Earth Day

So Earth Day is kind of like Mother's Day. We love our moms and we try to be nice to them every day and they love us back and take care of us and remind us to brush our teeth. The earth is the same, it loves us and provides for us and we love it back and try to be nice to it as best we can on a daily basis. But every once and a while we need to give the earth a card and make it brunch to say "hey, thanks for everything".

So, Earth, thanks for being awesome. Thanks for food and air and sunlight. Thanks for animals and fish and clouds and lakes. I know we haven't always been the best kids, but we love you and we're trying.

Beans' Nature Party

I don't normally do "lifestyle" type posts, but this one is kind of a crossover as Beans chose a nature theme for her 6th birthday party this past weekend, so I thought it might provide some nature themed activities in case anyone wants any. We planned for a nature hike with some bird-friendly activities, a plant pot craft and a chocolate mud puddle cake. The weather was less than cooperative, with snow in the morning and temperatures hovering around 0C for the day, but that didn't stop the determined little group of girls from tromping over to the park to help out the birds, who with the late thaw this year could probably use a little assistance.

As her guests arrived the birthday girl greeted them with her Red-tailed Hawk. She thought up the glove thing herself, which I thought was awesome (also awesome is this nest cam!). When you squish him he even makes the real call.

She then took them on an indoor "nature viewing" in our living room, where Beans and Bunny had set up a number of stuffed animals.

The elusive couch-climbing mountain goat

Penguins and owls, together at last

The couch pond

We then tromped over to the park around the corner, which as it turns out was covered in ice. On the way there we used field journals to record all the signs of spring we saw - words or pictures, depending on ability. Since there weren't many we ended up with a list that was something like "bird nest from last year, old leaves, grass, rocks, mud, puddle, water, melting snow". We also may have stomped in a LOT of puddles.

We brought a bag of black-oil sunflower seeds, which are pretty much the best all-purpose bird seed out there, and a bunch of paper cups and the girls had a great time sprinkling them (flinging them) all over the grassy and treed areas (ok, on the ice too and maybe some in the playground... and along the street back to our house. There are now a lot of seeds in our neighbourhood).

After we had sprinkled to our hearts content we gathered up a whole lot of sticks, grasses, pine needles and assorted other things we thought birds might like to make their nests out of and trucked them back to our yard and made a giant (ok, giant is a relative term here) pile of nesting materials for the birds to choose from. We also added pink, purple and blue yarn in case they need something wuzzy, because it's pretty cold out at night. The added bonus of this is that the kids can look for their coloured yarn in birds nests in the neighbourhood. If you have a backyard tree you can hang the material from the branches or in a net bag, but we don't, so we went with a pile. Beans has promised her friends to report on who comes to take the goodies.

Back inside to warm up decorating plant pots with some bling and some juice, snacks and an impromptu tissue paper/stuffed animal dance party.

And no party is complete without "cake", or in this case a delicious chocolate mud puddle (brownies and pudding).

Despite the weather it was an awesome afternoon, which I think goes to show that kids really don't care what the weather is, they just like being outside. I know Beans and Bunny sure do.

Happy Birthday Beans!

Spring Freshet

Yesterday I wore only a t-shirt under my jacket and there were 11 robins spotted on the walk to school. There are above freezing temperatures forecast for every day this week (we're ignoring the nights, ok?). At the risk of jinxing things, I think it might actually be spring - not calendar spring, on which we had a snowstorm, but actual things melting, birds returning, plants growing outside spring. Heck, Beans and Bunny even went scootering on Sunday - avoiding ice patches is a newly acquired skill.

BUT - if you read our last post you know that we get a lot of snow here. And yes, we still have a lot of snow. There are still giant snowbanks, particularly in parking lots and with the freeze-melt-freeze-melt cycle of the last few weeks, many of them are glacier-like in their consistency.

