Naturalist Newsletter: Sep 5/ Snake in A Bucket

[Rob]

JIM CONRAD’S NATURALIST NEWSLETTER
Issued from Hacienda Chichén beside the Maya ruin of
Chichén Itzá in the central Yucatán, MÉXICO

September 5, 2010

*****

SNAKE IN A BUCKET
Alex of the grounds crew approached the hut warily
carrying a white bucket and I figured he was bringing
me a snake. It'd be a little one, though, because the
fellows are afraid of snakes. But I like those little
ones since usually they're the most interesting. I was
right. It was a juvenile, and like so many species it
was pale below but dark above, with no lines, bands or
blotches. However, some distinctive-looking black
facial markings on the head gave me hopes for naming
it. The snake made no attempt to bite or get away as I
reached into the bucket. You can see the little fellow
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905in.jpg

A shot showing more of the body, including the black
tail that was minus a couple inches of its tip, at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905io.jpg

Those black lines on the face and the black tail
nicely matched pictures in Jonathan Campbell's
"Amphibians and Reptiles of Northern Guatemala, the
Yucatán, and Belize." It's a juvenile Indigo Snake,
DRYMARCHON CORAIS. The species' Spanish name is
Arroyera de Cola Negra, or "Black-tailed Arroyo
Snake," an arroyo being a small stream that's dry most
of the time. With that black tail and lack of
blueness, the Spanish name for our snake is more
appropriate than its English name.

Back in the 70s my Zoology teacher back at the
University of Kentucky, Dr. Roger Barbour, kept a big
Indigo he'd collected in Florida in a large metal,
swimming-pool-like container near his office, and I
remember that amazingly easy-going snake as being a
very dark blue. However, Campbell describes adult
Indigos in our area as having the front half of their
bodies pale brown to olive-tan, becoming darker
further back, so that the tail and about the last
fourth of the bodies are blackish. There's been talk
about recognizing our snakes as constituting their own
tropical species distinct from the North's Indigos.

The thing about Indigo Snakes is that they can grow
very large. Occurring in Florida and Georgia, they're
regarded as North America's longest snake, the record
being 103.5 inches (262.8 cm, over 8.6 feet). In the
Yucatan we have two species that grow longer than
that, Boa Constrictors and Tiger Treesnakes.

Indigo Snakes eat frogs, lizards, other snakes, birds
and mammals. They don't constrict their prey like
Boas. They just rush and seize their prey, then
swallow it alive. That's often the way you find an
Indigo -- by its prey's distress calls as it
disappears into the snake.

Alex's little Indigo had been found in the tourist
area, so he couldn't be returned there. I laid him on
the ground beneath my Zinnias. Within two seconds he'd
slipped between the hut's foundation rocks, and I
figure that that's a good place for him.

*****

LEAFCUTTER ANTS EAT MY CHAYA
The edible-leafed Chaya in front of the hut has had a
hard time. Within a week of my planting it
caterpillars completely defoliated it. About a month
after new leaves had been issued, leafcutter ants
attacked, carrying away about half the leaves before
mysteriously moving on to other plants. This week the
leafcutters returned, and this time they completely
defoliated it again.

Leafcutters cut away small sections of many kinds of
leaves, carry the tatters back to their cavernous
subterranean nest -- these ants' nest lies about fifty
feet away (15 m) -- where the tatters are added to
masses of other leaf tatters, and then a certain kind
of fungus starts growing on the leaf-masses. The ants
will feed on the fungus, not the leaves.

You can see an ant excising a section of Chaya leaf at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905lc.jpg

A nice close-up showing how the spiny-backed ant holds
his fuzzy head at an angle in order for his sharp
mandibles to be in a better slicing position is shown
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905ld.jpg

That last picture is worth studying. For one thing, it
shows an ant cutting away the very platform on which
she is standing, plus there's another ant beneath her
holding to the same leaf section, that is about to be
cut loose.

