The editor said that if they felt they could use it, they would publish it. Unfortunately, this time they couldn’t fit it into the magazine. Understandably, Johann was very disappointed, but it’s still an excellent poem. Since many of you have heard us talking about it, we thought you’d like to read it and judge for yourselves. I’m hoping Johann will keep trying with new writings and have better luck next time.

The Oak
by Johann Heupel

Night, the dead of night.
The owl hoots from his high perch on the pine.
There is the oak.
He is the oldest tree in these woods.
“Who made these woods?” you ask.
The oak will tell you.
He knows 2,000 years of history and more.
He will tell you no man owns these woods.
The woods are free – free as the nightingale.
And that is the secret of life.

???
Originally uploaded by eclectic echoes.

Unfortunately the photos of the other creatures did not turn out very well.

Juvenile (not larval) brittle star of some sort? Although it looks like it, brittle stars have 5 arms…this has 7 maybe 8.

A small or juvenile pycnogonid (sea spider)? Algae? Pollen? ????

This critter has a diameter of under 0.5mm (it’s diameter is less than that of a 0.5mm mechanical pencil lead — very precise yes?) and this shot was 45x through the home microscope, using extension tubes to jerry rig a system to mount the camera to the lens. I’ll have to see about borrowing one of the eyepieces from the school scopes and see if I can get a slightly better result using their probably better optics.

The End.

The organizer of the conferences knows Johann’s love of science and was very generous, providing Johann and Tammy with passes to get into the event and attend talks. As a family we attended a number of the talks, but the whole family ended up volunteering behind the scenes, stuffing programs and helping hand out newsletters, sell raffle tickets, etc… On Thursday the closing NSA evening event and opening Benthic Ecology Meeting event was a viewing of the IMAX movie Volcanoes of the Deep Sea with opening introduction by NSA member and deep sea biologist Richard Lutz. Richard also had a 20 minute question and answer period afterwords with several questions from the few kids in the audience including a pair of insightful questions from Johann.

We all had great fun, especially meeting some of the wonderful people involved in the meeting and attending it including Kathy Johnston, Richard Lutz, Sammy Ray, Roger Mann, Ken Chew and many, many others.

Johann and Tammy were invited back by everyone to the Saturday evening event to close the Benthic Ecology Meeting – a Beach Party in the hotel ballroom. Johann had a blast with playing volleyball with all the scientists and grad students. It was great fun and hilarious to watch the beach balls fliying into the chandeliers. (My legs are still killing me from all the running and diving.) They also had “Benthic Twister”, limbo contests, a Hawaiian shirt contest and a hula hoop contest. Who knew Tammy could hula hoop for hours straight?!

The highlight of the evening however for Johann was his receiving a certificate of appreciation and participation from the organizer. He had a photo taken with all the volunteers as he received his certificate. We will hopefully be able to get a copy of the photo soon to post. The certificate is now going up over his study desk. As one of the PhD students said “Wow, he’s gonna have a better C.V. by the time he’s in high school than I have now!” Heck he’s gonna have a better one than I do!!

• Lise Meitner – Physics
• Shirley Jackson – Theoretical Physics
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt – Astonomy
• Laurie Marker – Biology
• Barbara Block – Marine Ecology and Biology
• Lisa Levin – Marine Ecology / Oceanography
• Cindy Lee Van Dover – Oceanography
• Rosalind Franklin – Biology
• B. Galdikas – Biology
• Meave Leakey – Paleontology
• Louise Leakey – Paleontology
• Mary Leakey – Anthropolgy
• Jane Goodall – Biology and Anthropology
• Sylvia Earle – Marine Biology / Oceanography
• Eugenie Clark – Marine Biology
• Marie Curie – Chemistry and Physics
• Irene Joliot-Curie – Chemistry
• Helene Langevin-Joliot – Physics
• Caroline Herschel – Astronomy
• Gerty Cori – Biochemistry
• Maria Mitchell – Astronomy (bio)
• Sue Hendrickson – Paleontology
• Jennifer Blank – Geochemistry
• Jill Tarter – Astronomy
• Beth Shapiro – Biology
• Lisa Kaltenegger – Astrophysics
• Amber VanDerwarker – Anthropology
• Elizabeth Catlos – Geochemistry
• Penny Boston – Biology
• Diana Northup – Biology

While most of these we came up with without resources, it helped for some of them that Johann has his “Scientist Trading Cards” list, which all of these ladies are on. I figure his lists are the equivalent to “class notes” for us. When we have time maybe we can do a part two… that and go back and hyperlink these to bio pages and lab pages. ed. Done!

