*pats askbox gently* there are more Thermoreceptors?
(I'm sorry ur dome was so hot; I hope its much cooler now!)
My bluff has been called! Hooray!!
I am not a neurologist, a biologist, or a scientist. If anyone with better credentials than "obsessed with emergent properties" contradicts me, listen to them instead.
Cell membranes include little portal proteins that open under certain circumstances based on the shape of the protein and let chemicals into and out of the cell. These portals are useful for all sorts of things: managing water and nutrients, sending messages to nearby cells, serving the whims of tiny intercellular cats. Science hasn't found the tiny intercellular cats yet, but we all know they're there; the existence of a door that can be opened necessarily implies an indecisive feline.
Some protein shapes open up if the temperature is within a certain range. This means that if a cell with that sort of protein in its membrane experiences a temperature in the right range, it will move some chemicals around. This is used to make nerve cells that send a message towards the brain whenever they experience a certain temperature.
Because evolution does all its best work the night before the deadline while on a Code Red Mountain Dew bender, the opened-by-temperature portal proteins are mostly copied from opened-by-a-specific-chemical portal proteins. All of them, in fact, still open for specific chemicals, which means there exist out in the world liquids you can put in a bottle that most animals will instead perceive as "a temperature between 8 and 26 degrees" So things can get a little weird.
Temperature-opening portal proteins:
TRPA1
Opens for temperatures below 12C (not air temperature, skin or body temperature, so you might be kind of in trouble when this happens). Used by hunting snakes to detect where heat isn't so they can find prey. Feels painful in an itchy sort of way.
This one also opens for allyl isothiocyanate. Many plants have evolved to take advantage of the existence of a chemical most animals perceive as itchy pain, especially horseradish and wasabi. Allyl isothiocyanate is harmful to plants, so they keep two separate components in tiny compartments. When an animal bites the plant, the compartments break open their contents mix to create allyl isothiocyanate.
"This plant tastes like itching" is a good defense against almost all animals, but some humans have taught themselves to appreciate the taste of itching.
TRPM8
Opens for temperatures between 8 and 26 degrees. Opens for menthol (peppermint, spearmint, wintergreen) and linalool (roses, orange blossoms, basil). Feels cool or cold.
"This plant tastes like cold" is a somewhat less effective defense against being eaten than "this plant tastes like itching" but it's a more widespread defense because TRPM8-activating chemicals don't harm plants and don't need elaborate two-part storage.
TRPV4
Opens for temperatures from 27-37 C. I'm not sure what this one feels like, or if even feels like anything, since it covers normal human body temperatures. Whatever feeling we get from this one, we're feeling it nearly all the time.
Plants do make a chemical that tastes like this temperature, and it can repel nonhuman creatures with different body temperatures: allicin, the flavour of garlic. Like allyl isothiocyante, it is stored in two compartments inside the plant, and combined when the plant is bitten.
Maybe this is why vampires abhor garlic. There is a feeling that, as humans, we always have. Something we don't notice, something deeper than touch. That feel disappears forever when you become a vampire, except those unbearable moments when garlic returns to you for a fleeting moment the experience of lost humanity.
TRPV3
Opens for temperatures 33-39 degrees. Opens for eugenol, found in cinnamon, nutmeg, bay leaf, holy basil, ginger, allspice, and cloves. Feels like warmth.
Plants with high quantities of eugenol, like holy basil and Japanese star anise, are sometimes sacred to buddhists because they smell nice and bugs don't like to eat them, so you can burn them as incense without worrying about all the little crawly guys.
Humans apparently think food that tastes like "warm" is comforting.
TRPV1
Opens for temperatures over 43 degrees. (The one I was experiencing in the overheated dome, which I had never felt from air before) Opens for capsaicin, the active chemical in hot peppers. Opens for the combination of temperature and acidity of fevers and infected wounds. This one we feel as pain, as burning, as flame.
TRPV1 says: Your flesh is failing, and your doom is very near.
Humanity says: This is incredible. We are going to breed plants that cause this sensation as much as possible, and we will spend thousands of years getting it right. We are going to dry this and powder this and flake it and grill it and ferment it and eat it with everything.
And when we leave earth and go into space, we take hot peppers with us. Without gravity, fluid builds up in nasal passages, and astronauts sort of have colds the entire time they're in space and can't smell food very well. But the Nearness Of Your Doom is not a smell and is not perceived by the nose, so - with their doom always on the other side of ten centimeters of insulated aluminum - astronauts can taste hot peppers. In 2002, Peggy Whitson, commander of the ISS, jokingly refused to let a replacement crew on board until they handed over the hot sauce.
