The Village of Agios Ioannis

Welcome to the village of Agios Ioannis, or Saint John if you want a rough English translation. It’s a village very much in slow transition at the moment. Once an important hub of life in the area, over the past few decades people have gradually moved down to the seaside villages of Ferma and Koutsounari or the nearby town of Ierapetra. I read recently that in the last census the official population was somewhere in the region of eleven, all of them avid vehicle collectors judging by the number of cars I see parked around the place at times. However, the place seems to be coming back to life with newly refurbished dwellings standing cheek-by-jowl with tumbledown relics. This looks like the path down into the village so let’s follow it and see what we can find.

As you’ll notice it’s very steep but it affords wonderful views of the Lybian Sea and the lower part of the Milonas Valley that we’re going to explore (if you can see through the riot of flowers that seem to be taking over the village like triffids).  The birds that are lined up along the wires with the pretty red faces are Goldfinches. They’re resident here, as they are in most of western Europe but tend to be more noticeable when they flock together in the winter. They’re particularly fond of thistle seeds and in Christianity they’re associated with the crown of thorns placed upon Jesus’ head at the crucifixion.  A painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Barocci shows John the Baptist (after whom, presumably, this village is named) holding a goldfinch out of reach of a cat who is eyeing it up in a most unchristian manner.

A scene which is very easy to visualise here as, like in most Cretan villages, cats are legion.  These three (there’s a third one hiding by the potted pelargonium) look reasonably well fed and are probably semi-domestics. Cat ownership in Greece is a little different to that in northern Europe. Generally they’re not allowed indoors, they’re not spayed or neutered and lead semi-independent lives. This leads to unchecked breeding of the street-wise taverna beggars who thrive in the summer but face great hardship in the winter when the tourist season finishes. The question is: to feed or not to feed? Difficult to resist a cute looking cat mewing at your feet when you’re tucking into your fish supper but if you feed ‘em you breed ‘em and the problem escalates. 

Cats aren’t the only one of man’s imports to the island. We’ve also brought quite a variety of fruits with us over the years. The ubiquitous olive came to us from the Middle East, the pomegranate from India/Iran and oranges were brought in to the Mediterranean from south west Asia by the Moors in the tenth century. The ancestors of this magnificent quince, making an escape bid from this derelict building to our right, originally came over from South-West Asia, Turkey and Iran. We are very much in a man made environment here but is it unnatural? Birds distribute plant seeds, beavers substantially alter their environment and rats move fleas about so are we just another animal doing essentially the same with fruit, houses and cats?

I can resist it no longer. I simply have to poke my nose into one of these derelict dwellings and see if there’s anyone in residence. Look, a Marbled Cellar Spider. These are great spiders who build their webs in the same ramshackle way that pigeons build their nests. The webs aren’t sticky but prey gets entangled in the very randomness of the threads which seem to go every which way. Not that they rely on trapping as their sole means of finding a meal, they’re quite prepared to go out and hunt for their prey. One of their favourite tricks is to sneak up on an unsuspecting house spider and vibrate its web. When the house spider comes running to see what he’s caught he suddenly finds himself on the receiving end. Underhand maybe but it keeps us from being overrun by house spiders.

The Extra Bit

We seem to have reached the church at the bottom of the village and, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going into the churchyard to pay my respects to my neighbours Sofia and Yannis who have both passed away in recent years. In the summer a new birth has graced the family. And so the cycle of life and death continues, as it must, for all of us like every other living thing but isn’t it wonderful to be a part of it?

Last week we were chatting about air and nitrogen. If you’d like to delve a bit more into the story and find out what happens when too much nitrogen gets into the landscape  (and no prizes for guessing which species is putting it there) then you’ll find this post from Martyn Kelly of interest: https://microscopesandmonsters.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/part-of-the-problem/

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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)

Cretan Flora

Flowers of Crete;

BIRDS OF CRETE

Crete Birding

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)

Every Breath You Take

I thought that as we walk down the next part of the gully we’d have a look at air – there’s some, look, right in front of your nose. You can’t see, smell, taste or touch it so what exactly is it? Mainly it’s a mixture of two elements (not a compound – they don’t combine together). The two elements are Nitrogen (78%) and Oxygen (21%). The other 1% contains other elements, primarily Argon.

