The Short-Tailed Shrew, an evolutionary superstar

He [Raven] looked about and thought there was nothing on the land as lively as the fish in the water, so he made the shrew-mice, for he said, “They will skip about and enliven the ground and prevent it from looking dead and barren, even if they are not good for food.”                                                                                     – from Clara Bayliss’s 1909 collection A Treasury of Eskimo Tales.

Northern Short-Tailed Shrew (Blarina brevicauda) sniffing the air for prey

Creation myths aside, our early mammalian ancestors were little omnivorous insectivores very much like modern shrews.  Mammals evolved some 200 million or so years ago and lived alongside the dinosaurs, but did not grow to large size until millions of years after the dinosaurs went extinct some 65 million years ago.

Today we are a diverse group of flying, swimming, and running creatures ranging in size from the blue whale 120 feet long with a heart the size of a small car down to shrews no more than a few inches long, weighing less than an ounce.  We don’t know much about our early ancestors, small terrestrial creatures rarely leave fossil remains, but from what we can tell it seems that the shrew body design and hunting strategy is extremely successful and has remained a persistent mammalian body plan.

Shrew-like creatures live all over the world and are renowned for their ferocity, appetite, boldness, and their unusual (at least in mammals) venomous bite.  Here in Vermont the shrew you are most likely to encounter is the Northern Short-Tailed Shrew (Blarina brevicauda).  As near as I can make out, Blarina roughly translates to “nose-necked” and brevicauda actually does mean “short-tailed”, making this one of the few animals that has a matching common and scientific name.  Shrews are in the Soricidae family, which just means, “the shrew family.”

Short-Tailed Shrew running over freshly cut grass

Shrews move rapidly, driven by their rapid metabolism and resulting need to eat constantly.  They move with a peculiar blend of short, jerky twitches and weasel-like fluidity.  The shrew in the photos was hunting for insects and earthworms in freshly cut grass.  I followed it for perhaps 200 feet, and during that time it only stopped to sniff out prey, to eat it, and to hide from the dog that wanted to know what I was watching so avidly.

Like many predators, shrews are curious, engaging in high risk, high reward activities.  Their eyesight is poor, but their sense of smell is excellent.  How good their hearing is seems to be uncertain, some people thinking it is good, others poor.  I suspect that it is pretty good and that they are sensitive to vibrations via their whiskers and feet.

Searching for food

Unlike many animals the shrew had no fear of me what-so-ever, not even flinching when I stroked its back as it ate one of the 4 earthworms it caught while I was watching.  Every small animal nearby, on the other hand, was terrified of the shrew.  Insects froze into immobility, antennae twitching and heads slowly tracking as the shrew passed by.  Well should these creatures be wary of the shrew.  If a shrew goes more than a few hours without eating it will starve to death.

Short-Tailed shrews are tiny, massing between 2 and 5 US quarters (about .5 to 1 ounce), but they are perfectly capable of killing and eating prey several times their size.  There is a 3 minute National Geographic TV video of a shrew exploring a garden, then killing and eating a garter snake much larger than itself.  Most of the time shrews will content themselves with insects, worms, and seeds.

The dense fur of a shrew

Shrew fur is thick and dense, like the fur of an otter, but lacking the oily guard hairs.  The fur is so dense that it is waterproof, allowing some species of shrew to hunt underwater.  Shrews need this dense fur to keep warm through the winter.  Their small size means they lose heat quickly, necessitating both a rapid metabolism and good insulation.  In winter they remain beneath the snow as much as possible, eating cached food, keeping activity to a minimum, and burning brown adipose tissue (what we commonly call “brown fat”) to keep warm without resorting to shivering.

They have as many predators as they have prey, but their venom and unpleasant musk helps to keep some mammalian predators at bay.

Shrews are tremendously strong for their size.  I could see the back and neck muscles bulging as this shrew pulled earthworms from the soil.  It pulled a short section of the worm from the ground and ate it, pulled another short bit, ate that, and continued, as though it was eating Twizzlers at the movies.

Pulling an earthworm from the ground

We humans are proud of our accomplishments, but perhaps we should be more humble before the little shrew.  This tiny creature, so easily killed by a careless foot is upholding 200 million years of successful mammalian tradition, wearing a body design that gave rise to all other mammals from humans to whales, bats to elephants, beavers to monkeys.

Meteor Impacts and Ourselves

I am fascinated and enthralled by things that fall from space and the marks they leave behind.  It’s not just my love of space, it’s is something far more profound, it is in part what those things signify.

Go to a museum, one that has meteorites.  Often there will be at least one display of a metallic body that you can touch.  Lay your hands on it, press your palms against it, feel the soft curves, the slightly nubby surface, the coolness of the blackened metal.  You are touching the core of an extinct planet.  That should give you pause and send a small shiver up your spine.

On Earth there less than 200 known, confirmed, impact structures.  Just looking at the map it is clear that the distribution is skewed to areas where there are many people (North America & Europe), exposed bedrock (Canada & Scandinavia), or regions where weathering is slow (Australia & North Africa).

Confirmed impact structures on Earth from: www.meteorimpactonearth.com

Every other rocky body in the solar system is liberally coated in the scars left by impacts.  The Earth bears the history of its impacts in a different way.  Weathering, plate tectonics, and the oceans have served to hide the marks of the numerous past impacts.  Except…

The global ocean, that covers 70% of the surface of the planet to a depth of 7 miles in some places, this, the single largest surface feature of the planet, is impact derived.  It is believed that ALL the water on the planet arrived by cometary impacts soon after the planet formed.  The Moon is another large impact structure, a relict left over from  the collision of the proto-Earth and another roughly Mars sized body.

