Snail reproduction and mollusc birth control

One of my hobbies is snail-rearing. I started this when living in Dublin. In spring/summer 2007 it was so amazingly rainy (even for Irish people!) that thousands of snails could be seen in the gardens. It must have been really good news for birds.

I started to be interested in these animals, as I did not see many of them in dry, hot and full-of-concrete Madrid. When I left Ireland I brought three garden snails with me. And I continued my "collection" rearing snails from other countries such as Portugal, Andorra or Spain.

I saw them mating many times, but they appeared to be sterile, as they did not seem to be laying any eggs at all. Then I informed myself a bit, and I read that apparently this was because I was not putting any earth in the snail's box.

So I decided to make an experiment. There you go!

The idea: it is quite simple, the hypothesis to prove is

When earth is available, two snails will lay many fertile eggs after mating.

The material: a glass jar, two snails (apparently it does not matter the sex, as they are hermaphrodite) and some earth from the park down the street.



The method: The reason I used a jar was that in that moment I had seven snails in my snail box, and I did not want to have everyone's offspring, so I just chose two garden snails (one Irish and one Spanish, which happened to be called Yogurín and Tullido). The jar was small enough to keep them near to each other. To ensure ventilation I made small holes in the lid.

I left them in the "love jar" on 16th November 2009...

The measures: well, what can we mesure here? There are a few interesting things to measure, such as the amount of eggs, their viability and the time it took the little ones to hatch.

Happily, in less than 24 hours (!), on 17th November, at 1:20 AM, one of the lovers started laying eggs, here is the photo of that moment:



You can see about five eggs, and the head of the snail almost an inch into the earth. After some hours, the job was finished (next photo was taken at 9:55 PM). About sixty eggs buried and hidden from possible predators!



You can see them a bit better here:



Just in case you want to compare sizes, here they are next to a 50 euro cent coin:



As you can see, the egg cluster looks as big as the parent, it is incredible the fact that he/she was able to leave so many!

For logical reasons, I only kept four eggs. The other eggs were responsibly buried (and probably baby snails were born soon afterwards) in the very same spot where the Spanish parent was found, near the Alberche river, so no harm had been made to them, or to the environment (as there are already many similar snails mating and laying eggs over there anyway).

Here are the eggs I kept:



For some days I looked at the jar to see if the newborn snails were there. The eggs always looked exactly the same. Surprisingly, after eighteen days, on 5th December, they were there!



No shells appeared to be around (later I learned the first thing they eat is their own shell to get calcium). And the change was quite fast. A couple of days earlier they looked like white, small pellets, and then, suddenly... snails! Tiny, translucent but complete snails. For unknown reasons, only three out of four eggs were viable. The other one looked a bit elongated. But it is a good ratio anyway.

Just in case you are interested in sizes, here you have them on a one cent euro coin:



And here they are, in one of their first walks:



Conclusion: snail breeding is not that difficult! However, it seems I was a bit lucky as well. After this experience I tried to do the same with a couple of grove snails I brought from Portugal, and unhappily after many days they did not seem to give any results.

Just in case you wonder what happened to the snail family, the parents (after completing their normal life cycle) died at the age of three. One of the children disappeared (probably fled home, *sigh*). But the two remaining Irish-Spanish little ones grew into adulthood and have a happy snailly life at home. The photo below has been taken an hour ago.

Baby bird communication (II)

This is Piolín:



(Piolín is pronounced [piɔˈli:n], and it is the Spanish name of Tweety)

My niece found Piolín in June, saving him (or her... I have here the same problem I had with Patxi) from certain death, as he fell from his nest on a very hot day (under the Sun it must have been around 40ºC), lying on one side of a road. You can see a small wound on his back, probably caused by the fall.

As I discovered later, after some research, and despite his aspect, Piolín was not an ET, but a baby sparrow. When we found him he was one to three days old. He could not be quite older than that, because he had not even opened his eyes yet.

We started feeding him with some water and wet bread, and, as this video shows, he was hungry:



I observed that Piolín, as every baby, used to sleep or rest a lot when there was no activity around. But when he felt my presence, he always opened his big mouth, asking for food. He was striving for life, and did not give up at all. Bird parents must be very hard workers, as these babies request a huge amount of food! But when Piolín's tummy was full, our friend simply started resting again.

There was a difference between resting alone and resting with mum: when he felt I was near, he used to tweet. When he felt he was alone, he used to keep quiet. Probably this is so, because he has to tell his parents in some way he is alive and OK. Otherwise, the parents could think he died, and so they would start worrying about the other babies.

