[I'll update this post as the season progresses instead of making new posts.]
I'm
in China for the rest of the spring (and a few days of summer) this
year! Yeah, you read that right! I'm still not rich though, if I was I'd
be all happy playing with Fancy Science Machines The main target is
thalloid marchantiophytes since 1. according to a Bryonet post by moss
researcher Bill Buck (and several not-Bill-Buck bryologists I personally
asked) there are no import restrictions on Marchantiophyta/Bryophyta
entering the United States, as long as no soil is brought along with
them 2. I aesthetically prefer the thalloid over leafy ones, mostly
because leafy ones' leaves tend to overlap or touch each other in mildly
annoying-looking ways when they branch. You know how those rosette
succulents start off as paragons of mathematical stylishness but tend to
get kinda misshapen when they branch because the two rosettes squish
against each other? Yeah, not a fan of that. I mean, even thalloid ones
can overlap each other, but because they don't have leaves to squish
against each other they don't look so annoying when they do it. Also
yeah yeah I know self-shading is so common in angiosperms because the
ecological costs of doing so are low (and, more interestingly, because
some species grow phenotypically different leaves specialized for shade,
and potentially are thus able to use light the sun leaves absorb
poorly) but I can't help but feel a little annoyed when a leafy
marchantiophyte grows over itself instead of in neat and tidy
self-avoiding fractal patterns. They don't look as good as bushes/trees
when they self-shade.
Anyways, enough blabbing about aesthetics.
I'm in subtropical Taicang as of this writing (it's my "home base", so
to speak) and I've found lots of bugs (some of which I'm also on the
fence about aesthetics-wise, so I'm going to post them all on a separate
page instead of here so as to not potentially interfere with my own
aesthetic. Don't judge me! I know it's kind of weird to be doing this
(especially considering I'm an Uncharismatic Microfauna/flora person)
but I'm still having my personal little aesthetics-ontology crisis okay?
With so little known about their ecology it's hard to judge whether a
superficially unappealing look actually serves some sort of ingenious
purpose or if it's just a flaw. And as I need to eat aesthetic decisions
to live the inability to figure out what's going on's really
frustrating. Wait, did I start blabbing about aesthetics again? Sigh.
Anyways, aside from that, eye candy without cool ecological stories
behind it bores me to death and if you're anything like me it'd bore you
too, and I'd rather not clog up my blog with too much boringness. I've
already posted years of mind-numbing small talk here for lack of
anything better to do and I've had enough of that (but the data is still
useful scientifically, which is why I bother to post it at all).
But
let's not go on another digression about that. So far as of this
writing (5/1) nothing particularly fun has happened yet, although what I
consider "fun" seems to be pretty different from most people's so maybe
you'll get a bigger kick out of it than I did. Taicang's ecology is
pretty wrecked, there're lots of Big Fancy Subtropical Bugs even in the
really shitty suburban areas but there's very little
wilderness-in-the-sense-of-nonanthropogenic-habitat remaining. If you've
interacted with me extensively you've probably heard me mention how in
Greater Los Angeles (and often in general, not just LA) even highly
weed-free urban/suburban anthropogenic native gardens have a pretty
messed-up ecology compared to weed-infested nonanthropogenic wilderness.
Some organisms just can't fly over to the urbs, and some organisms
require abiotic conditions abundant in disturbed wilderness but not
undisturbed artificial habitat, and no one entirely knows what those
abiotics actually are (although for LA thermal/hydrational refugia
appear to be a primary factor regulating aridland bug abundance,
especially considering how easily a lot of the rare LA ones reproduce
and survive in captivity indoors). I recognize the value and
biodiversity of what ecologists these days're calling "novel ecosystems"
but to not overcomplicate things let's just say that LA urban nature
(while impressive) is missing immense numbers of key floral and faunal
components and probably isn't the most valuable novel ecosystem, and for
Taicang the line between disturbed wilderness and urban/suburban
nonwilderness habitat is far blurrier than LA's but I want my thalloid
Marchantiophyta and as a rule urb/suburb nonwilderness tends to be too
disturbed to host many thalloid Marchantiophyta aside from the nursery
weeds.