The beginning

This led to our recent discussion - where does all the snow go? That is a LOT of frozen water to get moving. The simple answer is the lake obviously - they both know that Lake Simcoe is nearby and the water goes there. But we get what we refer to here as the "spring freshet" - which is basically a flood caused by the spring thaw - but it's not like a rainfall flood that happens quickly. It happens over a period of time as snow and ice melt and travel to rivers and the rivers themselves melt. The amount of snow accumulation that winter along with how quickly it melts are both factors in how big a "flood" it will be - that is how high up the water will go in the floodplains (which hopefully don't have any stuff in them). It seemed a good opportunity to talk about river systems, their catchment areas and how all that snow moves through the system and our world turns from snow to slush to mud.

Heading to the sewer

If you will, picture a river system like a tree shape. The trunk touching the ground is where it flows into the large waterbody (for us, Lake Simcoe). Everything from the tips of the tallest branches downward flows into that tree - that's how a watershed looks. Everything off the landscape surrounding that tree until a dividing point (usually a high point of land, the red dashed line below) also flows into that system.

It can be scaled upwards depending on how large you are looking at - for example you could look at everything that flows into the Great Lakes, or everything that flows into Lake Huron, or everything that flows into the Nottawasaga River - each of those is that system's "catchment" - it's water supply. In the case of a lake it probably has multiple systems each with their own catchment flowing into it, and each of those has it's own source of water - ground water, snow melt, rain runoff, etc. It all accumulates and makes it's way down the system. We live in an area that flows into Lake Simcoe, so our watershed looks like this:

http://canadiangis.com/listings/lake-simcoe-region-conservation-authority

So our snowbanks melt, flow via storm sewers and stormwater ponds into our local creek. That creek then takes them down the system to drain into Lake Simcoe, which also happens to be where our drinking water comes from so it means later on we may drink our snowbanks, which is cool (but only cool after treatment obviously, the snowbank is kinda grey right now). 

Mmmm snowbank

But it doesn't end there - Lake Simcoe is a part of the Great Lakes basin - so our water hangs out in the lake for a while and eventually will make it's way through the rest of the system. 

https://www.ec.gc.ca/grandslacs-greatlakes/default.asp?lang=En&n=03B3F448

So you can see our little lake nestled in between Georgian Bay and Lake Ontario there, a small piece of a large system - and that we are in the Lake Huron Drainage Basin, so our water goes there next. Which is cool because we swim in there a lot, so it's possible that this summer we can swim in the same water that was our snowbanks, which is awesomely cool.

Heading through the system

And moving up another step - the Great Lakes eventually flow out the St. Lawrence and into the Atlantic Ocean where they complete their journey.

Not bad for a lowly grey snowbank. So, Mama... how exactly does the stormwater pond work... ? 

Snow!

We live in the land of lake-effect snow - between two lakes - Georgian Bay (Lake Huron) and Lake Simcoe. This means that when you look at the radar, everywhere else is clear and there's a big green line connecting those two lakes and we are underneath it.

Looking for us? Try the big green blob.

Lake-effect snow: streamers, snow squalls, snow bands, whatever the name - it results in a fair bit of the white stuff. We hear these terms on the radio a lot so it's not surprising that Beans wanted to know what it was and how is it different than regular snow? And why doesn't her uncle have any snow?

Sometimes it's hard to find your toys.

The answer is that it's not different than regular snow. Snow is snow - it's precipitation that falls in a frozen state. Clouds form when water vapour condenses (goes from gas to liquid) and hang out in the atmosphere, then when they get too heavy they fall - and because it's cold it's not as water, it's as tiny ice crystals. It is actually usually so cold in the clouds that most rain actually starts out as snow, even in summer, but melts on its way down! As Bunny learned the other day from her favourite show Wild Kratts, snow isn't just water - there is dirt, bacteria and other random things in there from the atmosphere that help the snow freeze faster and form the crystalline structure, so she's not so sure about catching it on her tongue anymore. A bunch of those ice crystals fuse together and form a snowflake. Sometimes they melt and refreeze and then you get the harder ice balls and not so much the nice fluffy stuff. And sometimes those go sideways in the wind and hit you in the face while you dig out the car.

Pretty little crystalline structures (this one is not my pic)

But overall snow is snow - what is different in lake-effect snow is not the what but the HOW.