But if you are a baby bird, and you are alone, you will get more chances to survive if you keep quiet, or otherwise you could be discovered by an undesired predator.

The experiment

Well, that was what I thought, but... was it really so? Or was just my imagination? After all this is a blog about experiments, no matter how simple they are. And every experiment needs an idea to check, predictions (we just guess something from our idea), measurements (to check if they fit what we predicted) and conclusions.

So, the idea to check here is:

A baby sparrow will tweet more often if he feels his parents' presence

The prediction is simple: if I touch Piolín, he will tweet more times per minute than if I don't. So, I started counting how many tweets he did per minute. In the next video you can see a sample:



Even if I was covering him with my hand, I was not pressing at all. I was just touching him.

And here are the measurements:

• On my hand (covering him) > 38, 42 and 54 tweets per minute in three different moments


• On my open hand (not covering him) > 18 tweets per minute


• Touching him directly, while being in his nest > 65 tweets per minute


• Touching him through some cotton in his nest > 63 tweets per minute

• In his nest, not touching him > 0 tweets per minute


• In his nest, not touching him, but with my hand near him (so he could perhaps feel my warmth) > 0 tweets per minute


• In his nest, covered with cotton, but not touching him > 0 tweets per minute


• In his nest, covered with cotton, two minutes after being touched by me > 26 tweets per minute

Every measurement has been made leaving enough time in between, so each time I started from "zero tweets per minute". This is important, as we will see soon that Piolín kept tweeting for a few minutes each time he had been touched.

And the conclusion: it is obvious that there is a big difference in his message if he feels the mild pressure of my fingers/hand than otherwise. By tweeting, he is trying to express something to his parents, probably just to let them know he is OK.

As I said, Piolín used to keep tweeting for a while after he was left alone (about two or three minutes). Here you can see him alone in the nest we made for him, a few minutes after the previous video (where he was in my hand):



What about Piolín?

Very unfortunately, this story has a very sad ending. He did not make it. The day later, while we thought he was sleeping, he started choking on his own vomit, and when we arrived it was too late. Everything happened in just five minutes. We felt really unhappy about this, but at least we gave him a chance and it has been a very enriching experience for us (even if it has been really exhausting, as they need to be fed every 20-45 minutes).


Piolín sleeping

However, if you ever find a baby sparrow, don't be discouraged, as you have many chances to help him become an adult, healthy sparrow. If you are in this situation, you can check these videos:

Video about a baby sparrow, with happy ending
Video about how to feed a baby sparrow
Video about how to make home made baby bird food
Eight baby sparrows asking for food!

Baby bird communication (I)

Last month my sister brought a baby duck to my mother. Its name is Patxi (pronounced [patʃi]), and apparently what he (or she, but I will say he until we know what he/she is) loves most in this world is... tomatoes.

He probably thinks he is a human, as he has always been among humans. So, when there are no humans around he starts feeling scared of this dangerous world, and asks for help. In his language "help me, I am alone!" is translated into a siren-like shrill sound, while "I am OK and happy with you" is a normal ducky chirp.

This gave the idea to check for this experiment:

If a baby duck (grown up among humans) is left alone, he starts making a siren-like shrill sound to ask for help

Apparently this is quite simple. As any experiment should have at least some objective measurements, I timed the siren-like sound.

You can see the result in the following video.



I don't mention timing in the video, but you can see easily with a stopwatch that Patxi used his siren-like sound for about 24 seconds in four sessions.

Then I found something interesting: there is an exception to this. When Patxi is home, he does not feel scared of being alone (for him home means the plastic blue box). Even if I leave, he just calls mummy for a few seconds (about six seconds) and then he stops and continues doing whatever he was doing before (usually just chirping, pecking at things or... ehm... leaving his droppings around). Everything is explained in the second video:



As I show at the end of the video, funnily enough both places are in close proximity to each other.

So, by way of conclusion, we can make the following diagram:



I repeated the experiment several times, and many times there was not even "panic interval" when I left Patxi alone at home.

There is another experiment about baby bird communication I made. But that will be for the next entry.

Eating uncooked lentils

I made an interesting experiment last year, but I never spoke about it. There is a lot of people who enjoy eating sprouts of different seeds. I was used to see in the local store soya bean sprouts and I sometimes ate them.

OK, but eating once more soya bean sprouts wouldn't be quite an interesnting experiment. I needed something different. So, let us try lentil sprouts. Huh? Am I forgetting something? Oh, yes... the hypothesis! A real experiment is just a way to check a first idea. Otherwise it is... OK, simply, it is something else. So here is the initial idea:

Lentils are edible without cooking.