Rosularia serrata

Every breath you take (don’t worry – I’m not going to start singing again) is for the most part Nitrogen, a vital element for us but the problem is; we can’t use it directly. We need plants to do a bit of work for us like this Rosularia serrata here. It can’t use Nitrogen from the air either, it needs help from special bacteria in the soil that use enzymes to convert the nitrogen into organic compounds that it takes up through its roots. We, and other animals, can then take the nitrogen that we need to produce things like essential amino acids from the plants that we eat. When it, and we, die we pass the nitrogen back into the soil for reprocessing by bacteria. 

Ferns and Mosses

Air hasn’t always been air as we know it today and if we go grubbing about down there in the dark and damp bits we should find a couple of the major players in the events that led to the breathable stuff that we enjoy today. About four hundred million years ago, when these ferns and later these mosses, were the pioneering land plants oxygen was only running at about 15% but plants, as we know, give off oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis and over the next hundred million years levels built up to about 35%, an abundance that gave rise to giant dragonflies and things. The rise of oxygen breathing animal life brought the levels back down to a range which we’ve evolved to function in which is about 19-24%. 

Darkling and Rosemary Beetles

We seem to have come out into the open air as it were and it looks as if we’re at the head of the oleander highway (see Into The Woods) so we should be able to find some nice insect life in there. We have beetles in abundance. This beefy, black job is the brother of the one we found a couple of weeks back up the valley. That one was Raiboscelis coelestinus with the blue sheen and this one is Raiboscelis corvinus. The other two are Rosemary Beetles, Chrysolina Americana, and they seem to be thinking about expending a bit of energy to make more Rosemary beetles. Which brings me back to oxygen. The reason why it so important to us and all other animals is that we need it to convert glucose into energy in a complex process called catabolism^[1]. Simply put, we couldn’t move a muscle without it.

Ant nursery

Apart from the composition of air there are two other aspects of it that are important and those are its temperature and humidity, a delightful illustration of which you can see by looking under this rock that I’ve just turned over. The little white cocoons that the ants are fussing over are the larvae.  These, along with the eggs, they constantly move from one place to another within and just outside of the nest to regulate their conditions as the temperature and humidity fluctuate throughout the day and night. They really are the most dedicated of nursemaids. But now it seems we have reached a defile through which we cannot pass, not without ropes and crampons anyway. I suggest that we walk back over the hill, down through the village of Agios Ioannis and pick up our route again a couple of hundred feet lower down.

Cumulus and Cirrus clouds

Just look at that wonderful cloudscape above us. The large, fluffy one is a cumulus cloud (from Latin, meaning heap) while the streaky ones above are cirrus (from Latin, meaning a ringlet of hair). There are sixteen major cloud types in total, all of which contain water vapour in varying amounts evaporated from the Earth’s surface. You may be wondering; if air is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen how come your hygrometer says that its 60% water? Firstly it’s because those percentages are for perfectly dry air and secondly that your hygrometer is measuring relative humidity; the partial pressure of water in the air compared to what it could be if it was fully saturated, and not the actual amount of water in the air. Which is a good indicator of whether it is likely to rain or not and thus of far more practical use as a measurement.

So that’s air, in a nutshell. Meanwhile I think I can see the village below us so we’ll explore that next week.

The Extra Bit

Last week’s marmalade recipe seems to have gone down well so I may well do another in the New Year. Meanwhile if you want to know more about how we convert the sugars in the marmalade into energy then you can read all about it here: ^[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catabolism

I've just started a magazine called The Nature of Crete on Flipboard. Eventually it will not only contain links to the latest blog but other articles and blog posts about the flora and fauna of the island. If you'd like to read it and maybe even contribute a link then this is the web address: The Nature of Crete 

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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)

Cretan Flora

The Nature of Crete  (Flipboard Magazine)

Flowers of Crete;

BIRDS OF CRETE

Crete Birding

Greek Butterflies and Moths

Aquaworld Aquarium

Visit Greece (National Government Tourist Office)