Whenever you have a large body of water it has an effect on the local weather. When the atmosphere is cool and the cold winds blow across the lake water, which is significantly warmer, it picks up the water vapour, freezes it and because so much has accumulated it dumps it right there on the shore. So whoever is on the prevailing leeward side of a lake get the snow jackpot. Because of where we are situated - surrounded by water, we get most of our snow from the lake when the wind is from the west, and then some from your regular winter storms too. There is snow in the forecast every day this week. Uncle Chris doesn't live on the leeward side of a lake, even though he does live near a large lake (Ontario), so most of the snow picked up by his lake gets dumped on the fine people of upstate New York. (NOTE: as I finished putting this together, southern Ontario got dumped on by a winter storm, so Uncle Chris has snow now).

Lake-effect snow in the Great Lakes (also not my pic!)

Luckily both girls seem to have a love of snow. Bunny a little more than Beans, who still seems to manage to get snow inside her snowsuit, no matter how much I attempt to get her all tucked in. Bunny will spend hours flinging herself down a hill, which is good because snow here starts in November and lasts until April (Started in October this year... and the odd early May snow flurry is not unheard of) and our yard happens to be a hill.

A young Bunny one November...

...and this was taken at Easter

I've been told people like pictures, so to end, a wintry collection of pictures of snow and snow related fun. Mostly because I had fun looking for old snow pictures!

This year. But we have more now.

If you have a lot of snow, you might as well celebrate it!

A walk in the snowy woods.

A lovely snow seat in the snowy woods.

WALKING IN THE SNOWY WOODS IS HARD!

Bunny. Toboggan. Snow Squall.
This is standard practice for her.

No post on snow is complete without a snowman! There. Done.

http://www.weatherwizkids.com/weather-winter-storms.htm
http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/outdoor-activities/snow-sports/snow-maker1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake-effect_snow

Skating Questions

Skating on New Years Eve

It's been a busy winter so far, and I seem to be spending it in a lot of it on ice - skating lessons, hockey games, hockey practices, hockey tournaments... at least some of the games are mine! And when we have free time, what do they want to do? Skate. But all this gliding around (and skate tying) has led to another batch of short answer random questions, so I present to you our skating conversations (minus all the requests for hot chocolate).

How does the Zamboni work?
Well, let me start by saying that Zambonis are awesome, and every kid (ok, adults too) pretty much has a fascination with them. They were invented in 1949 by Frank Zamboni in California of all places! They are technically called "ice resurfacers" and Zamboni is a brand name, but it's way more fun to say so I'll stick with that. They have a few parts - a snow container, hot water tanks, a wash water tank, a conditioner, and a brush. The conditioner is lowered to the ice with a large, sharp blade to shave off the top layer of ice. The shavings are then  sprayed into a large snow container. The wash water sprays the ice removing any snow and dirt and a squeegee and vacuum picks the water back up, this water is filtered and reused. Some have a board brush that cleans the boards when the machine is on the outside of the rink. Then a layer of hot water (60°C) is put down from a sprinkler pipe and a cloth towel dragged behind which fills up all the skate marks by melting the ice below and bonding to it. And we are glad it does all this because fresh ice is the BEST.  

 
How come it can snow and rain at the same time?
So apparently the answer "because it's Ontario" is not sufficient here. Although it's true - plus you can add in ice pellets for a trio of winter precipitation all at once! According to wikipedia in the US they call all three together "wintry mix" which we all agree sounds like it should be a type of candy. Here we refer to rain/snow as "sleet" or "November" but apparently in the US the term sleet is used for the ice pellets (which we just call ice pellets). It is is also not to be confused with freezing rain, which is actual rain that freezes on contact (and caused all kinds of problems south of here around christmas). So when does the rain/snow mix happen? When it's snowing but the atmosphere down in the lower part is above freezing, so some of it melts, but some of it doesn't and you get a mix of soft snow and rain.

The moon is following me. Why is it out in the day?

The moon isn't just out at night, it orbits Earth independently of the sun. So, when it's here in daylight hours you can see it when the sun illuminates it. And that's why sometimes at night you can't see it.