Yes, lentils are rather hard if you don't prepare them. No good for teeth, for sure. So, I thought first I needed several days to grow them.

I remember I saw a friend who was growing sprouts: he used some kind of sieve in some kind of tupperware with water. This way the seeds kept the humidity and had space to grow at the same time.

I couldn't find something similar, but I had an idea: I could just use a clean towel on a pan. For some stupid reason I thought this was a wonderful idea. Don't do it, I will tell you later why...

Here is the set-up:



This was the aspect the lentils had on Day 0 (which was 3rd August 2008, at 9 pm):


Day 0; 9 pm

OK, nothing surprising for the moment. Everybody has seen raw lentils. On Day 1 I didn't take photos, so we will skip this, and we go straight to Day 2 (5th August):


Day 2; 5 pm

Here you can see the first white roots. They are alive! Nothing surprising: if 99.99% of the population has ever seen a raw lentil, probably 99.9% has already seen a growing lentil (leave a comment if I am wrong). On Day 3 (6th August) the experiment proceeded well:


Day 3; 5 pm

I remember I tried one of the lentils, and it was quite hard. Not edible yet. I was surprised, I thought it would take less time. "Give it another day" I thought. And this way we get into Day 4 (yeah, 7th August...)


Day 4; 5 pm

We can see on Day 4, for the first time, that most of the seeds have green tiny leaves. Photosynthesis is on! But seeds are still very hard. Hm... Am I going to need to cook this after all? So I left them there one more day.

This was what I got on Day 5 (8th August, just in case you lost count):


Day 5; 6 pm

At this point the plants were about ten times longer than the original seed diameter. You can check this wiht the first image of this post, as it has been taken on Day 5. Seeds were much softer. Here is what I got on Day 6 (ehm... 9th August):


Day 6; lunchtime

A wonderful lentil salad! I added some onions, tomatoes, parsley and dressed them with olive oil and salt. Probably pepper as well.

My impression: lentils are perfectly edible even when you don't cook them, but you will need around six days to be able to enjoy them. They have a strange texture in the mouth, I don't know how to explain it. It is as if they were kind of grainy when you chew them. But I think I could perfectly get used to this. And in some ways I think lentil salads are much better than lettuce salads.

Now... you remember when I said it was a stupid idea using a towel for this experiment? OK, here is why: I didn't know the roots of the plants were going to root so deep into the towel. They were amazingly strong! It was impossible to remove them completely, so some roots stayed in the towel. Additionally, the pan I used, after almost one week in contact with a humid towel, started to go rusty! This way, the towel blackened.

One less towel...

So if you want to reproduce this experiment... use a different system!

After this experiment I read a bit about lentil sprouts, and I discovered some wonderful properties they have. For example, they have a 25% of protein, lots of vitamins and three times more fibre than cooked (as they produce fibre while growing). Maybe I should restart growing them.


Enjoy your meal!

Tomatoes with no light

We are growing tomatoes for the first time. It is very interesting looking after new living beings at home. Our salads are also a bit more interesting now. For some reason I started wondering what would happen if tomatoes get no light. Are they red because of light? What about the leaves? Checking the local library or wikipedia you can get fast answers. I am not an expert, but after all I am not completely green in this subject, I know the basic things everybody can remember from school: chlorophyll, chloroplasts and so on.

But there is something that the local library, wikipedia and my teenager memories cannot fulfill: they cannot give me my own answer.

And that's why I made this experiment.

As with every experiment, I need an...

Idea to test: Plants are green because of sunlight, so if they get no light they will not be green, as they cannot photosynthesise. That's what we expect. And what about tomatoes? Somebody told me they are red colour because of carotenoids, the organic pigments produced by plants along with chlorophyll. Carotenoids, especially lycopene, absorb blue light and reflect red light.

So, the idea is: if a leaf cannot photosynthesise, it will be any colour but green, and if the tomato cannot photosynthesise, it will be any colour but red or green. Maybe yellow, maybe brown, but not the usual colour. Here is the specific idea I want to test:

If I wrap a tomato leaf up in aluminium foil, after some days it will start losing it natural green colour, and if I do the same to a tomato it will also lose its red or green colour.

The material: Aluminium kitchen foil, bought in the local supermarket, and a tomato plant.

The set-up and measures: Well, I have not a "green-meter", so to compare the differences I just took photos from time to time. The experiment lasted 39 days.

3rd August

The experiment starts!

