Exploring the eyes (the adventurous way)

You will never see me suggesting a dissection.

It's not that I don't see the importance of cutting into animals to see how they work, but there are a lot of very explicit dissections and medical procedures on the Internet. We can let things live now.

There are some really good alternatives to getting your hands into some cadaver's abdominal cavity: Two are Internet videos, and yourself. I'm not suggesting that you take a scalpel to your torso. But everyone (sooner or later) has medical procedures and we finally have free access to our medical records. In my case, my doctors use a tool called "My Chart". I'm having a blast with it.

After I had the cataracts removed from my eyes (both of them in two sessions), I watched the procedure on YouTube. The surgery itself was painless and fascinating. I enjoyed it thoroughly. The videos were great, too.

I'm glad I waited to watch them until after my surgery!

And now, after knocking the retina loose in my left eye and having it fixed, I have learned a lot about eyes.

Actually, you can see inside your own eyes. Much of my Observing and Recording LabBook (on this page

https://theriantime.wordpress.com/labbooks)

Is about vision and there are explorations of the inside of your eyes. Check it out.

There is that other thing.....

If you hunt for food, you'll be killing and "dressing out" animals. If you're going to be disassembling animals for food, you might as well be learning anatomy while you do it. Just stay safe.

There are at least two famous cases of biologists that were killed by their own curiosity.

In 2007, Eric York, a research biologist in the Grand Canyon National Park, found a collared female cougar dead of unknown causes. Taking her back to his lab, he opened her up to try to determine what killed her. He soon became sick and succumbed to pneumonic plague (closely related to bubonic plague).

In 1626, Sir Francis Bacon, father of modern experimental science, bought a bird from a woman, had her clean it, and stuffed it with snow to study how well it preserved the meat. There was a lot of trudging around in the winter weather. Soon after, Sir Bacon died of pneumonia.

So learning is fun.....just don't kill yourself doing it 

Do you have access to your medical information? If not, you're doctor's staff may be able to tell you how to get access. When you get the results of a visit, look them up online to see what they mean.

For instance, using My Chart, I can see that my last visit to my surgeon included an ocular coherence tomography and that some "drusen" were found. There are links that explain these terms. In addition, there is an article about ocular coherence tomography on the Wikipedia site.

Cherry Creek: Monaco to Nine Mile Station

For anyone following this blog, you've noticed that I've slowed down considerably. That's partially a result of the two months stagnation after my eye surgery this year and the accumulated effects of aging. 

When I first moved to the Denver area eleven years ago, an endurance hike was thirty miles. Now it's ten. This leg of the trip up Cherry Creek was around five miles according to Google Maps but I noticed about a mile into it that I had left my wallet at home and walked another mile to retrieve it. With a one and a half mile hike to and from the train station, that adds up to about ten miles. I was pretty whipped at the end but I still had enough energy to wash the supper dishes, so I'm not completely debilitated yet.

This section of Cherry Creek is not the most scenic, as it flows mainly through residential and industrial areas, carving its way through deep sandy sediment. Being an active flood plane, this soil is geologically very recent.

It's a popular stretch of trail near Greenwood Village so the traffic is heavy with bicyclists, walkers, and hikers. The plants are a mix of indigenous and introduced species. I didn't see any big predator or prey animals but I've seen reports of both deer, Coyote, and bear in the area. The creek and Greenway provides a natural corridor for wildlife coming up from the less inhabited canyons and Palmer Divide to the South.

The deep layers of sediment laid down by past flooding shows a typical soil profile. The layer of humus at the top is thin. Past vegetation on the plains (this is the beginning of the Great plains) is sparse and gets washed off regularly. Beneath is a thin layer of leached soil. The clayey layer below tends to hold darker ionic materials that are drained into it from above and that darker layer is thick and goes down to the bedrock that fills the Denver basin....eroded materials washed out of the Rocky Mountains. You can faintly see layering where different floods deposited various materials and hollowed out softer sediments. 

Cherry Creek has been around long enough to have developed some decent meanders.

