mudboots

Hah!!! You sound like my Soil Scientist partners-in-crime. They like to jab me when I get into "problem soils" (high pH, high Calcium Carbonates, red and black parent materials et cetera) because I nearly refuse to dig a hole in a soil when I know I'm not going to find any features. I jab back the 3 main wetland indicators are vegetation, vegetation, and vegetation...

...now you've got me wanting to look under the glass to see if I can see anything, fortunately it's not a heavy tank...

davemonkey

Man, if you want to see some cool features, I put some "Beaumont Clay" in Rita's tank as her substrate. It has developed some neat features that you can see easily since it's a 1.5" layer, fully visible through the tank sides.

We can stare at it and discuss it over a tall glass of wine on Thursday.

Phil Edwards

HAHAHAHA!

My former boss at the consulting firm was a soil scientist and was adamant that we get soils observations and data as well as water/veg. Two of the guys who'd been there the longest thought veg, veg, veg and made up soil and water data for the forms they submitted to the Corps. >< I've got a plant biology and soils/hydrology background and had so many disagreements with them it wasn't funny.

Let me know what you find! I bet there'll be some nice oxidized root channels.


Cheers,
Phil

davemonkey

Oh that is TOO funny!! (And not very honest...but FUNNY!! )

Phil Edwards

Yeah, they were jerks too. I kept waiting for the Corps to call them on one of their delineations and have to go dig a pit. One can dream.

mudboots

I always fill out data forms and take field notes with the assumption that everything I submit (mostly to landowners and the they're representatives) will be challenged. I've found that usually it confuses them to the point that they just take my word for it.

BTW - I think maybe after Thanksgiving or something I may post some new pics. I made a few minor changes, including removing the newts (we did a complete overhaul of Abby's 10 gallon - pics coming soon on that one). I think the newts will be happier in the 10, and the betta was happy to get rid of the last few platties he shared the algae farm, I mean NPT, with.

mudboots

Just an update on something in the works:

I've got things almost finished on the open water scene. I have some wild-collected plants that I found that fit just perfect to scale. Some small-leaved Hydrocot.s serve as the giant American lotus pads, some Eleoch.p. serves as the shoreline Juncus effusus and bullrush (Scirpus sp.), and some liverwort I picked out of a batch of plants I got from Niko serves as the smartweed. This is pretty common in some of the southeastern areas I go to where there is significant open water.

The pic is not centered and really is horrible, but it's just to show kind of where I'm going with this in the next few months. It's hard to do too much when I refuse to mess with it more than once a month or longer. This keeps me from interfering with the natural tendencies of the scape. On another note, the crypts are doing great. I've added a pic of the C.wendtii in the "marsh" area.

The rest of the plants are doing great, but are still re-filling in after I messed around in there a while back.

Phil Edwards

That's gorgeous! I may have to set something like this up in the lab when I get settled in.

~Phil

mudboots

You have your own LAB? Sweet...Melinda would kill me because I'd have 70 aquariums in there...EXPERIMENTS.

Thanks for the comment. I'm going to dive in there late next week to give the glass a cleaning (tiny land snails have no sense of decency when it comes to releiving themselves), plant a mystery plant from davemonkey so we can get an ID eventually, and a small seed that tagged along in some moss (I think it's one of Dave's Polygonums). I'll take an updated set of pics at that time to show a little better detail of how it looks.

giypsy

Geez real scientists, no wonder I feel like a minnow swimming in Lake Michigan around here.

A primary motivation for all this tank stuff, is to teach myself the discipline of good field notes
in anticipation of having to produce them as an anthropologist, someday.
Unfortunately, the tank logs are taking second place to term papers and finals these last two weeks.

We can rationalize nicely by saying all this "independent study" is preparing me
for biology, which I have not studied in over thirty years.
{No I am not, quaking in my boots . . . much.}