, Margalit Fox in her New York Times obituary of Sleator seduced me with a word in her discussion of Sleator’s parents.  His parents fit no conventional models of parenting.  One example should suffice.  His father would play what I can only describe as an urban survival game with Billy and his sister Vicky when both children were under the age of 10.  The two children would be blindfolded and then driven by their father to some remote corner of the city, released from their blindfolds, and left to get home on their own.  The only small piece of a safety net – a dime for a phone call.

As Fox noted in the obituary,

Billy, as he was known, grew up amid art, intellectual ferment and a laissez-faire approach to child rearing that would give helicopter parents the fantods.

That’s the word – fantods.  Clearly invented, worthy of Sleator or his sister Vicky, its first use predating them by over a century.  The American Heritage Dictionary asserts “origin unknown.”  Meaning of the noun?  “A state of nervous irritability” or “the  movements caused by tension.”  Merriam-Webster’s does it better – “fidgets.”  Just reading about his father’s “game” gave me the fantods.

Geology of Words

Four years before his death, Walt Whitman published a collection of poems and essays titled November Boughs.  Trust Whitman, even in his last years, to expand the reach of words, to enrich them to an overflowing abundance; trust him to connect mind and body.

As Hurricane Irene draws up the coast toward Long Island where my rickety summer cottage awaits her onslaught, I drink in this volume’s poetry about Paumanok (the Native American name for the island).

Paumanok.
Sea-beauty ! stretch’d and basking !
One side thy inland ocean laving, broad, with copious commerce,
steamers, sails,
And one the Atlantic’s wind caressing, fierce or gentle – mighty
hulls dark-gliding in the distance.
Isle of sweet brooks of drinking-water – healthy air and soil !
Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine !

Whitman, a consummate shaper of words, sought words among people of all stations and occupations.  He came to this endeavor with an appreciation of the process through which words are born and live and often die.  In his essay Slang in America which appeared in November Boughs, Whitman wrote,

To make it plainer, it is certain that many of the oldest and solidest words we use, were originally generated from the daring and license of slang. In the processes of word-formation, myriads die, but here and there the attempt attracts superior meanings, becomes valuable and indispensable, and lives forever.  (p. 68)

Trust Whitman to not be content to merely describe this process, but to reach for more, to draw in an encompassing natural history.  As he concluded the essay, he stated,

The science of language has large and close analogies in geological science, with its ceaseless evolution, its fossils, and its numberless submerged layers and hidden strata, the infinite go-before of the present.  (p. 72)

The “infinite go-before of the present” . . . perhaps Whitman would be the best companion for the late night vigil amid the howling winds.

Beginning My Studies, Admitting Amazed Ignorance

Beginning my studies the first step pleas’d me so much,
The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion,
The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,
The first step I say awed me and pleas’d me so much,
I have hardly gone and hardly wish’d to go any farther,
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
                       ~ from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

In a recent post on her blog Looking for Detachment, geologist “Silver Fox” wrote about geological “weirdness.”  Her blog offers posts that wonderfully blend interesting text on topics geological with breath-taking photographs of same, and this weirdness post is no exception.  She focused on the megabreccia (a coarse sedimentary rock with large angular rock fragments or clasts) she came upon while she was driving into Death Valley.  But, actually, it’s a comment on the post made by someone with the tag “Lockwood” about that specific breccia that struck a chord with me.

[A]lmost everything I've read that's actually coming from geologists includes that coded geospeak phrase, ‘not well understood.’ Which in regular English means ‘no one knows with any confidence.’

Indeed, I wondered, how do scientists say, “I don’t know”?  Clearly, “I don’t know” wouldn’t be the phrasing typically used, particularly not in published articles.  I turned to what I was currently reading of a scientific bent – a peer-reviewed article by a paleontologist and book by an evolutionary biologist and here’s a quick sampling of how they dealt with “I don’t know.”

“No explanation has been found.”
“ . . . is unknown.”
“. . . unable to resolve at present.”
“. . . much we don’t understand.”

Does not seem so hard for scientists to admit the limits of collective knowledge.  Personal ignorance?  That may be something different as it is for anyone, I suppose.  I’m currently in an observational stage of my amateur engagement with natural history where the question I pose to myself most often is, What is that?  My response so often is I don't know.  I seem to have no trouble saying it.  So much is so new and so startling, and I clearly have less at stake.

Case in point.  Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post about species-area curves and an inventory of the wild flowers that had populated a small piece of my front yard I’ve let go wild.  Among the flowers that voluntarily populated this plot was the lanced-leaved coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata).  This year, coreopsis flowers, also known as tickweed or tickseed, have returned in great profusion of bouncing yellow disks.  Coreopsis are composite flowers (the flowers are actually many individual flowers) and each yellow “petal” of the flower heads is a ray (part of an individual flower).

