Et Tu Cucumber?

drawing by marguerita One can't be absolutely certain about anything....
One of the problems with growing crops is that they grow.
You can't switch them off like you could a baked bean factory: they just keep coming.
There has already been a considerable drop in demand in Germany, where authorities are advising consumers not to eat salads because they still have not pinpointed the cause of the outbreak. This is affecting the area around Hamburg in particular; the rest of Europe appears to be OK. But the knock-on effect is that orders for cucumbers from Spain and Holland have been cancelled altogether, or at best reduced. For cucumbers from Holland, the obvious place to look is in the UK – we already take large volumes of cucumbers at this time of the year. Extra cucumbers will be "dumped" here rather than marketed, and this will drop the price paid to the grower. These price reductions, if they occur, are unlikely to affect the price in the shops but they do have a massive effect on the price paid to growers in the UK.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/01/cucumbers-e-coli-germany?intcmp=239

Flowers,Flowers,Where do you come from?

drawing by marguerita

All flowers, from Amborella on, have the same basic anatomy. Just about all of them have petals or petal-like structures that surround male and female organs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/science/08flower.html?_r=1

Not Funny: Et Tu, Monsterbeetles ?

drawing collage by marguerita
A wood-devouring beetle has gained a foothold in New England, and authorities plan to cut down large numbers of infested trees and grind them up to stop the pest from spreading to the region's celebrated forests and ravaging the timber, tourism and maple-syrup industries.
''This insect scares us to death because if it ever got loose in the forests of New England, it would be just about impossible to contain and it'd change the landscape dramatically,'' said Tom McCrum, coordinator of the Massachusetts Maple Syrup Association.Calling it a national emergency, federal authorities have committed themselves to spending tens of millions of dollars to fight the invasion.Beetle Invasion Threatens New England Trees - NYTimes.com


The Interface Between Beetles & Humans


The assessment of beetle quality as "good" or " bad"- even the names that we give to beetles- merely reflect our own value system.Although we have touched on some of the more practical aspects of beetles in our lives, this can hardly be considered an accurate portrait of beetles and their role in the natural world. Beetles enrich our language, art,agriculture- even our diets-
but what to we do for them ?The fact is, we need beetles for our intellectual, spiritual, and biological survival, but they have very little use for us.
Our challenge lies in our ability to recognize beetles as biological treasures, preserving them for future generations of, among others, etymologists, artisans, agriculturists, gourmands, and healers.

The Significance of Beetles

The biological basis of our affiliation with beetles may be viewed from the perspective of nine fundamental values that reveal how humans relate to nature: utilitarian, ecologistic, scientific, naturalistic, aesthetic, symbolic, dominionistic,negatavistic, humanistic, moralistic. These categories were developed by Stephen Kellert of Yale University in the late 1970's, not to define any instinctive behavior, but to identify clusters of learning behavior to understand basic human perceptions of animals.
The elegance of this classification is that it may be considered a universal framework for the expression of basic affinities for and dependance on the natural world. Applying this typology yo our relationship with beetles, we can briefly summarize some of the ways in which these marvelous animals are meaningful in our lives. from Beetlephilia in An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles
by Arthur V. Evans and Charles L. Bellamy