Sage (Artemisia tridentata) is so common out here that it's become indelibly a part of the spirit of the West. How many western bands have had "Sage" in their name. It's a typically scrubby plant. A lot of the plants on the plains are low and tough. They have to be to withstand the winds and sharp, and often brutal, shifts in weather. Despite the fact that this plant lives next to a watercourse, unless it's actually in the creek, it's in a very dry environment. It rains a good bit, but the air is so dry that anything wet will soon be dry again and the soil is loose and sandy and drains rapidly.

Big plants (trees) that are indigenous to this area have to be able to manage their water well. They usually live right next to a stream and there aren't many - mostly cottonwood and willow. Most of the trees you see in these photos were introduced and cultivated to become part of our urban forest.

This pretty little ground cover always catches my eye. I can never remember the name so I use Google Lens to look it up.

Oh, yeah. "Silver mound". It's another Artemisia.  It's pretty common out here.

Looking north, back the way I came, that cloud sorta bothered me. It was talking. Weather closer to the mountains, about twenty miles west where I live, doesn't worry me.....even the occasional hurricane force winds and hail. But even here I'm on the plains. They get tornados and the lightning is considerably more dangerous.

I have rain gear in my pack (always) but, even so, a downpour would be inconvenient. Luckily, it passed by to the north.

The Rockies, to the West, are an ever present sight here. 

Gaillardia Pulchella is a common wildflower here. Also called Fire wheel Daisy or Indian Blanket, it really stands out in the landscape.

Ants are less common here than they are in the Southern United States but they are here.

It's still autumn here and we've had a nice display of fall colors this year thanks to more rain than usual.

This squirrel was curious, but not enough to come completely out of hiding.

The Highline canal crosses Cherry Creek here through a syphon. 

The diversity of cactuses increases in the mountains (the state cactus is the Claret cup) but the plains still see the wide spread prickly pear. Best I can tell, those are all over the coterminous United States. We had them growing both wild and in gardens in Alabama. Although the modified stems (the "mouse ears") and leaves (the spines) aren't very showy, the big yellows blooms are gorgeous and the "pears" are edible. My housemates were waxing nostalgic about eating prickly pears the other day.

We have a lot of corvids in the Denver area, crows, ravens, a variety of jays, but magpies are most common in the South Denver Metro Area. In other places in the US, they can be a rather obnoxious bird but around here they are, across the board, a friendly creature unless you get too near a nest. A friend calls them "tuxedo crows".

About two-thirds of the way from Monaco and the end of my hike, I begin to see my destination, the large dam that impounds Cherry Creek Reservoir.

This massive earth embankment plays a major part in the next section of my journey up Cherry Creek, so I will hold off discussing it for now.

Keeping with tradition for the Denver area, Aurora (the largest eastern area of the Denver Metro Region) has plenty of public art scattered around. John King's 16 foot high kinetic structure was awaiting me where I exited Cherry Creek trail at South Havana Street. Here, I had to do a little road work to get to the light rail station.

Nine Mile Station is a little daunting with its labyrinth of tunnels leading to train and bus terminals, parking garages, and passing under heavily trafficked highways and rails to the area under the dam. In the center courtyard is this minimalistic, abstract clock tower. It's a train station.....people need to know what time it is. (Of course, in the band, Chicago's opinion, "Does anybody really care?")

Nine Mile Station, like the Four Mile House Historic Park is situated near a pioneer way station. It was at the nine mile mark outside Denver on the Smoky Hill Trail.

Unlike Four Mile Station (best I can tell) there's nothing left of the historic site of Nine Mile house.

The Smoky Hill Trail was named for the Smoky Hill River that paralleled most of its way. It developed from a Native American trail through prime huntng range. It started in Atchison, Kansas and continued to the Kansas River, along the Smoky Hills River and Cherry Creek, to Denver.

The site of the Nine Mile House is today on the other side of the dam, under water.

The Nine Mile Station platform provides some great views of Cherry Creek Reservoir and the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop to the Denver Tech Center and the surrounding area. To the south is the familiar profile of Pike's Peak.

And Pike's Peak.....

From here, it's a short train ride back to Arapahoe Station and the mile and a half hike back home.