24/03 A witch once laid the Doom of Daffodils upon us, that everywhere we would ever call home would be haunted by that Accursed Yellow. And now it is spring and the Doom is upon us: daffodils in the gardens, the forest, the swamps, lining the driveway taunting us as we escape and beckoning to us as we return. We cut them by the hundreds, anonymously donate them to community events, and run away quietly, before the daffodils can hear us.
The Enormous Feathery Accountant says: don't trust the daffodils.
23/03 Creeping woodsorrel in the dome. Pretty much every greenhouse has it. We thought we'd been lucky so far - we received a plant with a woodsorrel stowaway and immediately fed the woodsorrel to the chickens, but alas, here it is, springing up from the ground itself.
Reasons every greenhouse gets creeping woodsorrel eventually, and can't eliminate it:
Batteries: If you leave any tiny root splinter in the ground, it holds enough energy to regrow the whole plant. (An unknown species of woodsorrel was domesticated into the root crop oca, granting that energy to humans. I'm sure this is fine).
Detonators: The seed pods build up water pressure in their tissues and actually explode, ejecting seeds in ballistic arcs around your greenhouse. So it sprouts very far away from wherever you last saw it.
Wires: creeping woodsorrel accumulates copper in its stems, which run for long distances along the ground and sprout roots wherever they touch down. Historically, picking woodsorrel and grinding it up has been a practical way to locate underground copper deposits.
I don't know what kind of Ineffable Device the creeping woodsorrel infesting every greenhouse in the world is intent on forming, but our dome is part of it now.
21/03 We are very excited about this year's first citrus bud, on one of the Trifeola (Poncirus trifoliata and Minneola tangelo hybrid) trees!
In entirely unrelated news, Lazy Evaluation Ranch is excited to announce our new sponsor, the Institute of Signs and Portents! Big thanks to them for making this Moment of Culture possible. Today's Very Cultural Selection is this line spoken by Vladimir from the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot:
Last year we ordered some kiwi vines to help control temperature in the dome. They'll climb up the south side of the dome and offer some partial leafy shade in summer, but let the sun in during winter when they've dropped their leaves.
Kiwis have male vines (which create pollen) and female vines (which bear fruit). We ordered one male and five females, but somehow received five males and one female, so the kiwi vines are enacting some sort of Vegetal Reverse Harem Anime.
The Blue Haired Girlfriend and I sometimes say that the Enormous Feathery Accountant is the most sensible of our three Accidental Roosters, which is true, but only in the way that "Mercury is the planet in our solar system that most resembles a 1989 Suzuki GS500E motorcycle" is true.
Still, the Enormous Feathery Accountant usually only crows when Something Is Wrong, and we usually go outside and try to Fix The Wrong Thing. Sample Wrong Things:
The chickens have kicked sawdust into their feeder and can't see their food
The chickens have tipped over their waterer with ill-advised hijinks
A negligent human moved the feeder three centimeters North of the exact geometric center of the henhouse
Someone is going to town at the wrong time of day
It cannot currently be mathematically proven that another rooster doesn't exist, somewhere in the universe
A junco is eating the chicken food
A junco is drinking out of the water dish
A junco is sitting on the Enormous Feathery Rooster's favourite perch
The Enormous Feathery Accountant was making a racket today, so I went out and removed some sawdust from the feeder, re-centered it, and patiently explained that there had been no recent major mathematical breakthroughs on the Nonexistence Of Other Roosters.
The Enormous Feathery Accountant continued to yell, so I gave up and headed back toward the house, shouting over my shoulder in the general direction of the henhouse that I was still not able to delete all juncos from the world, and could the Enormous Feathery Accountant please █████ ████████ █████████████ cram it?
So anyway, as I came out from behind the woodshed, I saw what the Enormous Feathery Account was yelling about: some nice young missionaries, who had for the first time in the six years we've been living here, braved the long steep dirt road to invite us to Easter. Oops.
The turkey vultures spend the winter in Venezuela, fly North along the mainland, and circle in groups above the shoreline. In the air they mostly lock their wings open and glide, not flap. So where the land ends they must circle at the water's edge and wait for the wind to be right to glide across to the islands in a group.