Oh and for the record Penny Boston and Diana Northup have some of the coolest named study subjects (at least for Johann): Snottites and phlegm balls.

S’not funny. That’s what they study… no really.

Once Johann has decoded his words he has them all memorized, in part because of his heightened level of concentration. I’ve had to make simple concepts more complicated in order for it to be interesting enough for him to stop and think about it before. He had a mental block on grasping 2+3=5 until I taught him 20+30=50 when he was little.

In my many hours of boredom in the 6th grade, I taught myself to write backwards. Now I have a use for my untapped talent. In the past I’ve written messages backwards to Johann. He would run into the bathroom to use the mirror to read it. It was a fun game.

In preparation for his last spelling test, I wrote all of his words backwards on a sheet of paper and gave him a mirror. He sat at the table, held the mirror at the right angle, and copied all his words frontwards. He was ready for the test then, but he asked me to make another backwards worksheet, since the first one was so much fun for him. So I created a crossword puzzle, where the words were already in place, but backwards. I made a blank crossword puzzle for him to fill in. I got him started with the first word and he happily spent the next 20 minutes using the mirror to complete the puzzle. Once he had written each word letter by letter, he read it out loud to himself for reinforcement. He loved that one and asked me to do another one for the next set of words.

Our last big deciphering project was for the multiplication tables. True to what he has inherited from me and Eric, Johann has an extremely low tolerance for repetitive, mundane tasks. But I am determined to have him know his multiplication tables inside and out. My third grade teacher did that for me and it benefited me greatly.

While I was poking around Enchantedlearning.com looking for something new to do with Johann, I came across the numbers written in Chinese. A web search helped me find two other educational websites with even more information on writing numbers in Chinese. I learned how to do it, then taught Johann. Each day’s math consisted of one part of the times tables written in Chinese until we had gone from 1 to 12. Johann’s job was to translate the problems and write the correct answers to the equations. He had the idea of writing the answers in Chinese also, which improved it and made it more complete.

This turned out to also be an exercise in accessing and retrieving information. The entire multiplication tables were already in his head in the form of the Schoolhouse Rock songs. I taught him how to use the songs when he got stuck.

Now I’m looking for new codes. It’s going to get harder and harder to top the previous project. For the next spelling test I think I’ll use braille.

One of the family’s big presents this year was a nice zoom dissecting microscope with a set of 50 metazoan and 50 plant biology classroom slides. Johann and Tammy have been going through a few prepared slides per session, but whenever he gets on the scopes at the university, he usually gets to look at bacteria through the epifluorescent scopes or all kinds of zooplankton through the dissecting scopes there, so it is not really the same looking at a dead, prepared slide, many of which are largely unrecognizable as being something once alive.

For one of my classes last week, we did a bivalve particle clearing rate experiment using some mussels (Mytilus edulis) gathered from the water just off campus. As I was separating out some of the mussels in the lab, I noticed a ~15mm character in a preying mantis pose — it looked almost like a walking stick doing a Karate kid final kick, a Caprellid amphipod. I separated the small mussel it was on from the rest of the bunch and put it aside in a beaker. After everything was cleaned up from the experiment, I took the mussel and amphipod home to Johann and Tammy.

When I got home, I set the beaker on the kitchen counter while I stripped off the book satchel, laptop, coat, etc… before I was done Johann was already staring closely at the two occupants of the beaker. By the time I had turned back around, he assaulted me with, “Cool! What is that?! That’s mytilus, but what is THAT?!”

