Life Among the Trees

In spring or summer, you can look down almost any street and see flowers blooming, on plants from dandelions to cherry trees. Flowering plants, or angiosperms, are some of the most successful and diverse forms of life on Earth. Researchers have long attributed that success, in part, to the alliances these plants have with insects that help to fertilize them by carrying pollen from one plant to another while they sip a meal of nectar.

It’s a win-win relationship, but new research from the American Museum of Natural History and partner institutions shows that anther category of plants known as gymnosperms—the group to which modern conifers belong—also benefitted from pollination by ancient insects.

The evidence comes from a fly specimen trapped in amber during the Cretaceous Period. Researchers had previously suspected these flies, which belong to the Zhangsolvidae family, were pollinators. That’s because of their distinctive mouthparts, says David Grimaldi, a curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the Museum and coauthor on the paper, which was published in the journal Current Biology.

“These flies had specialized features like a long proboscis that was adapted to probing plants for nectar,” says Dr. Grimaldi.

What kind of plant, though, was a mystery that this research solves.

So this may seem like it will never work, and maybe it won’t, but I’m trying to crowdfund the money to buy a vehicle to enable my adventures.

It would mean a lot to me if you could read it through and reblog it so more people could see it. Thanks!

Last September, after a year of sluggishness and misdirection, I discovered Caving. I suddenly had something incredible to do every weekend, and a group of friends who cared about me just as much as I did about them.

That may seem like an abrupt change, with very little exposition, but that’s how it was in real life, too. After my first weekend with these people, I was one of them, and now they’re my roommates, less than a year later.

As soon as I began, I realized I had an incredible passion for Caving. I was not altogether surprised, as I have always loved outdoor activities, but caving filled a space that had been empty a long time.

I have been working through the summer in the hopes of affording a vehicle to take caving. I worked since school ended, but my job has kept me so busy that I’ve been unable to spend any time caving. Literally zero trips since classes ended at the beginning of April. I was finally fed up with this, and will be done with my job at the end of July. Unfortunately, with rent and food costs, I have made just over half of what I’ll need to buy a caving vehicle.

Now, I could get something cheap like a Jeep Cherokee (the chosen vehicle of many a poor caver), but I’d rather something that would stand up a little better. I’ve settled on a mid 80s model Toyota Land Cruiser. Where I live, most of those are priced used at $5-6000, and you might be able to work them down to $4000, give or take $500.

I don’t just want this for mu own sake. I want to give back to this community that has given me so much. I never want people to be denied a trip because there aren’t enough drivers (we frequently only have 1), or a trip to be cancelled when the only driver backs out. I want to enable as many people as possible to discover the bizare, wonderful, and truly awesome sport that I have. To give them the experience that I was lucky enough to have stumbled into.

I absolutely do not deserve for you to do this. In fact, if you giving me money would prevent you from giving it to people who really need it, then please go and give it to them immediately and forget about this project. However, if that would not be the case, then help me.

Now you know what it feels like to be inside a martini shaker - ice cubes mandatory.

@joelkowalski shot on location in Southern Iceland during the #nikon D810 launch campaign.