Mario’s Entangled Bank

It’s that time of year again. Round up your kiddos, go into nature, flip rocks, and get to know the wondrous creatures that live underneath them. Explore and marvel at the entangled bank of biological diversity, form and function that is all around us, have fun, and learn something at the same time. Or as Charles Darwin put it,

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

It appears that the rock flipping tradition got going with a post on the via negativa blog about a year ago…

It didn’t take my mother very long to figure out how to engage her five-year-old grand-niece Katrina’s attention during a walk in the woods last week. “See where that rock has been flipped over? That’s because a bear walked through here!” We explained briefly how bears love to eat insect larvae. Then came the magic moment of lifting a rock and exposing an ant colony: workers running helter shelter, some of them picking up their babies in their mandibles, others retreating along well-worn pathways and tunnels. Katrina’s two-year-old second cousin Elanor, who was stumping along with a large white teddy bear under one arm — in a jealous funk over this brash new competitor for her grandparents’ affections — started to show interest after the third or fourth rock, all but one of which sheltered an ant colony. Before we knew it, the walk had slowed to a standstill. There were rocks everywhere! Who knew what each might hide?

Here are some of the visual experiences from last years rock-flipping day. This years flipping experiences have already started coming in, see e.g. Bug Girl’s Blog.

Hat tip to A Block Around the Clock

This is from the “Mario’s Entangled Bank” blog ( http://pineda-krch.com ) of Mario Pineda-Krch, a theoretical biologist at the University of California, Davis.