Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 3:32 PM
Subject: RE: book club meeting: Thu, 6/5

Present: Jim, Sue, Wendy, Marge, Judy, Peter.  We
discussed "Flowering Earth", by Donald Culross Peattie.
Peattie takes us on a grand tour of (mostly) plant life
from the early autotrophs to what he calls the
social flowers and social insects.  The question of
chloroplasts came up; for a brief discussion of this plastid see:
http://www.may.ie/academic/biology/plastidfactory/plastid.html

Show'n'tell:
* I found some Mourning Cloak caterpillars on an elm.
  For caterpillar ID, check out this web site:
  http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/2000/cateast/families.htm
  The Mourning Cloak is under the Brush-footed Butterflies:
  This resource can be downloaded to your computer if you click
  on the "Return to Contents" and download the zip file at the
  bottom; it's also available as a book "Caterpillars of Eastern
  Forests"; you can try getting a free copy by writing one of its
  co-authors, Richard Reardon, at rreardon@fs.fed.us.
* Also found a cicada on Wednesday at the Arb.  It has big red
  eyes and orange wings, almost certainly a periodical, probably
  17-year.  But I don't see a brood emerging in 2003 at
  http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/fauna/Michigan_Cicadas/Periodical/Index.html
  The closest match seems to be brood X, scheduled to
  arrive 2004, and we seem to be near a boundary of
  its known range.
* A 2nd-instar Monarch caterpillar and an egg.
* Some praying mantis egg cases.  We opened a small one, most of
  the egg chambers seem empty, though some still had empty egg
  shells.  Perhaps some predator had managed to break in and suck
  out the eggs.
* We opened a cattail seed spike and saw a coccoon of the cattail
  moth.  I thought I also saw a caterpillar, but lost it in the
  downy fluff.

Our next meeting will be Thu 8/21, 7pm; please note
it's the 3rd Thursday of the month, rather than our
usual 1st Thursday.  The book will be "Natural
History of the Chicago Region", by Joel Greenberg;
this is a hefty book, so we'll cover the first 5
chapters or so, the rest later. For a teaser, check out
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/306488.html
There's a quote of Peattie in there.

After that, our next book will be "The Founding
Fish" by John McPhee; paperback editions of this
book (published Oct 2002) should be available
in October.

Peter
http://www.wideopenwest.com/~peterwchen/book.html