For months there have been no vultures, and then suddenly yesterday the wind opened their way home and the island's whole population is here, all at once. It's like someone found a giant knife switch labeled "Vultures" in a cave and shoved it to "on" with a satisfying "KA-VULTURE" sound.
The house is perched atop a stony ridge. The sun falls on the bare dark glacier-scraped slope behind the house and warms the stone, and from the warm stone a column of warm air rises. The vultures enter this invisible pillar of air and circle around its edges, upwards, upwards, around and above the house on ink-dark wings that glow where the sunlight comes through the edges of the feathers.
Sometimes they leave this air-column and glide over to the next stone ridge, the next invisible column of air, and the next beyond it, the next beyond that. Watching the vultures trace out the locations of the pillars, you get a sense of a whole vast structure of warmth and wind, like some grand invisible temple rising hundreds of meters into the bright brazen sky.
It's always here, I think, the huge columns, the invisible temple the glaciers built, made of air and light. But I can only see its structure when the vultures trace it out for me, like architectural drawings. Glad someone found the KA-VULTURE switch this year.
12/05/2023 I have news so momentous that it can only be shared via the Destiel meme. The Forms Must Be Observed.
Dijon's Grainy's favourite snoozing spot is in the tray full of tachibana seedlings. She enjoys watering time, climbing things, eating pine borer beetles bigger than she is, and geodesic polyhedra.
08/05/2023 Generally speaking, I enjoy how otherworldly the dome is. The way the skin of the dome focusses sound so your own footfalls come to you from a meter or two away from you unless you stand in the exact center. The way the dome bends wind around itself, so you can stand in motionless air and watch all the trees bow away from you. The iridescence of condensation on its skin.
However, this week the dome has decided the otherworld it wants to be is Venus. We've hit fifty degrees twice.
The Blue Haired Girlfriend, the Bearer of the Jabberwock Tattoo (staying with us and helping out over the summer), and I have been taking turns opening all the dome doors for ventilation and standing guard outside it to keep hungry chickens out.
Here is an experience you can have in the Imitation Venus Dome: Human skin uses several different ion channels to detect heat. If the air is 36 degrees, TRPV4 wakes up and sounds off like "yeah, it's kinda warm here." If it gets warmer, TRPV4 just gets louder. Same nerve signal, but more and more of it.
But at around 45 degrees, a new challenger appears. TRPA1 wakes up and sounds off, and it's Different. This is the channel fooled into going off by the capsaicin in hot peppers, put to its intended use at last. If, like me, you have mostly lived in pleasantly ocean-cooled climates, this is a New Experience. It's warm... it's warmer ... it's even warmer ... it's ẅ̷͉̟̰́͜a̸̯̥̰̭̘̭̝̺̯̿̓̀̒͂̊̐ȓ̷͎̓͐̋̽̕ṁ̵̥͇͖̝̱̳̻̊̀͋̂̓́̊̏̂͆̆͗͌.
06/05/2023 Caterpillar making Nonstandard Life Choices.
Marmara arbutiella is a tiny caterpillar that lives inside arbutus leaves. It leaves the waxy top and bottom layer of the leaf intact for shelter and eats a tunnel through the juicy middle layer, writing a gleaming silvery spiral into the flesh of the leaf.
The Blue Haired Girlfriend found this Caterpillar of Nonstandard Life Choices living in a salal leaf instead of an arbutus lead. These eccentrics turn up occasionally in a small area that includes our island.
We know the salal-dwellers are Marmara arbutiella, because someone sent a salal leaf with a caterpillar in it to Charley Eiseman (see @lies's Charley Eiseman Appreciation Post) and he got it DNA barcoded.
But nobody has observed a salal-dweller outside the leaf. We don't know if it has morphological differences from the arbutus-dwellers as an adult moth, like maybe a new subspecies is starting to branch off here.
So we picked the leaf and put it in a jar with a little moss to hold moisture. Hopefully there's still a Caterpillar of Nonstandard Life Choices in it, and the caterpillar will crawl out of the leaf, make a cocoon, and emerge into an adult we can send to Charley Eiseman.
The cocoon is pretty exciting too, described in the poetic words of Wagner, Loose, Fitzgerald, De Benedictis, and Davis:
The larvae exhibit a fascinating cocoon-spinning behavior which involves prolonged ornamentation of the cocoon with dozens of anally extruded compartmentalized bubbles, each of which is individually wrapped in silk and pushed through to the outer cocoon surface.
I, for one, am delighted at the prospect of a cocoon containing a moth nobody has ever seen, festively garlanded in silk-wrapped bug farts.