He spent the next hour watching both the caprellid and the mussel, (Gotta love low heat light sources!), calling Tammy and me over to examine some detail he had noticed or watching for some new behavior he just witnessed. The caprellid mostly repeated a pretty set cycle: it did its characteristic pose and swayed its upper body through the water, then remained still for minutes at a time. It did occasionally maneuver to a new location with it’s inchworm style motion.

The mussel opened and closed periodically, which allowed Johann to observe the mantle skirt closely. It also began to cement its byssel threads to the beaker using its foot. Johann watched this both through the scope and with the naked eye. After an hour he had sketched both thoroughly and was done for the night. Tammy, Johann, and I decided we can’t tell exactly what species the caprellid was, though we suspect it is a male Caprella mutica, an invasive species known to be here in the Long Island Sound, specifically in the Mystic estuary.

I took the opportunity to see if I could hand hold the camera and get a decent shot through the scope, with and without one of the 15x occulars in place. While not as nice as having a dedicated imager like we have in the teaching lab, it is a decent result for hand held and a good starting point. I’m thinking about modifying a lens cap/body cap to help in alignment and holding the camera in place.

So what is a caprellid amphipod?

Caprellid amphipods (a.k.a. skeleton shrimp) are small marine crustaceans which have been found on diverse habitats from deep ocean hydrothermal vents to shallow estuarine waters. These small amphipods spend their entire life attached to some form of substrate — usually seaweeds, and encrusting or non-mobile invertebrates such as barnacles, bryozoans, and mussels. They are also often found on docks,ropes, and nets used in aquaculture. Using the last three pairs of appendages, they cling to seaweed, bivalves, or other substrate with their claws (gnathopods) spread wide as they bend side to side waving through the water.

“That’s a caprellid,” said Dr. Jon Moore. To demonstrate its behavior, he and Mercer Brugler invented the “Caprellid dance,” holding up both hands and waving them, while shifting hips from side to side. This made clear to everyone what kind of organism they were looking at.
“Oh yes, the caprellid!”

Log from the NOAA Mountains of the Sea exploration:
May 15 2004

Caprellids appear to be omnivorous opportunists, eating anything including diatoms, copepods, amphipods, and nematodes. In turn they are eaten by a variety of fish, thus they form a link between the single celled algae and predatory fish.

A Caprella mutica male (top) and female from Dr. Gail Ashton’s work at SAMS

Caprella mutica is a fairly recent invader to Long Island Sound. Originally from the shores of Japan and China, it was confirmed in Connecticut waters when it was found at the Mystic Yacht Yard in 2003. C. mutica has also successfully colonized most of Europe’s shores, the Pacific Northwest, and New Zealand. Part of its success stems from its tolerance for a wide range of temperatures (-1.8 to 30°C) and salinities (15 — 35+psu). (Ashton et al. 2007)

Ashton, G. V., Willis, K. J., Cook, E. J. & Burrows, M. (2007). Distribution of the introduced amphipod, Caprella mutica Schurin, 1935 (Amphipoda: Caprellida: Caprellidae) on the west coast of Scotland and a review of its global distribution. Hydrobiologia 590, 31-41
DOI 10.1007/s10750-007-0754-y

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
subPhylum: Crustacea
Class: Malacostraca
Order: Amphipoda
Family: Caprellidea
Genus: Cabrella
species: Caprella mutica

The formula for kinetic energy is:

KE = 1/2 mv²

where m is the mass of the object and v is the velocity or speed of the object. This means that heavier objects will have more kinetic energy than lighter objects at the same speed. Slower objects will have less kinetic energy than faster ones with the same mass. But the formula also explains scientifically what I and all parents who had a young child have experienced:

KE (Johann at age 3) = 1/2(16kg)(3 meters/second)² = 72 Joules

KE (Me) = 1/2 (59kg)(1 meter/second)² = 29.5 Joules

Clearly Johann had much more kinetic energy than I ever did!