The frequency of large impacts has, thankfully, fallen over time, but they still happen.  Some of you, I hope all of you, may remember the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet that crashed into Jupiter in 1994 after being torn apart by Jupiter’s immense gravitational field.  The fireballs in Jupiter’s atmosphere were larger than the entire Earth, and there were multiple fireballs.

Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter

The energy released by each of the Shoemaker-Levy impacts was on a par with the Chicxulub impact in the northern Yucatan 65 million years ago that is implicated in the demist of all terrestrial animals larger than a piece of carry-on luggage.

On Earth impacts are still frequent, but most are small and do not survive passage through the atmosphere.  Think shooting stars, grains of sand and dust traveling at orbital speeds, around 20km/second.  Several months ago, on the last day of February, I was treated to a something more dramatic than one of these little grains of dust.  A little after 10pm on the 28th I was driving under a clear sky and the snow covered landscape lit-up with a bright blue flash.  I later found out that the flash of light had been seen from New Jersey to Quebec.  This was just one of the many fireballs that flash in the sky each year, probably something small only a few meters in diameter, an explosion not more than a few kilotons.

In a few places the scars left on the ground from large impacts are still visible.  One of my favorite ones is in NE Canada.  Canada is an excellent place for finding impact structures as much of the Canadian Shield is ancient, exposed bedrock.

Manicoaguan impact crater turned into a reservoir

The Manicoaguan impact is about 215 million years old and approximately 60 miles across.  It has been dammed and the island in the middle is now one of the largest fresh-water islands in the world.  Big impacts like this are rare, but they leave dramatic remains behind.

Small impacts are surprisingly common, the frequency rapidly trailing off the larger the impact.  This is good news, but the picture is very incomplete as we have only been able to watch carefully for a short period of time.

Impact frequency Table from geology.com

We are struggling to understand how the universe fits together and have tremendous difficulty comprehending the scales and energy involved.  We are too used to thinking on our small scales, our bodies, our houses, maybe our planet, for a few our solar system or galaxy.  Our solar system is huge, our galaxy immense, yet in the lager context of our body of knowledge and what we can see even the Milky Way galaxy is barely a microscopic speck.

Look at the ocean, lay back and watch the trails left by falling meteors, look at the background of stars, go to a museum and touch the heart of a planet, if you live near an impact crater go visit.

We often say, “We are all connected,” and this is true, and that web of connection is far greater, wider, and deeper than most of us realize.

Bryophyta, Ancient and Tough

An ancient creature is waking up.  These creatures are small in stature but extremely tough.  They have been around longer than plants, although we often lump all green sessile things together.  Mosses are different though.

They have neither roots, nor vascular tissue, the plant equivalent of our circularity system.  They anchor to the substrate with little hold-fasts, somewhat like those giant algae, sea-weeds, and they drink though diffusion and osmosis.  They do well in places that are rich in airborne moisture.

Another things mosses lack is flowers and the associated seeds.  Like ferns, club-mosses, horsetails, and fungi mosses reproduce by spores.  By the millions.  They invest in quantity over quality and don’t pack any food or protection for their offspring before they cast them to the wind.  The spores will only germinate under perfect conditions.  Orchid growers are familiar with this problem, as orchids try the seed equivalent of this strategy.  Their dispersal strategy is like colonizing the galaxy by putting people in zip-lock bags and flinging them out of the solar system in the hopes that one of them eventually hit an earth-like planet.

This time of year the capsules that held the spores look like fossilized wind-socks.

Mosses are incredibly tough and individual stems from a colony can be very long lived.  A common way of judging the age of stair-step moss is the count the feather-like branches on a stem.  Five and seven year old moss stems are common and there are other mosses much longer lived than that.  An established moss colony may been in place for thousands of years.  Especially colonies in cold environments.

In the northern hemisphere we tend to think of plants and animals going dormant in response to cold.  If you can prevent the water in your tissues from freezing the danger for plants becomes one of dehydration.

Mosses, as I have said, are tough.  And Ancient.  They have some tricks they have learned over the hundreds of millions of years they have been around.  They learned these tricks before the ancestors of most of the things we see around us evolved.  Dinosaurs are latecomers to the party by the standards of the mosses.

Mosses dry up.  In a way the lessons learned as a spore transfer to the adults.  Most of their water evaporates, and as it does so the moss tissues curl in predictable ways.  The pores through which they breath close. Mosses can wait a long time like that.  Some mosses are so good at surviving this way that they grow in deserts.

Air in cold environments often contains less moisture than desert air.  Vermont has been even dryer than usual and many of the fir-cap mosses are still tightly furled, waiting for water.  Many look like the dry spires in the picture above.

Others have found enough water to wake up.

Like sponges, moss colonies trap water and fine debris.  The debris falls to the ground in the suddenly still water and becomes a nutrient supply for the mosses once they rehydrate.  Much like flowers they open as their tissues fill with water.

The growing tip opens as it hydrates revealing a tight furl of nascent microphylls (moss and clubmoss leaves) tinged a rosy hue.  Cold is well and good for living slowly, but growth requires warmth and the tips of the moss are shaped like little parabolic reflectors.  They trap both water and the sun’s light.  The reddish color may help them adsorb the long-wave understory light once the forest above leafs out.

From now through summer the new spore capsules will ripen, and come fall and winter they will scatter their spores across the landscape to drift with the wind, flow with the water, and run across the snow.

Unlike the poor fellows in zip-lock bags hurtling between the stars, the mosses have stacked the odds a little for their offspring.

Where water splashes moss may grow.  Where wind dies and lets drop what it carries moss may grow.  Where snow is late to melt moss may grow.

NOTE: The three close-in photos were taken though a 10x hand-lens held to the front camera of an iPhone4.