Popcorn!
Another post skating staple, popcorn is the seed of a specific kind of corn, Zea mays everta, that has a hard, impermeable (waterproof) hull that is filled with starch and water. When it's heated up the water turns to steam and the starch turns to a gelatinous substance. The pressure build up until the hull bursts and the starch puffs out - the pressure hits 135psi! There needs to be about 14% moisture inside for the popcorn to pop, and it ends up about 50 times it's original size. And then we stuff our faces with it (OK, the last part isn't part of the science answer, but it's a key step in popcorn).

http://www.popcorn.org/ForTeachers/TeachingGuide/WhatMakesPopcornPop/tabid/88/Default.aspx

 

Why is ice slippery?
 Sometimes there is a question with no good answer, because science just doesn't know yet. Although, physics is working on it. Could be friction causes the ice to melt a bit, could be that ice inherintly has a "liquid" or "liquid-like" layer on it that causes the slipperiness, could be some combo. But whatever makes it slippery also makes it fun!

Now get some blades on and go have fun!
(and don't forget the hot chocolate after)


...and yes, I do want to drive the Zamboni.

Hibernation

Beans could easily sleep through the winter. At 5 years old she has already mastered the snooze button (or "hit the hat" as she calls it - her alarm clock is Perry the Platypus in his trademark fedora) and the whole blanket over the head with "5 more minutes" routine in the morning. This increases exponentially in the winter when it is dark the entire time we get up, eat breakfast and get to school. Bunny on the other hand is up bright and early each day (which has proved useful when she wakes me up when I have slept through my alarm) and has thankfully learned to make her own breakfast on weekends (although the first time she woke me up to tell me she did so, which completely defeats the purpose of making her own breakfast). She now also helps Beans make breakfast if she gets up, although I did have to point out that 3 entire big shredded wheats is an awful lot in one bowl even if they are strangely packaged that way. Beans did admire the pretty sunrise on the way to school the other day, so maybe she's coming around to the morning a little bit.

But this is not a post about how to get Beans up in the morning (although suggestions on that are appreciated), what she wants to know is how do the bears stay "asleep" for the whole winter? 

Hibernation is different than sleeping - there are physical changes that go along with it while sleep is a change in mental state. Brain waves during hibernation as closer to awake ones than asleep ones. In fact, when animals wake up from hibernation they can be sleep deprived and require a lot of sleep in the next few days to recover.

So first we need to figure out what hibernation actually is. It's a form of torpor, which is a term used to describe metabolic suppression in animals - so where they drop their usual body functions for energy conservation. It can be triggered by a lot of things - starvation, thirst, dark, cold, heat, etc. Hibernation is the seasonal form of this where the body preemptively reacts to the threats are lower temperatures, lack of food and darkness. Typically larger species like bears prepare by storing body fat, which will sustain them over the winter. Smaller species, like chipmunks and squirrels, don't have the capacity to store enough for entire time, so they food cache - hiding lots of food around for when they wake and need replenishing. Which is why when you move the lawn furniture in the spring there's a whole whack of nutshells under it.

Bears.

Nom Nom Nom
By Traveler100 (Own work)
 [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
via Wikimedia Commons

For a while people debated whether or not what bears did was actual hibernation because their body temperature doesn't drop very much. But that was all solved when they took a look at metabolic suppression, and they do lower their rate about 75% below what it usually is, so that pretty much answered that right there - there is a huge shift in how their body functions (more here!) Some more northern bears will not eat or drink for up to 8 months! Instead of slowing things down by dropping their core temperature they instead use vasoconstriction - which means they slow blood flow to their extremities to conserve energy for the core of the body. And the craziest part? They recycle their proteins and urine - nothing in, nothing out for months at a time. That ability is now being studied to help with organ transport, kidney diseases and space travel!

The prep actually begins in the summer with the cramming of themselves with as much carbs as they can find to gain as much as 30 pounds a week! Those fat stores break down over the winter to provide calories and water, the muscle tissue breaks down to provide protein. Our bodies do this when we are starving too with one main difference - bears are able to replace their proteins using urea (a part of urine, a waste product) and we can't - ours accumulates until it becomes toxic. Bears win.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/110217-bears-hibernation-warm-sleep-animals-science/

 Another cool thing bears can do (there's really no end to it...) is delayed implantation. Although mating takes place way before hibernation, the actual pregnancy is delayed until the bear's body figures out if it's able to sustain it through hibernation. If there's not enough fat then the egg will abort, otherwise there's a signal that triggers the egg to implant and the pregnancy to go through. Sometime around January she wakes up, gives birth and goes right back to sleep. Now THAT is how you do labour.

