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Weather or Not
By Dorothy MacFarlane
Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007
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I didn't think I would be writing about another warm winter so soon again, but this year is even worse than last. El Nino is supposed to be to blame this year, forcing warm air northward. It is hard to be upset, on the one hand, because heating costs are lower. On the other hand, what is happening to the plants and animals? One of my concerns is whether or not there will be any useable maple sap this spring. It will be hard to do the Maple Festival at the Nature Center (you can email them at: ssnsc@comcast.net) without fresh sap from flowing trees, not to mention the fact that there will be no syrup.
The Nature Center has several large vernal pools on the property. (Vernal pools are temporary woodland pools that fill with water part of the year and host an amazing variety of wildlife.) I sampled the water in two of them to see what was going on. Usually, this time of year, our pools are nearly full, and at least partly frozen. This year, they are not full, and have had minimal ice. The first pool I visited, Catbrier, is very low. The water is teeming with invertebrate life, including isopods, amphipods, daphnia, copepods, and, unfortunately, mosquito larvae. I didn't find fairy shrimp or hear wood frogs, two of the signature organisms of vernal pools. Wood frogs don't croak, they quack. Just hearing this spring cacophony coming out of the woods means there is a vernal pool nearby.
The second pool I visited, (We call it Pool No. One) is our deepest. It also was teeming with invertebrate life. My sample pulled up one of my favorite little water creatures, a flatworm called planaria. This tiny organism glides along on its stomach, and has an arrow shaped head with two eyes. When I was a kid, I used to fish for them in the river behind my house with a string tied around a small bit of meat. They are not the kind of thing you keep as a pet, so it was just to look at them.
Pool No. One also contained fairy shrimp. Their only habitat is vernal pools, where they live, breed and die in a season. Eggs are left in the mud to winter over for the next year. The eggs may remain viable for many years if water levels are not high enough for them to hatch.
Vernal pools are an important wetland type that has special protection. They may be certified by recording evidence of breeding populations of wood frogs, spotted salamanders, or finding fairy shrimp. These small pools may not look significant, but they help prevent floods, and by storing water, add to our underground water supply. True, they also are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, but nothing is perfect. Everything in nature is connected, even mosquitoes. Those larvae are food for the beetles and carnivorous larvae that also live in the pools. And then mosquitoes become adults, and look for animals to continue the food chain, including us. Here's to spring.
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