In fact, as I watched individual leafcutters reduce my
poor Chaya to tatters, several times I saw ants cut
away the parts of the leaf they were standing on.
Usually they gradually moved onto the remaining part
of the leaf, or at least managed to grab hold of the
main leaf body before they fell, but sometimes they,
along with their leaf tatter, plummeted to the ground.
Sometimes the ant remained on the parent leaf while
only the tatter fell. Sometimes the ground below the
Chaya was almost green with fallen, unattended
tatters, but as night fell ants began clearing the
ground of dropped pieces, and carrying them away.

During these defoliations, if you watch a series of
individual ants at work, you'll probably get the
notion that they're a disorganized bunch. Often you
see ants carrying tatters the wrong way, returning to
the nest carrying nothing, or maybe just wandering
around bumping into other ants, not seeming to
accomplish anything constructive. Yet, at the end of
the day, it's impressive just how much they've cut and
carried away.

The continually flowing line of tatter-carrying
leafcutters passes right below the green, immature
Black Iguana I introduced you to last week, perched on
his little rock. That iguana lets thousands and
thousands of leafcutter ants pass less than a foot
below his nose, but the moment a grasshopper or
butterfly lands within twenty feet, like a streak he's
off. I suppose it's the formic acid in the leafcutters
that makes them unpalatable. However, the other day I
did see a Peacock walking along a row of leafcutters
crossing a corner of a parking lot just outside the
ruin's entrance, and that bird nonchalantly pecked up
quite a few.

A couple of days before the leafcutters attacked my
Chaya they'd started on the basil planted beside my
door. I happened to be sitting there just as the
defoliation began. In a spray bottle I had a small bit
of solution made from mashed garlic and Common Rue,
which earlier had seemed to keep caterpillars off my
cucumber plants. I sprayed the basil with what was
left of that and the ants immediately stopped their
predation. The unfortunate thing is that I have no
more garlic or Rue for making a spray.

Having leafcutters so handy, I've been able to study
what they do when it rains. From what I've seen, they
don't do much of anything. If the rain isn't hard,
they work through it. If it's a heavy rain, eventually
they drop their tatters and hold onto something or get
beneath something. I think a lot must drown. Within
half an hour of the rain's end, individual ants start
appearing on the old trail, some with tatters, and
start back toward the nest. If a big puddle lies
between them and their nest, they reach the water's
edge, drop their tatters, and wander around until
something happens. The tatters build up. Here puddles
never last long, so within an hour or so they do reach
their nest and all the tatters have disappeared.

During the dry season the leafcutters tended to work
at night and disappeared during most of the day.
Nowadays they work during the day and seem to quit
with darkness.

What curious, mysterious things these leafcutters are.
Really I understand why there's a discussion about
whether the "leafcutter organism" is the individual
leafcutter ant, or rather the whole nest -- individual
ants analogous to red corpuscles flowing along
arteries defined by scents on the ground. Information
flows from the brain (the queen) not along neurons,
but via chemicals passed from one ant to another. Who
says that a living body can't be diffuse, and must be
wet?

And if we can accept that an ant colony might
constitute a single living organism, then there's Gaia
to think about, and the Universal Unity...

*****

A PEACEFUL BUR-GRASS
Maybe you remember the vicious Coastal Sandbur grass,
Cenchrus spinifex, that so painfully stuck into feet
of those walking along the beach in Quintana Roo back
in late 2008. You can see those wretched, spiny fruits
at http://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/sandbur.jpg

Along the roads around here sometimes you see a member
of that same genus, Cenchrus, with spiky fruits the
way a Cenchrus fruit ought to be, but the spines are
too soft and blunt to penetrate the skin. You can see
a typical plant, with two flowering heads, at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905bu.jpg

The spiky fruits, which hardly prick at all, are shown
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905bv.jpg

This species isn't common enough in English speaking
countries to have its own English name, though it can
be referred to by the general names of bur-grass or
sandbur. It's CENCHRUS BROWNII, a fairly common weed
throughout much of the world's tropics, and supposedly
introduced here and there in the US Southeast.