So, can people do it?

Probably not. There have been a few studies that try to emulate it, using freedivers, but a natural trigger in humans just isn't there. And there are a few unverified anectodal cases and work on "suspended animation". But it's ok, because well - despite it all, we really like winter. And bears don't get to toboggan. 

More on hibernation: 
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bear-essentials-of-hibernation.html
http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/all-about-animals/hibernation.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernation
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bear-essentials-of-hibernation.html

Stomachs in Reverse

Most of last week Beans and Bunny were not outside. Beans and Bunny were inside. Throwing up. The girls have recently been struck by stomach viruses. The dreaded "tummy bug". Bunny went first, throwing up on the walk to school. Then Beans a few days later, as we stood getting her hockey equipment out of the van in the arena parking lot. All over her rainboots (I know, thankfully she was wearing rainboots!). I used her water bottle to wash her off because clearly we weren't going to be using it for hockey that day. As a bonus we got to talk about scavengers again because the Ring-billed Gulls came to eat the eggs and toast that were now all over the lot.

This prompted a discussion between Bunny and I about viruses in general and her body's defenses against them. There's a few different tactics based on the type of virus - sometimes it's runny nose and coughing and sometimes it's vomiting (and we've been through them all) - for your body to try to rid itself of the virus. But what Bunny was really interested in was more the how - if food is supposed to go through your digestive system in a downward fashion, why does it all of a sudden go the other way and how is it doing that?

So, vomiting, throwing up, puking, blowing chunks (technically emesis) - is the forceful expulsion of the contents of one's stomach through the mouth and sometimes the nose. (Thanks wikipedia). And there's a ton of underlying reasons why it happens but regardless of the why, how the event itself happens is pretty consistent.

Your brain has a "vomit trigger" zone. It's in the fourth ventricle of your brain and is called the area postrema. The stimulation of this zone, by various methods, is what causes your body to start the expulsion routine.

These are from Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the show):
 

So there's a few ways to get this party started (although often this kind of ends the party) through chemoreceptors and that can be through blood-borne toxins and drugs, the vestibular system (which we talked about with motion sickness), cranial nerves through your pharynx (gag reflex), central nervous system (stress and psychiatric issues) and the enteric nervous system which tells your brain about the state of your gastrointestinal (GI) system. For Beans and Bunny it was that last one - irritation of the GI system through a viral infection - gastroenteritis, our tummy bug.

Once it's triggered it sends messages out to the rest of the body on how to react which results your body prepping itself for the big show - this happens quickly and gives you that "oh no, I'm going to puke" feeling. An amazing number of things happen simultaneously - you produce more saliva to protect your teeth from stomach acid, your lungs fill so that you don't breathe vomit later, you sweat and your heart rate increases. While all that is going on your small intestine starts to work in reverse and sweeps your digestive tract contents into your stomach, then your abdominal muscles contract forcing everything into your esophagus and then finally out your mouth. There are usually a bunch of sphincters (like one way valves) that prevent this from occuring randomly, but during this process they all relax. The stomach and esophagus themselves don't do much other than relax and provide an open pathway for exit. Bunny thinks this whole process is really cool, particularly the saliva protection thing, but overall it's still also really gross.

http://www.dizziness-and-balance.com/treatment/drug/emesis.html

There are two phases - the "retching" phase - where your abdominal muscles contract with the diaphragm and breathing muscles all together. Next is the "expulsive" phase - which is exactly as it sounds. Pressure has built up in the stomach thanks to the diaphragm and abdominal muscles. That pressure gets released when the esophagus releases what is usually a one-way valve and whoosh - eggs and toast in the parking lot. The only good part is that pressure release and some associated endorphins make you temporarily feel better.

As I have decided not to put in any pictures of people vomiting, here is a picture of Beans and Bunny enjoying a post-virus treat that did not end up in reverse. I am now living in a state of fear as it's only a matter of time...I know it's coming for me.