Diario de lfel

So I decided to look for certain species and mostly saw all of them on my walk through campus and on my way home. Common Dandelions, Daisies, and Bermuda Buttercups are everywhere. As it is spring they are also in full bloom and easy to see along the street and on campus. The Nasturtium is also everywhere, but the particular image I found was one coming up from a hedge on campus.

I went to the beach in San Diego and observed a few items, but my main hike was up the fire trail behind Clark Kerr. What I learned most about was the wide variety of wild plants and wild life that live here! It is definitely possible to get 50 different taxa. I would have done that but birds, lizards, and bugs kept escaping my phone's lens. I also found it interesting that the two sides of the trail had completely different taxa depending on the sun light, the different zones were quite stark and you could see the environmental reasons why (sun/shade, where water runs in the rain, etc)

I also learned about fasciation, which is a mutation in the plant which makes the tissue of a vascular plant become flattened, ribbon-like, crested, or elaborately contorted. I have no idea what kind of plant I saw, I labelled it as "flowering plant" but it was definitely something I had never seen before. I actually thought it was just some strange plant that grew like that on purpose until I ironically saw an article on buzzfeed.com entitled "confused plants" and saw a similar looking mutation!

There are many signs of spring around Berkeley. Not only are the flowering plants showing signs, but animals are out and about.

First I noticed a large brown/gray spider on my walk to the RSF.

Secondly, you can hardly go a block without seeing Bermuda Buttercups.

Third, dandelions and other "weeds" are flowering.

1. Irregular: black calla. This plant is clearly irregular because the flower is almost like a curled leaf, when you roll it out you do not have radial symmetry. I am not sure if this flower is naturalized, typically they are, but its located in a center median type structure that is overrun with weeds.
2. Regular: dandelion. A Taraxacum is a regular flowering plant because it exhibits radial symmetry.
3. Monocot: Bluebell. You can tell the blue bell is a monocot by the parallel veins in its leaves.
4. Dicot: ivy plant. Not sure what type of ivy this plant is, however you can see it is a dicot because of the branching out of the veins and the multiple cotelydon.
5. Fabacaea: wisteria sinensis. This plant has pod like seeds, unfortunately it was flowering and not producing these. The flower is evident of its membership in the fabacaea family as you can see in its structure
6. Gymnosperm: Tree. I think this is in the conifer family of trees, which are gymnosperms. Gymnosperms are nonflowering plants that are seed bearing plants, such as pinecones.
7. Nonseed Plant: Moss. Mosses are nonvascular, nonseed plants. They reproduce using spores not seeds.
8. Pinnate Leaves: Fern. Not sure what type of fern this is, however ferns have pinnate leaves because they shoot off the common branch. Some plants in the palm family are pinnate, but these are not so common around Berkeley.
9. Opposite Leaves: Plant. I have no idea what kind of plant this is. It has white flowers and opposite leaves. The leaves are opposite because they split off in opposite sides from the same point on the branch, in contrast to alternating leaves.
10. Sunflower Family: Zinnia. The sunflower family is the largest of the plant flamilies. I had hoped to find an actual sunflower, but these zinnias worked. They are cheerful little pom pom like flowers.

For this exercise, I first went to the Berkeley Marina and after not being able to find at least five of the, "iconic taxes," I resorted to exploring the neighborhood.

While at the marina I was able to find

1) Mollusks: The Limpet, which one typically finds on docks, rocks and old wood around the beach. In addition, the rock I photographed had another organism on it, but I wasn't sure which organism it was.

2) Birds: There were lots of birds, mainly gulls and one stork that I saw, however they flew away before I could get a sufficient photograph of the stork and other longer beaked birds. I got a low quality of what I assume to be a standard sea gull.

3) Plants: There were a variety of plants down at the Marina, however I chose to use a moss I found in my neighborhood. This moss was growing on a rock in a shady area, none of the other rocks/trees it was around had it which I found interesting

4) Animals: The animal I chose to use was a worm I found underneath a rock at my apartment, I thought the worm was particularly interesting because it was very dark and had kind of a snake like head. I do not know much about worms so I was not able to really narrow down what kind of worm it was aside from the fact it was a worm.

5) Arachnid: Unfortunately, I really wanted to photograph the spider that lives behind my driver's side view mirror, however, while I see its web, I have never actually seen it. So instead, I was forced to search my apartment for a spider, as I failed to find one on my walks. I found this large legged spider hanging in a corner. I assumed it was a Daddy Long Legs. I began to search through spiders, and got confused as I read something that said these were not a member of the Arachnid family, but in fact under Animalia.