I had been reveling in their yellow grandeur and delicate scent (sniff one sometime) when I pointed my spouse toward the blossoms.  She commented offhandedly, “Oh, there are actually two types of flowers.”  “No, there aren’t,” I asserted, sure I was right, but then I took a closer look.

The first photo, taken a year ago, below shows a flower head from that initial coreopsis.

Here are the flowers now blooming (I offer a close-up of the composite flower head for each type).  These beautiful springy flowers differ markedly from each other.

In A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America (1968), Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny note that “most coreopsis have 8 showy rays which in most (but not all) species are tipped with 3 to 4 teeth.”  Hmmm, this year’s flowers seem to slip through the opening fashioned by the word “most.”

Peterson and McKenny describe six different coreopsis species for this region.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service lists 33 different species on its website, of which 8 are native to Maryland where I live.

Unfortunately after considering each of the local coreopsis species and ultimately all of those in the USDA listing, I am at an impasse.  Which species are growing on my plot?  Has some cultivar escaped from a nearby garden?  Are these even coreopsis?

I don’t know.

In fact, things are weirder that I thought.  Two key attributes argue against these flowers being last year’s lance-leaved coreopsis:  I see too many rays in either kind of flower, and crow’s-foot-shaped leaves abound instead of lance-shaped leaves.  In my notebook, I labeled these unknown kinds as “many rayed coreopsis” (the first of this year's shown above) and “lesser rayed coreopsis.”

But, the variability in the number of rays and the arrangement of rays on individual plants startles me.  The “many rayed” have at least some 24 or 25 rays in multiple layers; the “lesser rayed” display at least 11 rays in what seem to be single, compact layers.  Counts of flower heads on the same plant vary.  Indeed, among the blossoms on the “lesser rayed” coreopsis, I shake my head when I spot flowers sporting the classic eight-rayed heads of many coreopsis flowers.  I tag them to see if over time they open more rays – no, if they emerge with eight, they seem to live, wilt, and die with eight.  What is going on here?

I don’t know.

I have been nagging at this for over a week.  Amid my forays into books and the net in search of clues, I came across Walt Whitman on coreopsis.

I certainly count Walt Whitman among my favorite amateur naturalists, if only because of his enjoyment of that quintessential impulse to compile lists of things found in nature.  I have read bits and pieces of his Specimen Days in America (1887), a volume of extended diary entries from the Civil War and later.    (The Internet Archive makes the book available in various electronic formats.)  At this point, I enjoy much more the non-Civil War entries which are often really more essays than diary  excerpts.  These, appearing after his descriptions of the pain and horror of the Civil War, make an sharp break in the volume.  As Whitman wrote,

Without apology for the abrupt change of field and atmosphere – after what I put in the preceding pages – temporary episodes, thank heaven! – I restore my book to the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life.

Who knows (I have it in my fancy, my ambition,) but the pages now ensuing may carry ray of sun, or smell of grass or corn, or call of bird, or gleam of stars by night, or snow-flakes falling fresh and mystic, to denizen of heated city house, or tired workman or workwoman? – or may-be in sick-room or prison – to serve as cooling breeze, of Nature’s aroma, to some fever’d mouth or latent pulse.

Indeed, not surprisingly, these later entries offer a less intense experience; they ramble around the natural world, they are a walkabout punctuated at times by lists.  Lists of trees (those “I am familiar with here”), of the birds he’s seen, of the “perennial blossoms and friendly weeds” encountered on his walks (including coreopsis), of stars and constellations.

Between September and December, 1879, Whitman took a trip out west.  He titled one part of an entry – “A Silent Little Follower – The Coreopsis.”  The yellow flower followed him from the east coast out west.

I had seen it on the Hudson and over Long Island, and along the banks of the Delaware and through New Jersey, (as years ago up the Connecticut, and one fall by Lake Champlain.)  [punctuation in original]  This trip it follow’d me regularly, with its slender stem and eyes of gold, from Cape May to the Kaw valley, and so through the cañons and to these plains.  In Missouri I saw immense fields all bright with it.  Toward western Illinois I woke up one morning in the sleeper and the first thing when I drew the curtain of my berth and look’d out was its pretty countenance and bending neck.

Once again, upon a closer look, my ignorance grows.  Whitman described his “silent little follower” as “a hardy little yellow five-petal’d September and October wild-flower . . . .”

Five petals, fall blossoming . . . .  What was he seeing?  What am I seeing?

I’m a bit tired of I don’t know.  So, I think I’ll use, for awhile, There is much I don’t understand (but I will sing it in ecstatic songs).