05/05/2023 It seemed like a good idea at the time.
When we have chicks, we give them descriptive nicknames based on their transient baby spots and stripes. As they grow up, they earn real names based on their devotion to a particular teaching of the mystic arts of Galline Derangement.
One of the batch of chicks eight months ago was yellow, except for a white face and black marks around the eyes. She looked like she was wearing clown makeup.
I didn't want to nickname her "Clown" or "Mime." I wanted to Be Clever About It. So her hatchling nickname became "Homestuck" because I was on tumblr a decade ago when everyone was posting fanart of Homestuck characters with clown makeup.
Today the chickens were making a terrible racket in the henhouse, and I ran out to investigate, and discovered that one of the hens had gotten inside the henhouse wall somehow and couldn't get out.
She was, uh, you know. She was... stuck. In her ... home. Guess who it was. Guess.
I got my arm into the wall and tried to support her, which calmed her. I tried lifting her up and out, but there was a crossbeam in the way. I tried guiding her downwards, but she panicked and kicked her feet the instant I wasn't holding her up.
After half an hour of trying to manually thread individual chicken atoms (all of which were screaming) between the wood atoms of the wall, I went to fetch a hacksaw. When I returned, she was standing innocently on the floor of the henhouse, eating a moth she apparently found in the wall.
As she apparently took her hatchling name as a suggestion, she gets to keep it. Presenting the newly christened Homestuck Q. Clipping-Error the Chicken.
04/05/2023 The Blue Haired Girlfriend spotted a couple morels while we were walking down to the mailbox. Delicious! We've never seen morels here before.
Every year, in spring and autumn, when the light comes through the rain in a particular way, we go through a process foragers sometimes call "getting your mushroom eyes." At first you look at pieces of the forest one after another: the shadow of a likely tree, a mossy hollow, a fallen log, a pile of rotting leaves. Mushrooms could be in this place, or that one, and you focus on each possibility one at a time, switch between them with a sort of internal click. But as the rains continue and the world greens, we start to read the forest as a whole story, instead of sounding out each individual shadow and clump of moss. There's a trick to it that has to be relearned each season, a porousness, a way of looking at the world and letting it flow through you and feeling the underlying currents and patterns.
Until one day you are walking in the woods and there are mushrooms everywhere and it doesn’t seem possible you didn’t see them before. Like you've gone through a hidden doorway into a different world, stranger and truer than the old one.
The thing that is most like getting your mushroom eyes is falling in love. You meet someone. A musician: you talk about synthesizers and phrygian mode. You look at the moon together when you are sleepless thousands of kilometers apart. You've never been good at conversation, but she listens to everyone - waiters and tow truck drivers and delivery people - and you learn that everyone has a story so beautiful that listening to them tell it feels like wings opening inside your ribcage. At first the glimpses of the other world are piecemeal, clicking into and out of focus - like maybe you hear a synthesizer in grocery store background music, and you tell your friends, "hey, you know, my girlfriend is a musician," and they smile tolerantly. (It is not the first time they have heard this.)
Until one day you realize you can feel the phase of the moon without looking at it, the mode of a song is as clear as its lyrics, and that when you talk to a stranger you can see a soft light in them now, like a lantern through stained glass. It doesn’t seem possible that you didn’t see these things before, somehow. You have come through the door of her, to a better world, vaster and stranger and truer.
We enjoy cooking, but I think more than the occasional leaf or mushroom for the kitchen, the thing we love about foraging is to love the world, together.
03/05/2023 Rumbled! In our defense, if the chaotropic tumblr hivemind had voted for the Eight Foot Tall Jagged Iron Torus, Constructed For Unknown Purpose, Free To Good Home, but we'd been unable to procure it, tumblr might have been Very Disappointed In Us. So I put the poll in while the torus-bearing crane truck was pulling up the driveway.
Details photographed the next day, in fog.
While we were cleaning out the cracks, we found dried out little segments of rose cane, and beneath them, twisty honeysuckle tendrils. Apparently the Eight Foot Tall Jagged Iron Torus, Constructed for Unknown Purpose, Free To Good Home instills in everyone who sees it the intense desire to grow climbing plants on it.
Some dark day perhaps we will all finally know and rue the Purpose of the Eight Foot Tall Jagged Iron Torus, Free to Good Home. But in the meantime, it sleeps under a curling green blanket and dreams of blossom and berry, lifting sunwards.
