Tue 3/22: Fire and What Comes After

[Adrian Cotter]

Guest Speaker: Joan Hamilton 
7pm, Tuesday Mar 22nd, 2016
FREE Lake Merritt Rotary Nature Center, Oakland, CA 

Since September 2013, Joan Hamilton has been documenting Mount Diablo’s recovery from the Morgan fire. Come see how various parts of the mountain changed over time–and what scientists are learning from the 3,100-acre conflagration. 

 

Hamilton is a freelance writer and editor who writes regularly for Bay Nature magazine. She  also produces Audible Mount Diablo–a series of downloadable hiking guides–and is a former editor-in-chief of Sierra magazine. 

Announcements

• There's a new UC California Naturalist program that will be in the Presidio (at Sports Basement) starting April 26th.
  More information here: https://seaturtles.org/newssection/calnat/
  
  
• Seen any raven's nesting -- Adrian is still working on his project tracking ravens in San Francisco, and would appreciate any leads! aco...@nonsensical.com

Lecture Notes

Trent Pearce joined us February 25th, 2016 at the Lake Merritt Rotary Nature Center to introduce us to the Kingdom of Fungi, focusing on mushrooms. As with many of our lectures, I didn’t really know how little I knew.

First of all, Trent asked what are Fungi? We can say they are not plants… they are in fact closer relatives to humans than plants are. They are consumers of other things, they don’t produce their own food. They also have chitin in their cell walls. Chitin is a sugar that is also found in insect exoskeletons, and is what provides structural support to the organism.

The Fungi kingdom includes yeasts, chytrids (the fungus causing problems for amphibians), molds, lichens, and mushrooms. Fungi split off from animals on the order of 650-900 million years ago. Our common unicellular ancestor has carried on as choanoflagellates (of which there are about 125 species). For a long time Fungi were considered by science as part of the Plant Kingdom. The inventor of our current scientific classification of organisms Carl Linnaeus in ~1735 only had plants and animals separated out as kingdoms. It wasn’t until 1959, when Robert Whitaker separated them out as their own things.

Future Talks

* April 18th, Historical Atlases of the Environment - Megan Prelinger  (San Francisco, Green Apple on the Park)

* May TBD, Restoration in the Presidio