Agios Stefanos – The First Flower

Last week we were at Pefki, the village of the pines where, somewhat surprisingly, there weren't many pine trees to be seen. There is however quite a magnificent pine forest a little to the west, just past the village of Agios Stefanos which brings us round full circle on our upland village tour of east Crete. Agios Stefanos, or Saint Stephen would have been my personal saint, had I been born here in Crete but I must confess that I had to look him up because apart from the fact that Good King Wenceslas had a predilection for musing out of his bedroom window on said saint's feast day I knew nothing about him. Turns out he was a clever fellow who managed to prove, by theological argument, that Jesus upheld the precepts of Judaism better than the Jewish elders did. Clever, but not wise, seeing as he was on trial for blasphemy by those same Jewish elders at the time. They sentenced him to be stoned to death. Incidentally this gave us two important precepts which still hold true today: one, never conduct your own defense and two, nobody like a smart-ass.

But I digress. Apart from exploring the pine wood itself I noticed a beautiful glade when I passed by the other day, absolutely carpeted with wood sorrel, windflowers, and other small anemones which looks a delightful place to start. Here we are and I see that the honey bees are queueing up for nectar. We've talked about pollination before of course but while we're surrounded by pine trees and looking at flowers it makes you wonder how we got from one to the other. If you look at the centre of the windflower (just move the bees out of the way a second) you can see the female organ, the carpel, surrounded by the male organs, the stamens. Pine trees have carpels and stamens too but the key point is that they are separate. There are female cones that you see all the time and male cones that appear (here in Crete) in the spring (see Evolution: Top to Bottom for pictures). Somewhere between 130 and 160 million years ago a particularly enterprising pine flicked a genetic switch, combined the male and female parts into one structure and the world of flowering plants was born. Since then flowers have done a lot of experimenting with some going back to having separate male and female flowers on one plant, some producing different male and female plants and various shades of sexuality in between.

So that's the flowering plants but where did the pine trees come from? We've got a little shady gully feeding the glade and I think that the answer may lie up there. Come and meet the ancestors. In here amongst the shady rocks we have a few ferns. These first appear in the fossil record some 360 million years ago which is a heck of a long time just sitting about being a fern. Ferns reproduce by means of spores which you can see on the underside of the leaves, male and female, which require external moisture to get together. The breakthrough came with wrapping the spores in a protective coating and providing them with internal moisture and this was the origin of the seed. How long this mutation had been going on in various individuals is anybody's guess because as long as ferns had a moist environment seeds weren't needed. But around 300 million years ago when the Earth's land masses were having one of their little huddles called Pangaea there were a lot of arid bits where spores couldn't germinate but seeds could and the seed plants came into their own.

Where did ferns come from? Come and meet the bryophytes; mosses like these, along with similar looking hornworts and liverworts. The most obvious difference between these and the ferns is their size. Mosses are perfect little plants but their size is restricted because they lack the internal vessels needed to transport water. This was another little genetic tweak that proved useful some 440 million years ago due to falling levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Plants need CO₂ to photosynthesise but when you let it in, you let water out and there's the nub of the problem. When CO₂ levels are low you have to keep your pores open longer. You either grow low and close to the water or you develop a way of moving the water. The bryophytes that solved the problem developed into the ferns.

Now if we had some water in this gully we might have found some Chara as we did in the Dew Ponds of Katharo. Chara is a green algae and it is from these that the early bryophytes evolved. Some of the green algae went on to become bryophytes, some stayed as green algae and others went a completely different route and set up a symbiotic relationship with fungi creating a whole new group of organisms called lichens such as this sunburst lichen, Xanthoria parietina, which is a combination of a fungus and a green algae called Trebouxia.

So with that little round-up of how algae became bryophytes, became ferns, became pines, became flowers, we end our tour of the upland villages of East Crete. From here, if you own a rugged vehicle you can continue along the rough road back to Stavrochori or return to Agios Stefanos and turn right in the village to get back to the coast road at Makry Gialos. 

The Extra Bit

Personally I think we'll opt for the latter option and pop into Dasakis, a lovely little taverna (now open all year) at the entrance to Butterfly Gorge. We can spend a pleasant hour chatting around the wood stove whilst admiring a pair of Muscovy Ducks in the car park.

Next week we'll be starting a whole new walking tour in the hills above Koutsounari. This is new territory for me so we'll be exploring it together and who knows what we'll find up there.

Photographic Bit

Many of you have asked me what photographic equipment I use so for details of aperture settings, shutter speeds etc. my pictures will be on Flickr within a few days and that has all the geeky stuff. Pictures were edited with FastStone Image Viewer and combined with Microsoft Paint.

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LINKS:

Share your nature thoughts, photos and comments on Naturalists (the facebook page that accompanies this blog)

Explore the region with the #CreteNature interactive Hiking and Nature Map

Cretan Flora

Flowers of Crete;

BIRDS OF CRETE

Crete Birding

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)

The Art of Stream Dipping

To read in other languages use:  Google Translate and copy and paste the web address into the translation box.

