Diario de ktang10

On this nature walk, I once again went on a TA led trek to Houghton Garden with a bunch of other Eco Evo students. The weather was very gloomy and overcast. During the walk, it was raining a bit and the soil and plants around us were very wet. I observed a lot of fungi during this walk and it might be because of the wetness in the environment due to the rain. This reminds me of how we learned that bacteria and fungi are major decomposers in our ecosystem and I wonder if wetness helps facilitates this decomposition and if so how. This also reminded me of our lecture on how we identify species by different species concepts and I was wondering if fungi is identified mainly based on the morphospecies concept. I observed a lot of differnt fungi and lichen during the walk and I noticed that a lot of the fungi sort of blend in with the brown leaves and soil of the forest floor. I enjoyed this rainy day walk even though usually, I dislike rainy weather.

On this nature walk, I went to the Pine reserves on our school campus at night around 9pm. I was booked and busy this whole week and on Wednesday, this was the only time I could squeeze into my day to do my nature walk and to observe some plants. By that time, the air was very cold and I shivered my way through my nature walk. It was also very dark but since plants are so abundant, I was able to find and identify different species without much problems. I tried my best to find plants from all 4 main groups of plants. The first plant I took a picture of was a species of ferns which were seedless vascular plants. I also saw both flowering plants and also evergreen plants. I was not able to find any mosses probably because of a combination of the dark and the cold temperature. At night, I also noticed the lack of animals. The only animals I saw were the geese? or swan? in the reservoir and they seemed to be sleeping. While looking at the different types of plants, I wondered about the adaptations of these plants, specifically leaf size, in helping them survive. Why do some plants have thinner leaves while some have really broad leaves? While thinking of this question, I remember our lesson on how plants are photolithoautotrophs. Because of their need to use the sun as a source of energy, I expect broader leaves to be more advantageous to gather more sunlight. What type of advantage of the leaves of an evergreen plant provide in sacrifice of getting more sunlight? This walk was a great way for me to calm down after a very busy day and listen to some music alone while observing nature.