Nature in the Ditches
Laura England | April 2018
Have you ever Googled “flower growing in concrete”? If you do, you’ll find thousands of images—some real, some clearly photoshopped—of plants surviving in improbable, unnatural and even hostile environments. Most of the sites hosting these images spin this phenomenon as a metaphor for the resilience of life…
“Nothing says hope quite like flowers growing through the cracks in concrete.”
“Despite the circumstances, we flourish.”
“I am the flower pushing itself through the cracks in the sidewalk.”
My identical twin sister even has a song on her 2003 album “A Flower Grows in Stone” about a resilient person… “How could something so beautiful come from somewhere so unkind. You must have known, when you had grown, you could leave it all behind.” It’s an inspiring song (yes I am biased—I love all of my sister’s songs) and a powerful metaphor. But I have a darker, more cynical read on the tenacity of plants pushing through pavement. For me, they are symbolic of the extent to which we have marginalized nature.
Most weekends, barring bad weather, I take walks by myself. It’s precious time alone with my thoughts and time when I can pay attention to the magnificent mountain setting we call home. I typically just take a left out of my driveway and walk along Watauga River Road, which follows the river for miles. I marvel at birds perching above or flying above the river—kingfishers, hawks, great blue herons and most recently ospreys. During a walk in late February, what caught my attention was not above, but below me—large masses of wood frog eggs in the water-filled ditches along the roadside.
The wood frog is cold-adapted, so much so that it ranges farther north than any other amphibian or reptile in North America and is the only cold-blooded tetrapod that lives above the Arctic Circle. In the southeastern United States, they are restricted to the Appalachian Mountains. How do wood frogs survive in such cold environments when they have no fur and their body temperatures, unlike ours, are determined by their environment? Like other frog species in cold climates, wood frogs have the extraordinary adaptation of being able to over-winter in a frozen state. Their cells don’t freeze—ice crystals would cause cell damage—freezing takes place in intercellular spaces in their bodies. Next time you pass a frozen Appalachian pond or wetland in the winter, imagine all of the frog popsicles in the sediments.
In the springtime, wood frogs thaw and are among the earliest frogs to breed in this area. The calls of wood frog males, described as quack-like chatter, is often heard before ponds and wetlands are ice-free. After mating, female wood frogs lay their eggs in fish-free ponds and vernal pools. They are very much dependent on late winter rains to create these ephemeral breeding grounds. After metamorphosis from tadpole to adult, wood frogs are largely terrestrial and live in variety of moist forested habitats, thus the name “wood frog.”
If you get a chance to see, not just hear, wood frogs, you’ll recognize them by what looks like a black “robber’s mask” on their faces as well as a white line outlining their upper lips. These handsome frogs have a variety of skin colors, including shades of brown, rust, green and gray. Most wood frogs have a light yellow-brown fold along both sides of their backs. And you’ll more likely than not see their eggs in temporary wet areas if you’re paying attention in late winter or early spring. Check the ditches.
Wood frogs aren’t the only species that are making the best of ditch-life. A number of native plants take advantage of ditches too. I heard through the naturalists’ grapevine that a small population of the Gray's Lily, a rare and endangered plant found only in this part of Appalachia, is growing in roadside ditches at a local nature preserve. Those are actual ditch dwellers, but life in the ditch is a metaphor for the extent to which we’ve sidelined nature. We’ve shoved it aside with the implicit message that it’s lucky to get our scraps.
A 2012 study synthesizing a large body of research on land cover determined that humans have modified more than half of the Earth’s land surface. We’ve converted forests, grasslands, prairies, savannahs, swamps and marshes into crop fields, pastures, roads, parking lots, shopping malls, golf courses and more. Landscape ecologists examine, not just with a bird’s eye view but with a satellite’s eye view—the remnants of natural habitat within mosaics of human land uses. Remnants... unused scraps, surviving traces. Can we survive if nature, on which we depend for all sustenance, is relegated to remnants?
Scientists have recently developed an approach to defining the safe limits of human alteration of major Earth systems—the framework is called “planetary boundaries.” These boundaries—including safe limits on how much freshwater we should withdraw and how much carbon dioxide we should cause to accumulate in the lower atmosphere—are akin to health guidelines. Doctors’ guidelines on cholesterol don’t imply that you’ll have a heart attack as soon as your blood cholesterol level surpasses 200 mg/dL, but instead warn you that you enter a zone of significant risk for a heart attack.
When it comes to human land use and its impacts on the fabric of life, we’re in that zone of significant risk. We’ve surpassed the safe limit—the majority of the land surface is, according to scientists, “biotically compromised.” What does that mean? For the majority of the land surface, there aren’t enough (non-human) living beings remaining, in terms of numbers and/or diversity, to ensure that ecosystems will function. Why should we care? Functioning ecosystems, in countless ways, make our lives possible and enjoyable.
I enjoy my weekend walks immensely. Throughout the spring, on each walk I stopped to check in on those wood frog eggs. They successfully hatched and tadpoles swam in the ditch water. I’m not sure how many of them metamorphosed fully and survived to become adult wood frogs since my weekly “snapshot” surely means that I missed this final transformation.
But there was another ditch scene that I couldn’t miss—an entire coyote carcass sprawled lengthwise in the wet ditch just paces away from the egg masses. I caught snapshots as it decomposed over the weeks until only bones remained. Wood frogs were born there, but I’m more convinced that nature dies in the ditches.