As always, it's so neat to see "variations on the
theme," this time the theme being the genus Cenchrus.
Cenchrus brownii's memorable contribution to the music
that is Cenchrus is the relative softness and
bluntness of its fruits' spines. Cenchrus in general
is martial percussion and harsh, intimidating
tonalities, but Cenchrus brownii comes on as an
unforeseen strain on the French horn, masculine and
offish to be sure, but much mellower than the music
it's embedded in.

*****

TOMATILLO/ HUSK TOMATO/ TOMATE VERDE
Nematodes are killing all my tomato plants. As if to
compensate for that, my Tomatillos, PHYSALIS IXOCARPA
of the Nightshade Family, are four feet high (1.2 m),
loaded with flowers, and fruits are starting to form.
You can see a bug-eaten but vigorous sprout at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905ph.jpg

A 3/4-inch wide (1.8 cm) flower -- back side on the
left, frontal view on the right -- is shown at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905pi.jpg

A back view of the flower is included so you can see
the green calyx subtending the yellow corolla. In the
genus Physalis the calyx is important because it does
something extraordinary: After the flower is
pollinated and the ovary begins growing into a fruit,
the corolla falls off but the calyx begins enlarging
rapidly, soon completely inclosing the fruit. The
fruit becomes something like a small, immature, green
tomato suspended inside the papery, balloon-like
calyx, looking like a Chinese lantern, as shown at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905pj.jpg

In that picture the image at the left shows how the
"balloon" looks now hanging on the plant. On the right
one side of the bladder has been torn away to show the
immature, tomato-like fruit suspended inside.
Eventually the mature, tasty "tomato" will fill the
bladder. Back in Querétaro we bought such fruits in
the market, and you can see a collection of them at
http://www.backyardnature.net/q/physalis.jpg

You can imagine the benefit a juicy fruit has from
being suspended inside a bladder. Insects can't simply
light on the fruit and begin eating or depositing eggs
there. Also, the mature fruits of wild Physalis
species I know up North fill only a small portion of
their bladders, so the bladders are mostly filled with
air. When the bladders fall to the ground, fall and
early-winter wind often rolls them, with the fruits
and seeds inside them, across the ground for long
distances -- wind dissemination.

Up North wherever lots of Mexicans live sometimes
these fruits are sold in supermarkets. Sometimes they
are marketed as Husk Tomatoes but my impression is
that nowadays they're usually marketed under the name
Tomatillo, which is Spanish for "little tomato." Here
they're called Tomate Verde, which means "green
tomato." These names, plus names for the regular red
tomato, change from region to region in Mexico.

Since regular red tomatoes are in the genus
Lycopersicon, you can see that Husk Tomatoes/
Tomatillos, in the genus Physalis, aren't too closely
related. However, they do belong to the same plant
family, the Black Nightshade Family or Solanaceae,
which also holds the potato, tobacco, chili pepper and
petunias.

Around here everyone knows about the plant because the
fruits are much used in a tasty but not hot, green
sauce. They taste so good that I like to just eat them
raw, one after the other.

By the way, maybe you noticed that the flower in the
picture bore six calyx lobes, or sepals, six corolla
lobes and six stamens. Flowers with a symmetry based
on six usually are limited to monocotyledonous species
such as those in the Lily, Iris and Amaryllis
Families. In Nature, Physalis species -- usually
weedy, and called ground-cherries or Chinese-lanterns
-- almost always bear five-lobed calyxes and corollas,
and five stamens. As was the case last week with the
Star-Apple flower based on seven -- its symmetry also
departing from its normal number five -- horticultural
manipulation of important species often screws up the
genes so that you get species doing weird things. It's
the spots-on-cows phenomenon again.