These hikes are scratching my itch to follow a way (in this case, Cherry Creek) from one end to the other. On the next link of my journey I'm going to skip the unremarkable trail along the base of Cherry Creek Reservoir dam to the next light rail station to the west and take it up at Dayton Station. See you there.

Biology resources

There have been many changes in science curricula since I was in school. Most of the stuff back then was descriptive. Physics was more structural mechanics. Now there's a lot more subatomic stuff and cosmology. Chemistry was more about how the elements and their compounds looked and behaved. Now, there's a lot more mathematics....calculating yields and such, and more about what happens at the atomic level.

Biology.....they used to talk about cells, organization of bodies, cell division, and the tree of life (organization of species) but now the tree of life is a different tree. It used to be based on observable similarities between different plants and animals ( and there were only two kingdoms.....plants and animals) but now it's based on similarities between their DNA which reflects how living things are related through evolutionary development.

I'm watching the lectures from the MIT introductory course in biology. They start with molecular chemistry then briefly touch on cellular organization. Then they spend a lot of time on how genetic materials translate into proteins. They end up with considerable amounts of medical biology....stem cells, immunology, cancer...

If you want a deep introduction, the MIT course is at https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-016-introductory-biology-fall-2018 .

As usual, there's a lot out there. Let's see. What's in my tool chest? It's nice to have all my tools in one place so I try to consolidate as much as I can on my phone. Beside the general purpose apps I've been using (the calculators, sensor apps, and general purpose tools) there are some useful programs specifically oriented toward biology.

A major emphasis on biology is imaging. Biological entities range from submicroscopic viruses (we won't be looking at them since it would take some very expensive and very non-portable equipment, like electron microscopes. We might do some Internet safaris, though ) to whole forests of Aspen trees (an Aspen Grove may well be a single organism.) The parts of organisms are important also, from the molecules that power them (again, too small for us to actually see) to individual cells, to whole ecosystems.

I walked down to Dry Creek Park the other day to take some pictures. I was a bit disappointed. We're in a period of cooling and frequent storms and everything was quiet......no birds or squirrels in sight. The creek was flowing so that microorganisms are washing downstream.....no stagnant water there to play with and the cold water encourages them to go dormant. Still, I got a few pictures.

This ash tree was still green. The grass in my lawn looks like it's getting ready for fall but the trees haven't quite caught on yet 

I have some identification books stored in my phone but I used Google Lens to check my identification. Once you have an image in Google Pictures, a poke at the Lens button  will search the Internet for a similar image. There are similar apps available for different phones and computers.

I can zoom in with my phone camera to about eight times (8x) but notice that, in the photos of an ash leaf above, the more I zoom, the blurrier the picture is. In an electronic camera, the number of light sensitive elements (pixels) there are in the CCD (charge-coupled device chip...the part of the electronic camera that replaced the film in older cameras and changes patterns of light into electrical signals)  is constant. Since the picture resolution is determined by the number of pixels available, that's constant, too. Resolution is usually specified as the number of pixels on the CCD. In my phone, the front camera ( the one on the same side as the user....the "selfie camera") has 16 mega pixels ("mega"="million") and the back camera (the one I usually use) has 50 megapixels. My phone actually has three lenses that focus the light on different sections of the CCD.

Imaging is important in biology because there is so much detail that matters that is hard or impossible to see. You probably got to use laboratory microscopes in school that magnified to over a thousand times. Field microscopes are usually lower powered for a couple of reasons. Portability is an obvious virtue in a microscope that will be in the field. Often, though, samples are brought back to the laboratory for examination. Most laboratory microscopes used to look at field samples trade resolution for field of view. They're usually bulkier than laboratory microscopes and have two eyepieces ("stereoscopic microscopes") to enhance the dimensionality of the image.

I determined the optical characteristics of my camera here:

http://adventuringbcc.blogspot.com/2021/05/i-am-camera.html

I have a very portable clip-on microscope for my phone that is quite serviceable in the field. It's rated at 60x magnification with more magnification possible with zoom.

