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 Milonas Gorge

I think that I may have lulled you into a false sense of security last week with all that beauty in Where Three Valleys Meet. Not that this week’s stage of the journey is any less beautiful but it will require a head for heights and nerves of steel in places. You have been warned! Those three mountain streams that were gently carving out valleys have now got together and their combined force has carved through the limestone like a knife through butter and we’re going to try and get through there. If you’re up for it, follow me.

Not surprisingly, as we enter this damp, almost subterranean gloom, we have fungi. The creamy brown jobs running up the length of this fallen tree are of the Crepidotus genus which is based upon the Greek for cracked ear. Many different species have been described in the past but modern phylogenetic analysis has shown that the same species can show different growth forms depending upon where they are growing. Essentially, like us humans, they can look very different but underneath they’re all the same. The gorgeous little yellow fellow is a wax cap of the Hygrocybe genus and these are rather unusual in that recent research has shown that they seem to have a symbiotic relationship with mosses and other bryophytes. As usual we are constantly discovering new ways in which elements of nature are working together.

I think we need to do a bit of climbing here. If you’d like to flip a few rocks I’m just going to shin up this overhanging pine and spy out our route. What have you got there? One grey and one orange woodlouse. Why? I believe that it is down to a genetic variation. The orange one, being more conspicuous, is more likely to be predated and so the grey form predominates. Did you know that the woodlouse is one of the true blue bloods of the animal world? Instead of having rich, red haemoglobin in their blood (see How To Get Blood Out Of A Stone) they have haemocycanin  that  uses copper to bind with oxygen instead of iron and their oxygenated blood is blue... um, you could have just taken my word for it.

We seem to have reached a little shelf where we can sit and catch our breath for a minute. Which is just as well as the next part looks a bit strenuous. The sea squills are just beginning to push their dark green leaves up from their bulbs and we have quite a swathe of little buttercups. We have over twenty species of buttercup on Crete and the distinctive leaves of these tell us that these particular ones are Ranunculus bullatus (subspecies cytheraeus if you want to be really precise). And where we have flowers we now have a beetle. These delightfully furry Tropinota flower chafers will be all over the place in a month or two’s time but this one seems to be taking advantage of an early harvest.

Now for the hairy bit. I did warn you but before we risk life and limb have you noticed the crag martins dancing through the gorge? You normally find them at this altitude and above but this winter I’ve seen them down by the beach. We always think of bird migration as a long distance affair but some birds are mini migrators – just a few kilometres north to south or from higher to lower altitudes.  Rock thrushes and even ravens tend to move down from the mountains in cold weather round here whereas white wagtails move up from the beaches where they bum around in the summer and head for the shelter of the olive groves. If you’re ready we’ll crawl along this little ledge and then scramble our way to the top. My, but it’s a long way down. I’m not sure that your humming the theme from Indiana Jones in my ear is helping.

The Extra Bit

You have to admit that the view from the top was worth the knee-trembling climb. The whole of the lower valley stretched out before us. All we have to do now is find a way to get down there.

I'll be popping back and forth between Crete and Athens over the next few weeks so please bear with me if I'm a bit slow in answering your correspondence. SD

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LINKS:

Naturalists (the facebook page that accompanies this blog)

See detailed pictures at http://www.inaturalist.org/login  (search - people-stevedaniels-observations)

The Nature of Crete  (Flipboard Magazine)

Cretan Flora

Flowers of Crete;

BIRDS OF CRETE

Crete Birding

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)

Water Divining

The winter rains have started in earnest and our gullies should be starting to fill nicely now. There is an ancient practice called dowsing whereby you can divine the presence of water by wandering about with a Y shaped stick. Whether this actually works or is merely some sort of ideomotor effect where an action is prompted by the subconscious is open to debate. I prefer to use a simpler technique: walk downhill and when down changes to up that is where you’ll find water if there is any. So the water should be down there somewhere. Just before we start our descent take a look at these harvester ants down here who seem to be having a bit of a problem. Falling olives can be a nuisance. At this time of the year my courtyard is littered with them and they get trodden into the house and make a right old mess. As yet, I have never had one fall and totally block my front door. It would be interesting to stop and watch how the ants solve this particular dilemma but it’s a bit chilly this morning for hanging about so we’ll press on.