*****

MAYA RAIN THAT BURNS
At the end of the dry season José the shaman brought
me a potted Rue plant, warning that if I let the plant
set out during the upcoming rains the leaves would
"burn." Once the rainy season was well underway, one
week suddenly the rains stopped and I had to start
watering the garden by hand again. One morning as I
went watering, just to have something to say as I
passed Don Filomeno, I said, "We need some rain, don't
we?" Don Filomeno looked at me with a look of surprise
and replied, "No! Rain will burn our plants. It's best
to have dry days and water each plant individually."

I've been asking my Maya friends what they mean by
rain "burning" things, since obviously we can all feel
that the rain falling each afternoon is cool, even
chilly.

José the shaman, to be counted on for the "official"
Maya line, like any good conservative, fundamentalist
religious figure, interprets the words his teachers
handed down to him literally. He says that rain
falling through hot afternoon air soaks up heat and
when it hits plants it releases that heat into them,
burning their leaves.

Luis, who maintains the traditional milpa, or
cornfield, and is as much a traditional Maya as José,
has a different concept. To Luis, what burns our
plants is rain that falls at night, and heavy dew.
Afternoon rains don't burn plants since sunlight can
dry them out. However, if rain falls onto an
afternoon's hot ground, vapors arise and that's really
bad news.

"The vapors carry the heat that's been stored up in
the ground and scald the leaves," he says. "When you
first touch ice, you can feel that kind of heat; the
ice feels like it's burning. It's hot coldness... "

The Maya fear of "rain burn" is so great that, José
tells me, commonly Maya women after an afternoon rain
go splash well or city water on their most prized
plants around the house, to wash the rainwater off.

Also José points to the fact that often, as with
Spanish Plums, fruits with no holes apparent in their
skins mature filled with worms. José explains this by
saying that fruit worms start out as seeds, but when
burning rain hits the flowers, the seeds turn into
worms. When I tell him about insects laying eggs
inside flower ovaries (the future fruits) with their
very slender ovipositors, without losing a beat he
counters that the worms always are there, but the hot
rain activates them.

A Northern gardener looking at "rain-burnt" leaves
recognizes classic symptoms of fungal disease --
dried-out, crumbling brown spots bordered by yellow on
green leaves. Naturally at this time of year fungal
diseases are rampant because of the combination of
heat and humidity, which is exactly what fungi need to
thrive.

When I was a kid on the tobacco farm in Kentucky
during the 1950s I was told to never water the tobacco
during the day or I'd burn their leaves. I think I
finally got that figured out. Broad, thin leaves of
young tobacco plants growing close together tend to
stick to one another when wet, so maybe that blocks
the leaves' air-admitting stomata. Maybe when the sun
is shining and photosynthesis is taking place fast,
needing quick gas exchange, cells of leaves with their
stomata blocked die from lack of air, or build-up of
toxins. Does anyone have a better suggestion?

Whatever the cause, I've certainly seen many tobacco
(and lettuce) leaves on young, close-growing plants
"burnt" after heavy dews, summer rains, and my own
rebellious midday waterings. This "water-burning"
notion is by no means restricted to the Maya.

*****

PLANTING LETTUCE IN ROWS
This Thursday Luis planted lettuce. Since he's using
traditional Maya seeds I'm interested in seeing what
the plants end up looking like. He sowed the seeds in
very straight, evenly spaced rows. I broadcast my
lettuce seed in beds, so I asked him why he uses rows.
"That's the way it's done," he replied.

Probably most Northerners also plant their lettuce in
rows, and I've never understood why. When you
broadcast them, the seeds end up more or less evenly
spaced with each seed having plenty of open area in
which to develop. In rows, however, seeds get crammed
so close together that they must compete with one
another for limited space, water and nutrients in the
row's vicinity, even while a lot of open soil between
the rows remains unused. To each lettuce seed, every
other lettuce seed is a "weed" competing for the
plant's needs. Planting seeds in rows is like planting
weeds with them.

