Oliver, a two year old male short-haired brown tabby and white cat, is waiting for a home in Orange County, CA.
Oliver.
Oliver is a sweet cat who needs a home with no dogs and no kids. He loves to explore his environment, and can be frequently found sneaking through a fabric tube in the rescue.
Oliver popping out of a fabric tube.Oliver sniffs the corner of a cat cage at his rescue.
Oliver is currentlyno longer available for adoption through Miss Kitty’s Rescue in Costa Mesa, CA. For more information, and to find out how to adopt him, contact Mindy at misskittysrescue@yahoo.com.
Hurricane is a seven year old male short-haired black cat waiting for a home in Orange County, CA.
Hurricane.
Hurricane is a very intelligent, outgoing cat who loves people and is not afraid of anything, but who needs to live in a house without other pets as he can be aggressive to other cats and dogs.
Hurricane in Mindy Millers arms.Hurricane looking playful.
Hurricane is currently available for adoption through Miss Kitty’s Rescue in Costa Mesa, CA. For more information, and to find out how to adopt him, contact Mindy at misskittysrescue@yahoo.com.
Zoey and Porsche are two sisters waiting for a home in Orange County, CA. They’re both short-haired white and black bicolor female cats with yellow-green eyes.
ZoeyPorsche
They’re both less than a year old, and they need to be adopted together as a pair. They’re a bit shy and scared in the rescue, but they’re very playful with toys and each other, and will warm up once they get to a house where they’re given a space they can call their own.
Zoey (front; black nose) and Porsche (rear; black dot on her pink nose)Zoey peers out from behind a wall.Zoey
Zoey and Porsche are currently available for adoption through Miss Kitty’s Rescue in Costa Mesa, CA. For more information on the cats, and to find out how to adopt them, contact Mindy at misskittysrescue@yahoo.com.
Are you looking for a cute cat or kitten to adopt in Costa Mesa, California? Here’s a list of some of the cats currently available for adoption through Miss Kitty’s Rescue:
[Note: Click each cat’s image or name to see more information about the cat.]
If you’re interested in adopting any of these cats, please contact Mindy of Miss Kitty’s Rescue at misskittysrescue@yahoo.com. Some of these cats may also be available to be seen at the Petsmart at 620 West 17th St in Costa Mesa, CA 92627.
Miss Kitty’s Rescue is a cat rescue group run by Mindy Miller in Costa Mesa, California. Michelle and I adopted our two cats from Mindy; they were both former feral cats that Mindy tamed herself, and she turned the two of them from fearful, nearly wild cats into two kitties who love spending time with us.
As with most cat rescues, however, Mindy’s rescue is constantly full, and she has trouble finding people to adopt her rescued cats, especially since many of the cats need special homes. To help her out I’ve volunteered to take pictures of her cats pro bono, so she can use them in her own advertising. She has also asked me to do whatever advertising I can for the cats, and thus I’ve created this post, which will link to all the cats.
As I was taking my oat grass guttation pictures, I kept an eye out for cute critters on my newly planted grass. And, of course, there were some:
Home on the range: A small family of green aphids on an oat grass {Avena sativa} leaf. The scale bar (lower-right) is 1mm long.
That’s a young family of aphids, just starting out in life. Aphids are phloem-feeding plant parasites, so they’re sittin’ there having lunch. They have a proboscis they insert into the leaf’s phloem vessels, which they then drink like a soda through a straw. Phloem is just about as nutritious as soda, so aphids have serious problems getting enough nutrition and dealing with the sugar overload, but that’s the topic for another post (and probably another blog …).
The larger aphid is almost certainly a parthenogentically reproducing female. She reproduces asexually, creating more daughter offspring from just her own unfertilized eggs. Yes, kids, that does mean that she can have baby aphids without any daddy aphids around.
So, the six smaller aphids (called nymphs until they mature) are almost certainly her offspring. The mother will keep producing more and more offspring asexually, and these offspring themselves will almost certainly be able to parthenogentically reproduce as well1. That grass stalk won’t be happy for long.
It can often be hard to tell from web-sized images how much detail is contained in the original capture. Since I know you’re thinking that these aphids are adorably cute, here’s a crop of the image above focusing on them (see the same crop as a larger image here):
Crop of my "Home on the Range" image; the scale bar is still 1mm long.
I’m not certain what species these aphids are, but I suspect they may be Diuraphis noxia, the Russian Wheat Aphid.
Oh, and the small drop of water at the tip of the grass stalk is there because the grass is guttating – exuding water from its tip due to root pressure. I write about that more in this post.
1 Winged and/or sexually reproducing individuals can also be born, typically when environmental conditions change dramatically (e.g., the onset of winter, or depletion of the food source).
My cats love to nibble on grass, and so I grow tack oats (Avena sativa) from seed for them. About six months ago I figured out that on cool, humid mornings the grass could be seen guttating. At the time I lacked my macro lens, and so did the best I could and got this image. It’s an okay image, but I don’t like the choice of background in retrospect, and I also wanted to get in closer and show just a few stalks of grass so the water drops would be more obvious.
