For Science: Fountain Pens

I've decide that I would launch a series on this here blog, which I am titling "For Science", drawing on a popular meme (and I am very fond of Portal myself).  In this series of indeterminate duration and frequency, I'm going to write about things that I think are useful for scientific use, and beyond.

This time, the subject matter is fountain pens.  Yes, fountain pens.  That probably seems like a rather odd topic, so allow me to give a brief diversionary explanation.  On Christmas, I was somewhat unexpectedly gifted with a vintage Parker 51 fountain pen (it's a very dark green, basically this pen). It's a lovely bit of work, and considered the greatest fountain pen of all time by many.  It is also not a cheap thing, and wasn't even when new.

And having a fountain pen, for the first time in my life, got me to thinking about how we write, and what we write with.  I have long held up the plastic water bottle as the ironic symbol of modern civilization.  It is made out of a material that lasts essentially forever, is filled with something we can get for almost free, and is intended to be used only once.  And then thrown away.  The standard ballpoint pen is remarkably similar.  Intended to be cheap, convenient and inconsequential to lose, and yet made of immortal materials.

I began to wonder how many hundreds of pens I had bought or borrowed, and then lost or thrown away over the course of my life. Estimates put the number of pens thrown away by Americans per year north of 1 billion.  That's pretty terrible.  I had recently attempted to only buy pens I could get refills for, but found that the refills were often hard to come by, and that the pens themselves were often no great shakes.  The idea of having a few well crafted and durable pens that I might use from here until I no longer need to write had never really occurred to me. Until I was given this Parker.

Advice about Chiggers

So. In the last few months, I've spent an awful lot of time thinking about chiggers.

As you may know already, chiggers are the juvenile stage of a mite.  The adults are harmless, and not interested in animals, but in order to mature, they need delicious animal flesh. To that end, they climb up things that smell tasty, and find a pore or hair follicle to attach themselves to, and go to town.

That's an important bit. Their mouth-parts can't actually bite you.  They need to use the preexisting holes in your skin to feed, which they do by injecting enzymes, and sucking out the cell soup that results.  Your body produces a response to this, and that's what causes the itching. Most of the time the chigger is long gone before you will even begin to itch.  Aside from the itching, they're otherwise harmless, at least here in the US. In Asia and around parts of the South Pacific you can acquire scrub typhus from chigger bites, which sounds like a pretty bad time.

I'm somewhat battle-hardened when it comes to the little guys, and the fact that I have not been without a least a dozen or so bites for the last few months hasn't been a big deal.  Going through a few weeks with many hundreds of them will do that to you.  I would like to offer you some advice if you live in chigger country, so that you don't have to go through that experience.

Firstly: Wear long pants.  Some of my research partners disagree on this, but that's mostly meant they got chigger bites on their underwear lines, rather than on their ankles. Chiggers will climb your legs until they hit a barrier of some kind, and then look for a spot to feed.  That can be your sock, or where your shoe meets your ankle, or what have you. Or it can be your underwear line.  Or past it.  Seems like a simple decision to me.  If you're constantly moving, only in chigger territory for a short time, or outside at times they're not very active (when it's cool, wet, or very, very hot), long pants tucked into your boots may be all you need.

What I've Been Up To

As I keep mentioning field work and related pitfalls on my blog, some of you may be wondering exactly what sort of research I've been working on.  It's fairly straightforward, as these things go:  The study is intended to investigate the relationship between social institutions and urban forest canopy cover/structure.  This is more exciting that it appears at first blush, I promise.

Two parts of that sentence may not make a great deal of sense to some folks.  So I'll explain precisely what is meant by "social institutions" and "urban forest", as the former may seem very broad, and the latter something of an oxymoron.

I have the excellent privilege of being loosely affiliated with the research institution run in part by Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis.  Her work with IFRI informs this research project, and it is IFRI's definition of social institution that we are making use of: "institutions are defined as rules that constrain human behavior, either by encouraging people to do x or not to do x" (IFRI Manual, 2008).  That includes both formal--city ordinances--and informal--the approval or disapproval of your neighbor--rules.  This is may be broader than you might have guessed!  Our research group spent many, many hours devising a survey intended to probe the particular institutions we are interested in, primarily Neighborhood Associations (NAs) and Homeowner's Associations (HOAs).  We are also trying to investigate to what extent individuals are influenced by their neighbors and how much these things may impact land management decisions, particularly as those decisions relate to trees.

Now for the "Urban" bit of urban forest.  The word conjures up different mental images for different people, which is somewhat problematic. For some the word urban conjures images of Metropolis or Gotham; hundreds of thousands of people, the inner-city, concrete, high rise buildings, a lack of open space, etc.  To others it might mean anything bigger than a town of a few thousand.  There are official meanings, for particular purposes, of course.  The US census has a complex, somewhat arcane definition that can lead to odd outcomes at times. But it is a definition.

Spy vs Spy

You may recognize that bug right there, performing a little insect arabesque.  This is a Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica), a long standing invasive beetle.  I remember seeing them in my Aunt's pool as a kid, where they would inevitably seem to get stuck and end up drowning, but not before trying to climb onto you with their pointy little beetle legs. It's been a while since I've seen one, but I suspect it's only because I haven't been looking.  While out doing field work I spotted this one, along with a flower crab spider, just barely visible around the bottom of the unopened thistle (slightly better picture of it here, I suspect it got a bit more than it was bargaining for when this beetle showed up).  Japanese beetles are notorious for being extremely unpicky eaters: as adults they'll chew up pretty much anything green, and can do serious damage during population peaks.

Interestingly, this one has chosen to settle down for dinner on another invader, the Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense).  The Canada thistle is a very, very common invasive weed in this area, particularly along rail road tracks and road sides (this picture is taken less than five meters from the edge of the road).  It's very good at crowding out other plants, and is extremely hardy.  In this instance, the Japanese beetle (which is not considered a major problem in Indiana) is performing a very slight service by attacking the unopened flower of this plant.  In the long run, it wont make much difference that this particular beetle stopped to eat this particular flower.  But it does illustrate that invasive management is often not a clear cut thing, as pest species can turn against each other, or perform useful ecosystem services (pdf).

You can read more about controlling Japanese beetles here (pdf), and here.

Signs of Summer

Having been a Midwesterner my whole life, I have had the mixed blessing of four extremely distinct seasons.  This year, here in Bloomington, we've enjoyed a more than 100° Fahrenheit range in temperature between January and July.  Summer has always meant a few things to me:  tremendous thunderstorms, oppressive heat, and the endless droning of cicadas.  This year I have added a dubious fourth member to that hallowed list: chiggers.

I had never gotten a chigger bite that I can recall until a few years ago (I have still yet to get poison ivy, which I don't appear to be sensitive to):  I made the mistake of cutting through some high weeds when wearing shorts, and had a half dozen incredibly itchy little red dots to show for it.