Week 9
Week 9
Blog prompt:
Interpret (through this blog) the most amazing thing you know about nature – get us excited. This is your blog – you audience isn’t out in the field with you so bring the field to your armchair reader.
So far, this is the most challenging blog prompt for me to respond to. How do I choose one thing as the most amazing? Trees communicate with each other through fungal networks. The echidna is a mammal that lays eggs (and it’s adorable).
So what can I choose? If I am led by emotion, then I would choose the wonder of nature. There is no one species or process that I can select because they are all fascinating. If you doubt me, then you should know that I find the rock cycle fascinating. That two simple factors of pressure and heat can change a flat landscape into a mountain range, or granite into sand is awesome. But, to be honest, sand doesn’t really get me going.
A habitat. The mash-up of different plants and animals, microbes and soil composition, oxygen content and pH, which all together form a dependently functioning a space of life and activity is magical. My wonder and amazement are sparked when I see the interactivity of so many factors within these environments.
So I will dive deeper and focus on the habitat of the bog. This habitat is new to me and captivates me because in the area of a bog we can walk through hundreds, if not thousands, of years of history.
Bogs, as defined in my Ecology textbook, are “peat-forming wetlands with precipitation being the source of water entering the system” (Molles, 2020). This definition is accurate but not very interesting. So let’s dig in. Bogs develop from open, contained water sources, starting with invasion by sedges, mosses and shrubs which create a vegetative mat expanding as they grow on the surface of the water. Over time, these plant material die, fall and build up. The water in bogs has little to no oxygen content which limits flora to only a small number of species adapted to grow there. The low oxygen also severely restricts decay because the microorganisms which cause decay cannot survive in the environment. So slowly, as the vegetative debris builds up, certain trees like tamarack and black spruce begin to grow. And eventually we have forests where there were once ponds. (Strickland, 2022).
Bogs are home to many carnivorous plants as well as equally well adapted birds such as the spruce grouse, known for being one of the few species that can live on evergreen needles.
You can, with patience, quiet and binoculars, see these species but also see habitat history as you walk through a bog area because the changes occur soooooooo slowly. Walking to the centre of a bog from established forest is like walking back in time.
If you go on one adventure to learn something new, please consider the Spruce Bog Boardwalk Trail in Algonquin. I loved this trail which was a shock because it is an easy walk rather than a demanding hike. But I had the chance to walk through history. And thanks to the beavers, the centre of this bog will likely stay at the early stage of development for as long as they are there. The trail also has such great information – or should I say nature interpretation – which engages throughout.
For other bog walks in southern Ontario, check out https://ontarionaturetrails.com/trail-features/bog/.
Citations
Molles, M. C., & Laursen, A. (2020). Ecology : concepts and applications (Fifth Canadian Edition.). McGraw-Hill Ryerson.
Strickland, D. (2022). Spruce Bog Boardwalk: Algonquin Spruce Bog Ecology. Queen’s Printer for Ontario.