That's sorta an advertising misinformation. You can get larger pictures with electronic zoom but the resolution remains the same so a zoomed picture will be blurry. Still, you have to zoom to get rid of the "tunnel" effect in the top picture above. I can get a fairly reasonable image at around 80 or 90x. The maximum around 120x is pretty poor.

There are ways to improve a blurry image. Most phone cameras have editing features that allow you to play around with a photo image. "Sharpen" is one that can improve an enlarged image. It senses borders in the image and averages the values of the pixels around the border, replacing the pixels on the border with the averages. It's an illusory improvement that can miss some important details, but with some skill, a photographer can get some decent photomicrographs like that. There are also "magnifying glass" apps that have the sharpen feature built in.

The bottom line is that if you want really good photomicrographs, use optical magnification instead of electronic (zoom) magnification.

I also have a clip-on front camera microscope that has a stage like laboratory microscopes and uses transmitted light (my other clip-on has a built in light that reflects light off the sample). Actually, I got that microscope with the "Cells" Science Wiz kit. 

Here is some stuff I found in Little Dry Creek. It's not very impressive since the water flow was pretty high and the water was cold. All the little beasties were hiding for the autumn. The magnification is about the same - around 60x.

Big things and distance views are important in biology field work also. My Carson telephoto lens will give me a moderate field, zoomable, magnification of six times. That's about perfect for wildlife photography. You want to be far enough from wildlife to avoid spooking them or from being mauled or trampled by them.

At telephoto distances, tiny movements of the camera can blur the image so a camera tripod with a phone adapter is necessary. For wildlife photography the tripod needs to be set up in a location that's as obsured as possible and a portable blind is useful. On the day I was taking photos for this blog, everyone was at home asleep. Winter does that sometimes. Anyway ....leaves.

And, of course, phone cameras usually have a video mode that lets you take movies of, say, wildlife behavior.

Microscopy requires things like stains, slides, droppers, knives to slice samples. There are good kits that aren't expensive. I have a couple from Home Science Tools and the Cells kit from Science Wiz.

A particularly useful tool is a microtome that lets you make very thin slices of materials to put on microscope slides. You can pay as much as you want for one. Mine:

an economy model, cost less than $20 and came with a razor blade. It's basically a flat plate with a screw piston that pushes the sample by tiny increments up through the center of the plate so it can be sliced off. Table models can run to four figures but you don't want a table models in your backpack, anyway.

I won't be doing any high powered microscopy but it can be pretty fascinating. You can equip yourself for considerably less than a thousand dollars (or more) and a good source is American Science and Surplus. Avoid the cheap kiddie microscopes. The affordable ones have poor, plastic optics and are not worth the savings. A good option, around $100 is the Celestron line of digital microscopes. 

There's life out there (even in the winter.) so go out and study it!

The Education of Wolf VanZandt....in Biology

So, how do I relate to biology? Well, I am biological. I'm right in the middle of it all 

I don't understand how a person who pours over their car's driver manual can completely neglect learning about their own bodies . Sure, it's more complex, but it's also a lot more critical.

My first few months of college was just general curriculum but that quickly phased into a five year program in pharmacy. That was, of course, all kinds of biology. My first college course in biology was an introduction to biology. It was a laboratory course. We went into the classroom to perform the next exercise. The only time we saw an instructor was if we needed extra help. Tests were administered by assistants. I think that was my favorite college course.

I was sick for a week during that time and got behind, so when I went back I spent a day catching up on dissections. I also learned what formaldehyde poisoning felt like.

I met my longest term friend there. Paul Holm and I have been hiking together from that class in 1973 until I moved to Denver in 2013. We still check on each other occasionally.

There was a series of courses in Pharmacy that pushed my memory past its limits. It was a three quarter series and we were required to memorize 20 drugs a day....chemical and trade names, major manufacturers, chemical structure, action on the body, side effects. The courses were pulling my grades down and I intended to get a double major so with two quarters left to gain a degree in Pharmacy, I transfered to the School of Psychology.