Laura England | April 2018
Have you ever Googled “flower growing in concrete”? If you do, you’ll find thousands of images—some real, some clearly photoshopped—of plants surviving in improbable, unnatural and even hostile environments. Most of the sites hosting these images spin this phenomenon as a metaphor for the resilience of life…
“Nothing says hope quite like flowers growing through the cracks in concrete.”
“Despite the circumstances, we flourish.”
“I am the flower pushing itself through the cracks in the sidewalk.”
My identical twin sister even has a song on her 2003 album “A Flower Grows in Stone” about a resilient person… “How could something so beautiful come from somewhere so unkind. You must have known, when you had grown, you could leave it all behind.” It’s an inspiring song (yes I am biased—I love all of my sister’s songs) and a powerful metaphor. But I have a darker, more cynical read on the tenacity of plants pushing through pavement. For me, they are symbolic of the extent to which we have marginalized nature.
Most weekends, barring bad weather, I take walks by myself. It’s precious time alone with my thoughts and time when I can pay attention to the magnificent mountain setting we call home. I typically just take a left out of my driveway and walk along Watauga River Road, which follows the river for miles. I marvel at birds perching above or flying above the river—kingfishers, hawks, great blue herons and most recently ospreys. During a walk in late February, what caught my attention was not above, but below me—large masses of wood frog eggs in the water-filled ditches along the roadside.
The wood frog is cold-adapted, so much so that it ranges farther north than any other amphibian or reptile in North America and is the only cold-blooded tetrapod that lives above the Arctic Circle. In the southeastern United States, they are restricted to the Appalachian Mountains. How do wood frogs survive in such cold environments when they have no fur and their body temperatures, unlike ours, are determined by their environment? Like other frog species in cold climates, wood frogs have the extraordinary adaptation of being able to over-winter in a frozen state. Their cells don’t freeze—ice crystals would cause cell damage—freezing takes place in intercellular spaces in their bodies. Next time you pass a frozen Appalachian pond or wetland in the winter, imagine all of the frog popsicles in the sediments.
In the springtime, wood frogs thaw and are among the earliest frogs to breed in this area. The calls of wood frog males, described as quack-like chatter, is often heard before ponds and wetlands are ice-free. After mating, female wood frogs lay their eggs in fish-free ponds and vernal pools. They are very much dependent on late winter rains to create these ephemeral breeding grounds. After metamorphosis from tadpole to adult, wood frogs are largely terrestrial and live in variety of moist forested habitats, thus the name “wood frog.”
If you get a chance to see, not just hear, wood frogs, you’ll recognize them by what looks like a black “robber’s mask” on their faces as well as a white line outlining their upper lips. These handsome frogs have a variety of skin colors, including shades of brown, rust, green and gray. Most wood frogs have a light yellow-brown fold along both sides of their backs. And you’ll more likely than not see their eggs in temporary wet areas if you’re paying attention in late winter or early spring. Check the ditches.
Wood frogs aren’t the only species that are making the best of ditch-life. A number of native plants take advantage of ditches too. I heard through the naturalists’ grapevine that a small population of the Gray's Lily, a rare and endangered plant found only in this part of Appalachia, is growing in roadside ditches at a local nature preserve. Those are actual ditch dwellers, but life in the ditch is a metaphor for the extent to which we’ve sidelined nature. We’ve shoved it aside with the implicit message that it’s lucky to get our scraps.
A 2012 study synthesizing a large body of research on land cover determined that humans have modified more than half of the Earth’s land surface. We’ve converted forests, grasslands, prairies, savannahs, swamps and marshes into crop fields, pastures, roads, parking lots, shopping malls, golf courses and more. Landscape ecologists examine, not just with a bird’s eye view but with a satellite’s eye view—the remnants of natural habitat within mosaics of human land uses. Remnants... unused scraps, surviving traces. Can we survive if nature, on which we depend for all sustenance, is relegated to remnants?
Scientists have recently developed an approach to defining the safe limits of human alteration of major Earth systems—the framework is called “planetary boundaries.” These boundaries—including safe limits on how much freshwater we should withdraw and how much carbon dioxide we should cause to accumulate in the lower atmosphere—are akin to health guidelines. Doctors’ guidelines on cholesterol don’t imply that you’ll have a heart attack as soon as your blood cholesterol level surpasses 200 mg/dL, but instead warn you that you enter a zone of significant risk for a heart attack.
When it comes to human land use and its impacts on the fabric of life, we’re in that zone of significant risk. We’ve surpassed the safe limit—the majority of the land surface is, according to scientists, “biotically compromised.” What does that mean? For the majority of the land surface, there aren’t enough (non-human) living beings remaining, in terms of numbers and/or diversity, to ensure that ecosystems will function. Why should we care? Functioning ecosystems, in countless ways, make our lives possible and enjoyable.
I enjoy my weekend walks immensely. Throughout the spring, on each walk I stopped to check in on those wood frog eggs. They successfully hatched and tadpoles swam in the ditch water. I’m not sure how many of them metamorphosed fully and survived to become adult wood frogs since my weekly “snapshot” surely means that I missed this final transformation.
But there was another ditch scene that I couldn’t miss—an entire coyote carcass sprawled lengthwise in the wet ditch just paces away from the egg masses. I caught snapshots as it decomposed over the weeks until only bones remained. Wood frogs were born there, but I’m more convinced that nature dies in the ditches.