To say "anyways" again, anyways I should probably take
some landscape photos of the area immediately adjacent to my residence
to give you an idea of what my surroundings look like. Internet photos
don't do it justice, they tend to be super photoshopped and fake-looking
(not even in the pretty sort of fake-looking, the cheesy sort). My
macro cam broke when it fell on the ground too many times and now it
can't zoom out very far. =(
Okay, enough trip-report-unrelated rambling for real this time. Now it's time for trip-report-related rambling!
Log:
Pre-4/30:
lots of bugs seen, not the Large Fancy Bugs but bugs nonetheless. The
ground has remained pretty dry lately, I'm guessing (can't be bothered
to check, tired & depressed) that the heaviest rains are during the
summer, and back when I was at Taicang in summer 2018 the Large Fancy
Bugs were everywhere. I didn't go very far from my residence as I was
scouting out the area for suburban Marchantiophyta (not much luck) and
documenting bugs (much luck) and more importantly waiting for stuff to
get fixed (part of the ceiling had mildew everywhere and the hot water
wasn't immediately working).
4/30: went to 金仓 Lake Park. The dirt was that sort of awful-looking dried mud that I've come to associate with really wrecked soil in California (e.g. Debs/Griffith/Elysian Park). It is of note that despite having only somewhat more invasive plant biomass (and in some areas significantly less invasive plant biomass) than places like the woods around NASA Jet Propulsion Lab the lab woods are significantly more biodiverse and normal-looking than anywhere in Debs/Griffith/Elysian if you ask me. The poor Targionia populations in Griffith are just barely hanging on. Anyways, I found no thalloid Marchantophyta but in a forest of identical-looking trees-in-rows ("liminal space" vibes) some petroleum company apparently created as "ecological restoration" there were some epiphytic leafy ones, to my mild(ly pleased) surprise.
Eventually
I realized the petrol forest wasn't the main entrance to the park and
went into the main entrance, which was pretty and colorful (there seem
to be no imgs of the colorful entrance online, maybe it's new enough
that no one's posted to Google/Baidu yet, but don't worry you're not
missing out on much it's an aesthetic you've probably seen before) and
had some generic ornamental landscaping flowers, which led to the
eponymous lake (no flowers there, just a dry-looking lawn). Inexplicably
the leafy Marchantiophyta were not around the trees at the entrance and
lake despite them seemingly being the same species as the petrol forest
ones, maybe because the petrol forest was densely planted and thus
allowed the bark to stay wet longer after rains. Anyways, here's
a pic from some random internet stranger of what the lake and
surrounding lawn area looked like. This internet photo does do the scene
justice, which is to say that it was not particularly impressive. I
figured that considering how fancy the entrance looked there might've
been something cool on the other side of the lake, but it was a large
lake to walk the entire perimeter of and golf cart* rides to the other
side were absurdly expensive so I decided not to chance it.
*I don't think it was for golf, but it was more or less the same type of vehicle as a golf cart.
Then
I went back to my "home base" to do some research on iNaturalist to see
which angiosperms in Taicang and neighboring areas were associated with
true wilderness.
5/1: did more research on iNat for much of the
day (and wrote this blog post), I feel like I've a reasonable
understanding of the bioindicators now (directly searching for which
ones were bioindicators on Google/Baidu is unhelpful, which is why I
looked at iNat and why it took me so long. Wouldn't have gone to 金仓 if it weren't so timeconsuming to find wilderness areas or bioindicators of such. Scanned
several thousand plant spp. and counting). 5/1 is Labor Day ofc so I
didn't go out much to avoid the traffic jams. Oh, and I realized the
landscaping around my residence has a single very small patch of
thalloids:
Suspect Reboulia.