We haven’t been out to Red Butterfly Gorge  together for almost a year so it’s high time we took another look. Particularly as last time we went hiking up the track to the gorge (like most tourists do) and missed all the wonderful stuff not a hundred yards from the car park.

Slippery Jack, Red Admiral, Nematocera Larva

You’ll have noticed that we’ve swapped the sweep net this week for a pond dipping net and scientifically selected glass sample jars (yes, I know yours has still got a Hoeseradish sauce label on it but I assure you that I scientifically selected it myself). Now the idea is that you wade out into that raging torrent using the wobbly stepping stones provided whilst I sit here on the bank with the magnifying glass and the inspection tray (or upturned one litre ice-cream tub lid as it’s otherwise known). You’ll need the net and this big stick as well. Steady as you go. Place the net on the floor of the stream and muddy up the bed in front of it with the stick. Marvellous, now bring it back to the bank – watch that stone it’s loose – oh dear, never mind, you held onto the net and that’s the main thing. We can get another stick and that sunny branch looks ideal for drying your socks. Let’s have a look and see what you’ve found. Now that looks like the larval form of one of the Nematocera, a suborder of flies that includes mosquitoes, gnats and midges among others.  We’ll have a few more tries and take the results back to the lab. No, you go, you’ve already got wet feet.

Anemone

I think we’ve got time to explore some of this lovely pine woodland on the way back. The Red Admiral Butterflies are out in force as usual and the ground is quite littered with these Slippery Jack mushrooms. As you can see they decompose quite rapidly and the caps soon become quite slippery and slimy. Some species are considered quite a delicacy in parts of Eastern Europe but I believe they only pick the very young ones. Ah, here’s a flower that can sometimes be confusing. This is an Anemone (Anemone coronaria) which comes in violet, pink and white and looks very similar to the Persian Buttercup (Ranunculus asiaticus) which comes in yellow, red and also white. Anenomes however have this whorl of leaves a little way below the flower and no sepals below the petals, Persian Buttercups are the other way around. We’ll get these samples back to base now as I’ve a new project for you to get involved with and I’ll update you with the ongoing projects we’ve already started. Don’t forget your socks, are they dry yet?

The Snails and their initial routes

Last week , as you no doubt recall, we were looking at animal personality and I thought it would be fun to have a closer look at snails and see if they have individual personalities. Are some more adventurous than others? If so does this swashbuckling, devil-may-care attitude make them more attractive to other snails or does like attract like? Accordingly I grabbed a handful of snails that were all resting together under a rock up the lane and put them in a box in the garden and waited to see what would happen. As you know, snails are hermaphrodite so we don’t have to worry about the whole male/female attraction thing and that’s why I’ve given them non-specific gender names. Let me introduce you. Ashley took a day or so to get moving, found a plank of wood on the ground beneath the box, explored half the length of it before coming back to the other end of the plank the following day where it met up with Vivian who’d also found the plank, travelled a few centimetres to the right and thought “that’s enough exercise for one week” and stopped. 

Ashley and Vivian with Big Mark and guests

The following day two baby snails had appeared between them and there the group has stayed and started receiving visitors in the form of two Julid millipedes (whether by invitation or not is unclear). Beverley has had a hard time of it. It also took a day to get out of the box and the following day was lying on its back directly beneath it looking rather forlorn. Since then it has climbed laboriously back into the box and out again, fallen over once more, closed its shell in a fit of despair and finally attached itself to the underside of the box in an apparent sulk. Sam on the other hand is the most adventurous of the bunch. First out of the box within six hours it sprinted three metres to the base of the grapevine on the first day, explored the right door jamb the following day, found this unsatisfactory and on the third day I found it lodged behind the air conditioning pipe 1.58m above the ground. After such a marathon eight metre trek it’s taken a four day break to catch its breath. And Leslie? I’m still looking. Six hours after the start it was still happily in the box, the following morning nowhere to be seen having been away on its toes overnight. 

The Boys

So that’s the snails, come upstairs to the terrace and I’ll update you on the other ongoing projects. You met Alice and Beatrice, our female House Sparrows, last week; now meet the boys. I haven’t named them yet as I can’t quite distinguish between them. Maybe you can? Those of you who know your European sparrows will have spotted that they have brown caps and white cheeks like the Spanish Sparrow (Passer hispaniolensis) rather than the grey caps and cream cheeks of the House Sparrow (Passer domesticus). The truth of the matter is that the distribution of sparrow species and subspecies in the Mediterranean is highly complex and I suspect that only DNA testing and cladistic analysis  will sort out the true relationships and ancestry of these birds.

European Wasp

As to our other ongoing projects: the moss continues to grow in the mossary but the insect egg still hasn’t hatched and I’m beginning to see why this was such a passing fad in the nineteenth century. Even in the days before television, watching moss grow couldn’t have been the most exciting of pastimes. And on the Phenology front I’ve added the European Wasp (Vespula germanica) to our January sightings which still leaves us with a couple of dragonflies and a grasshopper to try and spot on the insect list before the end of the month.

Well I think that just about wraps it up for this week so until next time – happy hunting.

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LINKS:

Naturalists (the facebook page that accompanies this blog)

Flowers of Crete;

BIRDS OF CRETE

Crete Birding

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)