Actually, probably I do understand why so many people
plant lettuce and similar plants in rows. It looks
more orderly and they think it's easier to tend. I
agree that it looks more orderly, but lettuce in my
beds needs no tending at all, other than the selective
thinning I do as I pick what I need for salads. I bet
that most people just unthinkingly plant in rows for
the same reason Luis does: "That's the way it's done."

*****

A VISIT TO PISTÉ
At least once a week during the last ten months I've
walked -- during the last month, biked -- into Pisté,
mostly to buy fruit. By now lots of people along the
way recognize me and we speak or nod to one another.
I'd never thought that a place like Pisté might
someday start feeling like a "hometown," but that's
become the case. There's a view of Pisté's downtown
area, with my fruit-buying place, the Frutería
"Dorcy," just beyond the big blue truck at the right,
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/100905ps.jpg

That picture was taken last Sunday morning at about
ten o'clock. After a clear dawn, clouds already were
curdling up for the afternoon downpour and the air was
so hot and humid that drops of sweat constantly had to
be shaken from the tip of my nose because they
tickled. My blue shirt was dark-blotched wet, and
stuck to my body.

At a little left of the picture's center you might
notice a shaded clutter at the roadside where you can
sit on the sidewalk and drink something cold, or go
into the dark, loud tortillaría behind you and buy
hot, freshly baked tortillas, or bucket-size masses of
masa (moist corn paste) for baking your own tortillas
over a fire, on a comal, back home. That's the way it
is in Pisté, lots of unexpected juxtapositions,
everything kind of a hodgepodge, really, all with a
friendly, homey feeling to it.

Pisté extends two or three blocks away from both sides
of the highway, which is Hwy 180 running between
Mérida and Cancún. The farther from the highway, the
more countrylike the streets become, the lusher the
vegetation, the more thatch-roofed huts you see, the
more goats and roosters you hear, and the more
interesting the plants around people's houses. Streets
generally end as weedy dirt trials continuing to ever-
more rustic homes.

Actually, backstreet Pisté is vibrant: Gaudy-flowering
greenery overflowing stone walls, kids everywhere
playing, crying, peeping around corners, sounds of
tortillas being patted into existence or maybe
methodical tapping from shops chiseling authentic Maya
wood carvings for sale in the ruins, dogs barking, a
little girl in yellow shorts and a pink Tweety-Pie T-
shirt coming down the street holding a clear plastic
bag of crushed ice in one hand and a liter plastic
bottle of black Coca-Cola in the other, behind her a
muddy pig chasing a dusty turkey... The animation goes
on and on, never ending, never going silent, and one
never tires of gawking, of letting the mind float down
street after street.

In fact, I used to think I'd like to live somewhere
like that, in a simple little hut amidst such
vivacious, colorful, congenial clutter. But, then I
thought of the noise. If a house has a radio, it's
played full blast, and the music is heavy on
accordions unless there's a teenager in the family,
and then it's hip-hop, boom-boom-boom, full blast. And
on every street there's at least one dog barking all
day and night, every day, year after year. And babies
crying, everywhere, everywhere, so many colicky
babies, plus all those crowing roosters, bleating
goats and sheep, gobbling turkeys, etc.

But, that's how life so often is: You're attracted to
something, feel like you really need it, but then you
get closer and it starts driving you crazy. In fact,
every trip to Pisté evokes in me that whole train of
thought, about it being human nature to overlook
problems associated with whatever it is you want
really badly.

So, when I go into Pisté I'm always glad to experience
the town's charm and friendliness, but then before
long I'm more than happy to get back to my own world,
which may not be as colorful and congenial-feeling,
but at least I don't have to listen all day and night
to colicky babies and accordions or hip-hop boom-boom-
boom.

*****

Best wishes to all Newsletter Readers.

Jim

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