Sci-Art Club

Come join the club and explore the connections between science and art with me!

11/04/2023

Spotted this fantastic coral tooth fungus, hericium abietis, in our backyard today. I've never seen them in our woods before.

09/13/2023

Front door friend.
European mantis - mantis religiosa.

08/27/2023

Making art with my little dude while camping 🎨 🥰

This was from our last camping trip, but it has inspired me to always bring some art supplies on our adventures.

Watercolor with fine tip/felt tip sharpie.

06/24/2023

Spiraled tendrils of a squash plant twis, grow, and climb to secure the plant against the wind and gravity.

A special layer of plant cells in the tendril shrinks, causing the structure of the tendril to become spring-like.
When stretched out, the tendril will not only return to its original shape, but it will actually curl tighter. This adaptation allows the plant to secure itself depending on the intensity of the environment.

06/23/2023

Backyard mood board.

01/21/2023

Mystery picture!
What do you see? Think? Wonder?
Can you guess what it is?
The answer will be in my story!

11/13/2022

Fall City Fall 🍂

10/13/2022

We gathered some moss and lichen today to make Autumn wreaths.

Then we got distracted and made a moss person 👤🌿

We also found some owl pellets and oyster mushrooms on our backyard walk 🦉

09/05/2022

Have you ever seen a watermelon 🍉 with symmetry and seeds that grow along spirals like this?

This is actually how watermelons used to look, before we modified the heck of the watermelon.

If you look at old paintings, you can see how watermelons have changed over time. The watermelon, that originated from Africa, was actually yellow like the one you see here. I'll put some old paintings in my story.

Humans love to experiment with selective breeding, so over time we have drastically changed what they look and taste like. Let's make it bigger, redder flesh, more sugar, less seeds, edible seeds, more water and even square...

Through selective breeding and modification, we have the common day bright red flesh watermelon 🍉.

But at what cost? We have lost some of the beauty of the symmetry that reminds us that the spiral is something we see commonly in nature. This is because the spiral is most efficient way for organisms to grow. The flesh of the watermelon is actually the placenta of the fruit in which the seeds grow along. This is the easiest most efficient path that requires less energy for the watermelon to grow.

When a biological organism, such as a watermelon or a nautilus, display a logarithmic spiral, it is considered a Fibonacci spiral. Next time you go outside, notice the spirals in how the branches and leaves grow on trees 🌿 Or how the seeds spiral out of the center of a sunflower 🌻 and of course, check your watermelons 🍉

05/21/2022

There is something I find so fascinating about slime molds. Stemonitis flavogenita is one slime mold that I see every year in our back yard on some dead alder trees. It's bright, almost florescent yellow is striking against the grey alder bark. The next day, it looks totally different (scroll through the pictures to see). Slime molds are actually classified as an amoeba (single-celled organism) and not a fungi. Sime molds typically spend most of their time in the microscopic world. When food the slime mold eats (bacteria) gets scarce, the unicellular organisms slowly move towards one another and form a colony (as seen). The colony then quickly produces spores that will hitch a ride in the wind💨, or maybe a raindrop💧.

04/30/2022

Cool bug alert ⚠️
Golden Buprestid - Buprestis aurulenta or the golden jewel beetle.

These beautiful metallic beetles have always been a mystery to me because I've only found them in and around my studio (which is actually our well our pump house), but never anywhere else around our property.
Mystery solved!

These extraordinary beetles are literally coming out of the studio walls...That's because these fancy pesks can infest lumber that structures are built with and sometimes live thru the milling process.

They typically emerge from the infested lumber 2-4 years later after completion of their development from larvae to beetle. There have been documented cases of buprestids emerging from construction of houses in which eggs must have been deposited at least 15-20 even almost 50 years prior! WILD.

During this time the larvae will go into a resting/pupal stage inside of an oval chamber called a pupal cell. The wood from our pump house originally came off our property and is typically a softwood like Douglas Fir. There's usually no point in treating the infested wood because once the beetles emerge, the life cycle is complete and they usually fly away and move on!

04/26/2022

Watch your step next time you are outside! There's a good chance you might step on some mycelium! Actually it's pretty hard to avoid... because it's almost everywhere!
We found some mycelium growing on this bark in our nature terrarium!Mycelium is part of the fungi kingdom. When we think of mushrooms 🍄 we typically think of the fruiting body but we don't always see what's going on below!
Mushrooms will fruit/grow from a white spiderweb like pattern (seen in the picture) - this is a complex network of threads called hyphae. Not all mycelia fruit mushrooms, but all mushrooms come from mycelia.
Mycelium and other fungi actually predate humans by MILLIONS of years!
Fun fact: there's a mycelium located in Oregon that is the world's largest organism that spans 2,384 acres of forest soil

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