A Confused Plantain......Raining Snails!...... From ‘Emergence’ Magazine….
by Bernie Bell - 07:46 on 29 August 2023
A Confused Plantain......
We have a lot of Plantain plants in our garden.
The leaves grow from the base, the stem grows up in the middle of the leaves and produces a fluffy flower-head, which then forms a seed-head. That’s what they do - but this one has become confused…
It’s putting leaves out of its seed-head!
Why? We don’t us any chemicals in our garden, so that’s not likely to be the cause of this…mutation?
We looked it up and found…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllody
All things considered, it’s probably a bacterial or viral infection or a genetic mutation. In which case, the question still arises…..why?
There’s always something new to find in life – including new words.
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Raining Snails!
I saw this report by Mike Hoy on the Orkney Wildlife Facebook page...
https://www.facebook.com/groups/133013273445588/?locale=en_GB
"Windwick, Early morning , Found 200+ small brown cylindrical snails around 10mm long on the footpath after rain shower, Possibly Clausilia bidentata.”
Co-incidentally, I’m reading ‘Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World’ which has a chapter entitled ‘A Cabinet of Curiosities’ which includes tales of ‘showers’ of seeds, nuts, fish, frogs etc. etc.
Snails do tend to roam after rain-fall – I’m not implying that the 200+ snails at Windwick are the result of a ‘freak’ shower – just a bit of co-incidental reading. Mebbe?
Can’t help wondering what the folk at The Cairns broch would have made of it?….
http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=16370
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From ‘Emergence’ Magazine….
“A Whale in the Desert
Tracing Paths of Migration in Turkana
by Tristan McConnell
Photos by Sarah Waiswa
“The story of Turkana and the story of us are entangled … It is a tale of relentless movement, adaptation, and migration, of a shifting landscape, changing climate, and restless populations.”
“Archaeologists have long believed that the emergence of humankind can be traced back to a single point, originating 150,000 years ago in the crucible of East Africa. But recent studies by geneticists suggest modern humans arose from multiple ancestral populations. The theory envisions human evolution as a “tangled vine” in which several groups from across regions and time periods in Africa moved, mingled, and merged in response to shifting climate conditions before dispersing again across the continent, and then into the wider world. This reframing of our origin story from one of isolation to one of entwinement reveals mobility as our oldest and most instinctive survival strategy.
In this week’s essay, writer Tristan McConnell and documentary photographer Sarah Waiswa journey across Turkana in northwest Kenya—one of the birthplaces of our species. Layered with ancient tectonic fractures, volcanic ridges, and dry riverbeds, Turkana exposes how landscapes continually shift and reshape our patterns of movement—propelling us out and compelling us back. As climate change triggers great waves of migration, will we remember to move in tandem with our changing Earth? If we understood our origin story, our very existence, as a process of migration and merging, might we learn to embrace those who move?”
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Here’s one I made earlier…. https://theorkneynews.scot/2022/05/10/more-fun-with-limpets/
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