It looks as though we’re getting close to the bottom now but before you go diving in have you noticed these little moths that we’ve been disturbing as we walk through the undergrowth? These are Diamondback moths and although they’re tiny they’re very interesting. For a start, despite their size and the fact that they only fly as adults for about a fortnight they’re marvellous at migration. It’s a European moth that made its way to America in the nineteenth century and has now turned up in the Hawaiian Islands. It also loves cabbages and is the nemesis of commercial brassica growers. A group of European scientists have found a chink in its armour however. They found that given the choice, the moths would prefer to lay their eggs on Yellow Rocket (Barbarea vulgaris) even though their caterpillars couldn’t eat the stuff and died. Weird but true. This one presumably is not laying eggs at the moment as it is on a mallow leaf and unlike cabbages and rocket, mallow is not part of the Brassicaceae family which is the only family on which Diamondback Moths will lay their eggs (even if they sometimes get the genus wrong).

OK, time to get down and dirty and dive into the gully. Great, we have water and with it what appears to be a covering of Moss on the rocks. But they could be Hornworts or Liverworts. All three are popularly (but incorrectly) lumped together as bryophytes and they share a similar but interesting way of going about life. Firstly, distinct male and female bits develop from spores (those are the green leafy bits which are called gametophytes). The sperm from the males swim to the eggs in the female; hence you find ‘bryophytes’ in wet, or leastways damp, places. These gametophytes then give birth to something completely different called a sporophyte (which is the stalky bit with the capsule on top). Sporophytes don’t muck about with the sperm and egg method of reproduction but go for the asexual method of producing spores which then develop into gametophytes and the cycle goes round again. It’s a bit like humans giving birth to a generation of mushrooms that then give birth to a generation of humans again. Sex is really weird down at this level.

Our next descent looks a bit tricky; a twenty foot slide down into a pile of branches that look to be hiding something akin to a tiger trap. What say you that we just take a look at these little orange fungi that I’ve just spotted on this wet wood and then find a less adventurous route down? These are called Scutellinia scutella by mycologists which is rather boringly from the Latin meaning little shield. I much prefer the common names for them which include Scarlet Elf Cap, Eyelash Pixie Cup and the delightful Molly Eye-winker. The last two are on account of the small hairs on the outside which look a bit like eye lashes. Here, have a look through the hand lens. Pretty little things; you can just imagine the little elves tripping around here at night by the light of their Jack o’lanterns and trying them on for size. I think the place is beginning to get to me, let’s get up into the real world again.

That’s better, back in the world of what you see is what you get. Only not quite. That bee pollinating the white mustard down there isn’t quite as it appears. Look closely at the pollen sacs – there aren’t any. And those eyes look a bit too close together and meet at the top which is a bit odd for a honey bee. And do I detect only one pair of true wings and rather short antennae? I do believe that we have unmasked an impostor. This is no bee collecting honey for the hive; it’s a fly, cunningly disguised, nonchalantly sipping nectar secure in the knowledge that his livery will protect him from predators. A lovely bit of visual crypsis where one insect has evolved to resemble an entirely different insect purely by natural selection.  Back in its ancestral lineage the flies that looked a bit like bees were less likely to be eaten than those that looked more like flies and so the bee look-alikes survived to breed more look-alikes. The more their offspring looked like bees the more they survived to breed until now they are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

We seem to be approaching the point where other small valleys are coming in to join our main valley so, with a bit of luck, we’ll have even more water to splash about in next week. See you then.

The Extra Bit

A question to my friends in Northern Europe: What have you done with my moths? December has come and gone and my terrace wall should be a teeming metropolis beneath the light. So far I’ve seen nothing more than the odd noctuid and pug. Have they stopped migrating?

Diamondback Moths (a study)

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LINKS:

Naturalists (the facebook page that accompanies this blog)

See detailed pictures at http://www.inaturalist.org/login  (search - people-stevedaniels-observations)

The Nature of Crete  (Flipboard Magazine)

Cretan Flora

Flowers of Crete;

BIRDS OF CRETE

Crete Birding

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)