Over the weekend some newly planted grass was again demonstrating guttation, so I tried anew:
Three stalks of oat grass demonstrating guttation.
Guttation is caused by root pressure building up so that water is squeezed out pores (hydathodes) at the tips or sides of a plant’s leaves. It typically happens at night, under cool, moist conditions when the soil is well hydrated. As Wikipedia says, it’s important to note that guttation and dew are two completely separate phenomena.
To demonstrate guttation in a typical botany science lab , a technician sets up a few-weeks-old pot of grass under a bell jar, waters it thoroughly, and leaves it for the night. The next morning tiny drops of water cover the plant’s leaves. One thing I like about my example is that it’s free of lab manipulation: this pot of grass was just sitting on my porch when I saw the guttation and brought it in to photograph.
Two guttating oat grass stalks with a strand of spider silk leading off camera. Scale bar (lower-left) is 1mm long.
If you’re curious how I photographed these, I used a technique much like1 that used with my poinsettia flower closeups; see my behind the scenes post for more details.
1 The first image is a single-frame capture; the second is a multi-image blend to increase depth of field. Both use a studio setup almost identical to the poinsettia setup, except I used reflected direct sunlight to aid in illumination.
This afternoon I went for an end-of-the-year sunset bicycle ride along the Santa Ana River Trail and Huntington State Beach. I was mildly hoping for a last gorgeous sunset over the water, but dense fog rolled in well before sunset. The fog made it even more fun, though, as what few people there were largely headed home, leaving the beach to myself and a few other dedicated folks to enjoy a solitary and atmospheric end of the last day of the year.
A fire pit on the sand at Huntington State Beach on a foggy New Year's Eve.
Huntington Beach is lined with hundreds of giant concrete fire pits, which on summer evenings are often surrounded by people having beach parties. It was a cold day today (in the mid 60’s!), so there were only a brave few out to enjoy New Year’s Eve with a beach fire:
Room to spare.
While black and white suits the feel of the evening well, the fire made me have to process at least one in color; the warmth of the fire just draws your eye in (as it drew me in while I was there – it looked so wonderfully warm):
An empty fire pit on the sand at Huntington State Beach with a lone group of people having a New Year's Eve fire in the background.
Before I headed home on a beautiful foggy dusk bike ride, I couldn’t help but take a picture of this amazing nesting set of fire pits:
Matryoshka beach fire pits.
And, to show how foggy it was, here’s a picture of the Pacific Coast Highway bridge that crosses the Santa Ana “River” at the southern end of the beach:
Bridge over foggy waters.
Happy New Year!
Getting There
Huntington State Beach: The beach is a state park, and runs for miles along the coast of southern Huntington Beach. It is accessible from multiple points along Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1) anywhere between Beach Blvd. to the north and Brookhurst St. to the south. There’s plenty of parking for cars right on the beach (unless you’re going on July 4th or at another peak time), though parking requires paying an entry fee to the park. I love visiting the beach in the winter, as the giant beach is largely empty, leading to a great feeling of solitude (especially when it’s foggy!). There’s a paved trail that runs the length of the beach, which is frequently used for bicycling, jogging, or roller blading.
It’s the end of the year, and that means that it’s time to make “best of 2011” lists. This blog will be no exception.
This year was a year of exploration for me, thanks mainly to my good friend Greg (of Alpenglow Images; he just posted his own top 12 of 2011), who inspired me to push my boundaries photographically, as well as to start sharing my photography online. But it’s far too easy to ramble on in posts like this. So, here are my 11 favorite images from 2011 (with many thanks to Michael Russell and Mike Cavaroc for inspiring this with their own posts earlier this week).
First, my top three:
The Future, from my Agave and Aloe series (1 | 2).
Foggy Morning Sunshine, from my Crystal Cove State Park series (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6).
Listening Cat is Happy to Hear About Your Problems – 2 (aka: Kira relaxing), from my cat galleries (1 | 2).
Unimpressed Cat is Unimpressed, from my cat galleries (1 | 2).
Nobska Light: Classic Americana, from an unpublished gallery. Taken in Woods Hole, MA.
Poinsettia Inflorescence Extreme Closeup, from my poinsettia series (1 | 2). Taken at Orange Coast College’s Ornamental Horticulture Department.
Agave Inflorescence at the Beach 2, from my Little Corona Agave post. Taken in Corona Del Mar (Newport Beach), CA.
Vertical Arch Rock and Clouds, from my Little Corona long exposure series (1 | 2). Taken at Robert E Badham Marine Life Refuge in Corona Del Mar (Newport Beach), CA.
Those are my top 11 pictures of the year!
As an encore I’m going to include one more image. While this didn’t make the cut artistically, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and thus seems to belong here.
Two Rattlesnakes Mating, from my Crystal Cove State Park series (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6). Taken in Crystal Cove State Park, CA.
A closeup of a poinsettia flower cluster from directly above. This macro image shows a number of inflorescences (green, red, and yellow structures) surrounded by bracts (colored leaves associated with a flower) extending out of the frame.