Unfortunately I didn't take a photo of the tomato leaf before wrapping it up, so you will have to believe me when I say that it was pretty the same than the other non-wrapped leaves you can see in this photo:



For the tomato, I chose one from a branch with four tomatoes, so I could compare better the differences between the selected tomato and its "brothers". Here is how this branch looked like in a previous photo I took on 28th July:



Here is a closer view:



And here is the same branch with the wrapped tomato on 3rd August:



8th August

This is how the leaf looked like some days later:



Its end was a bit damp (which probably was due to the fact that it had been in a closed space), but it looked as green as it was the first day.

Unfortunately I didn't take a photo of the unwrapped tomato, but there were not many changes as well: the four tomatoes were very green, and probably not very tasty.

11th August

The leaf looked as green as the other leaves, but touching it I could feel it was weaker, softer than the rest.



The tomato was a bit smaller than the other three (which could be casual), but no sensible changes were observed:



30th August

Here is how the leaf looked like almost four weeks later (obviously, the only moment when I removed the aluminium foil was while taking the photos):



there are no major changes in colour, but the wrapping is centainly affecting the leaf's health. Now the end of the leaf looks like burned, and perhaps a bit more yellowish.

However, the tomato looks perfect (it's the left one in this photo):



Note that one of the four brothers (the one at the back which can barely be seen) is getting redder and redder!

11th September

Last day. The "leaf disease" is in an advanced state and the "patient" will probably not last very long:



The colour is still green, maybe a bit more yellowish near the edge at the end.

Two of the four tomatoes were eaten in a great salad, but we left one brother to compare with the selected tomato:



They are both fairly red and start looking very tasty, but wait... what's at the bottom of our friend? Maybe we can see better from below:



oh, it looked so healthy, but actually was starting to rot away! More or less the same that happened to the leaf. But the colour is exactly the same as its brother's colour.

Conclusion: During these 39 days I have not seen too many changes in colour, which has been surprising. However, the aluminium foil has obviously affected both the leaf and the tomato, as they started to rot away. I can think of three reasons for this:

• lack of light weakened them, making them more vulnerable,
  
• closed space kept them wet, which contributed to the rotting process,
  
• the tight contact with aluminium, which is not quite natural for a tomato plant, could have triggered the rotting process.
  

Anyhow, colour didn't change discontinuously at the edge of the aluminium foil, as I thought. Why? Are chloroplasts distributed evenly through all the plant, regardless of the place where they photosynthesise? Maybe it can be interesting making another experiment covering the whole plant, to check how different is its colour from the colour of another plant with good sunlight. But for the moment... let's eat a salad!

Smelling or tasting?

I have seen I can summarize my philosophy about these small experiments in just one word: EMOTION, which means

• Enjoy = fun!
  
• Measurements = objectivity
  
• Observation
  
• Thought = we need a (specific) idea/belief to test
  
• Incentive = we need a motivation
  
• Originality = creativity
  
• and the four Noes:
  
  
  
  1. No great, revolutionary ideas required
     
  2. Not a lot of time required
     
  3. Not a lot of material required
     
  4. Not a lot of knowledge required
     
  
  

So, the last weeks I have been quite busy, but that's just a cheap excuse (see the second no). The real reason I was not posting anything here is not time, it is just because I am not very used to it. Accepting it is the first step. The second step is doing something about...

So I will speak about a small experiment I did some weeks ago.

I was curious about the interaction between gustation and olfaction. Everybody knows that blocking your nose it is much more difficult to detect the flavour of everything, but I wanted to check this. I chose a specific idea to test:

I can tell the difference between the taste of olive oil and sunflower oil when I block my nose

So, to do this, and to make an objective measurement, I couldn't simply block my nose and try both oils, as my mind could still make me think I can tell something, just because I know the answer. I also needed not to know which one it was.

I put in two cups a little bit of each oil. To make it completely random, I closed my eyes and I asked my girlfriend to flip a coin. Then, she had to leave the cups in a place depending on the result.

After that, I tried one of the cups while blocking my nose. It was a very strange feeling! A viscous fluid in my mouth. No taste at all. It could have been bicycle oil. But I thought I still could tell something. So I tried the second cup (still nose blocked, eyes closed, of course). This was amazing: exactly the same sensation! (It might seem obvious, but making the experiment is really interesting, as you don't have to believe in that: you feel it).

Actually you can still "cheat", as olive oil seems to be more viscous than sunflower oil. But you have to practice a bit, and I didn't. So I went out on a limb and said something. I can't remember what I said, but I was wrong.

Then I did the same, but without blocking my nose. Even before trying the oil it was completely obvious which one was the olive oil. It was as clear as telling blue from red.

It was an interesting experiment. Maybe next time I will check if it is possible, with some practice, to tell who's who by their viscosity.