At the time, neuropsychology wasn't a thing, but that was where I wanted to go so pharmacy was a way to get a solid foundation in physiology before moving to the more behavioral aspects of psychology. A student had to choose a framework to follow and, at Auburn, the choices were behaviorism (which I dispised at the time) and personality psychology (which, although I enjoyed, I wanted something more integrated.....there wasn't the "integrated psychology" discipline at the time). There was also social psychology and that was the closest match to what I wanted that I could find. And after graduating with a bachelor's degree in psychology, I entered a master's curriculum in rehabilitation and special education with focused in vocational evaluation and research design. And that was my formal education.

My informal education involved asking questions about everything that came up. I've always seen my medical incidences as opportunities to learn, including things like endurance hikes that pushed me beyond my limits, where my "instruments would swing into the red zone".

For instance, I'm just finishing up surgery and recovery for a detached retina. I have plenty of intimate details about my eyes (which I will share with you as time goes on). The bubble vanished the day before yesterday; I am again free to hike above 7000 feet and I am able to concentrate for more than five minutes on what I am typing.

So, where I stand in respect to biology.....I'm not a biologist but I am a retired public health professional. I have plenty to learn but I've picked up a lot along the way.

And it's not bookkeeping, so I have the incentive to learn.

So, what about you? Are you interested in the life around and in you and how it works? Biology gets as deep as you might want to go.

Hiatus

Yeah. I know. It's been a while.

That's because I have recently had surgery to repair a detached retina. Between that and the prednisolone they have me on, it's a chore stringing words together to make a sentence. (Remember that a sentence is the smallest unit of language that conveys a complete message. My sentences currently.....well,....)

Anyway, it'll be awhile before I start writing blogs again 

On the other hand, the surgical team at UCHealth did a great job and, since I'm shifting to biology, I have some great content for future blogs.

Cherry Creek: From University Boulevard to Monaco

I have an app on my phone called "Flow Alert" (by Shaina Schwartzel) that lets me keep up with the streams in my area. Since Cherry Creek is somewhat more variable than some of the Creeks in the area and given to flash flooding, I check it before I hike the Cherry Creek Trail. It spiked from 64.7 cubic feet per second flow to 125 cfs on the 10th of this month (February).

I began this hike behind Cherry Creek Shopping Center, the big shopping district on University Boulevard. As shown above, Cherry Creek is a respectable stream here.

There are several of these weir dams along the length of the creek. They're pretty and produce a nice rushing sound but they're obviously man-made and the primary purpose is erosion control. The average flow rate of 23 cfs with a range from 3 to 146 cfs isn't too shabby and has produced a considerable valley. In fact, the Valley Highway (I-25) runs along the rim between the South Platte River and Cherry Creek Valleys. Cherry Creek flows it's full length down into the Denver Basin.

Off to the left of the photo, out of sight, is a man and his dog throwing duck food to the duck convention. Local residents make this stream especially popular with water fowl.

Another broad cascade.

It might not be a work of art, but bathrooms are not common in Denver and are much appreciated. There are websites that let visitors in on the secret spots. Actually, Google Maps will tell you where the "bathrooms near me" are. Just type it into the search bar.

The Four Mile House was built in 1859, making it the oldest surviving structure in Denver. It was the last way station on the Wells Fargo Butterfield stage coach route between El Paso and Denver. People would stop there to freshen up before entering the big city of Denver. It was, of course, four miles from the terminal stop.

There are exhibits and, if you plan you might catch one of their many events. Of course, they have a website to help you plan 

https://www.fourmilepark.org/

And there is an old wagon there to remind you how wonderful transportation was back then.

Some people call these Conestoga wagons but "Conestoga" is a specific brand of wagon. They were huge, heavy wagons built to carry tons of supplies and they were almost completely used in the Eastern United States. By the time folks were traveling west, these smaller wagons were the common conveyance. They were basically farm wagons with a cover.

This long, straight section of Cherry Creek was the last on this hike and lead me to Monaco Boulevard where I caught a bus to the Southmoor Station and then a train home.

Waterways have always been the lifeblood of cities. Does your town have a stream nearby and does it serve a purpose for the people living there: drinking water, irrigation, transportation and commerce, sewage....