Earlier this week I posted about finding the flowers in poinsettias (spoiler: the petals aren’t the big red structures!). After writing that post, though, I realized it was missing a good closeup of the flower clusters themselves. So, yesterday afternoon I took a quick break from my end-of-the-semester piles of grading and headed back to Orange Coast College’sOrnamental Horticulture Department to get a few more pictures.
The flowers of poinsettias (Euphorbia pulcherrima) are actually cyanthia: flowering structures composed of many individual male or female flowers surrounded by modified leaves. Here’s what they look like:
A closeup of a poinsettia flower cluster from the side, showing how the cyanthia branch off of the tip of a stem and are surrounded by red bracts.
That picture shows multiple cyanthia (flower clusters) at the end of a stem surrounded by a sea of red bracts (colored leaves associated with a flower). Each green ball tipped with red is an involucre, a cluster of bracts (leaves) fused into a cup-shaped structure that contains multiple male flowers and one female flower within it.
Let’s look at the involucres and their flowers even closer:
A closeup of a poinsettia flower cluster from the side. Follow the link below to see the image at twice the size.
Emerging from each involucre you can see red filaments supporting yellow anthers that are dusty with individual pollen grains. The filaments are emerging from the multiple male flowers growing within each involucre. Also emerging from each involucre you can see a number of dark-purple structures supported by short stalks; I believe these may be the stigmas and styles of the flowers (though this species is supposed to have only a single female flower per involucre with a stigma divided into three sections, so I’m not certain what those dark-purple structures are).
[edited 1/20/2012: the dark purple structures are indeed not the female flowers, as I write about in this post. I’m not at all sure what these small structures are. Anyone have any ideas?]
The bright yellow, liquid-filled structures attached to the involucre are nectar glands filled with nectar (to attract pollinators). A few individual pollen grains are stuck to the surface of the left-most nectar gland.
I’ll leave you with a crop of that last image showing two cyanthia in more detail
Two cyanthia of a poinsettia flower cluster, with anthers and associated structures easily visible. This is a sample of the detail visibile in the image posted above.
And, if you want your own poinsettias to admire, head to Orange Coast College this Friday: they’re having their annual poinsettia sale, which is open to the public. See my first post in this series for more information.
Orange Coast College’sOrnamental Horticulture Department is just plain awesome. The department’s landscaped gardens are easily the most beautiful spot on campus, they teach a wide array of neat classes (landscape design, plant propagation, cacti and succulents, etc.), and they’ve got the nicest faculty and staff around.
To help fund their department, and provide a lab opportunity for their plant propagation class, every fall the department rears thousands of poinsettias (Euphorbia pulcherrima) in their greenhouses for sale to the public. This year’s sale is this Friday (December 9), and their greenhouses are currently full of beautiful poinsettias.
I just had to take a look at the plants last week:
A small portion of one of five greenhouses in Orange Coast College's Horticulture Department that are filled with poinsettias being grown for their annual 2011 poinsettia sale. The plants in the foreground are the "Ice Punch" variety.
Many people think that the big red (or red and white, in the picture above) structures are the flower petals of poinsettias; they’re not. The big red structures are bracts: specialized leaves associated with a flower that are typically brightly colored (usually to help attract pollinators to inconspicuous flowers). The actual flowers of the plant are located at the ends of the stems, and are significantly smaller and less noticeable. Look closely at the picture above, though, and you’ll see little green, red, and yellow clusters at the top of the plant; those are the flowers.
A closeup of an Ice Punch poinsettia flower cluster from the side.
In the picture above we can see that the true flowers of the poinsettia are not the brightly colored leaves, but instead are these small green and red structures. The yellow things that look like lips are nectar glands, and the green balls with red filaments are the flowers (which are more appropriately termed pseudanthia or inflorescences, since they’re actually multiple flowers in a single structure). Let’s look at them closer:
A closeup of a poinsettia flower cluster from directly above. Many people confuse the bracts (red leaves) with the petals of flowers; they're quite different.
This macro shot shows a number of red bracts surrounding the flowers and extending out of the frame. The green balls tipped with red are individual inflorescences called cyanthia, which are composed of multiple flowers surrounded by modified leaves1. The green tissue surrounding each inflorescence is an involucre, a cluster of bracts (modified leaves) fused into a cup-shaped structure that contains multiple male flowers and one female flower within it.
Emerging from each involucre are red filaments supporting yellow anthers that are being grown by the male flowers (the anthers produce and release pollen). A single female flower should be emerging from the center of each involucre, but isn’t easily visible in the picture.
The yellow liquid-filled structures attached to each involucre are nectar glands filled with nectar to attract pollinators. On less-developed inflorescences the nectar glands look like little light-green lips.
If you’re in the Orange County area and want your own poinsettias to observe the flowers of, head to OCC this Friday and pick some up for yourself! You’ll get a cool botanical specimen, and will be supporting a great program in the process. Oh yeah, and you’ll have a nice pretty plant for the holiday season.
