Deal pipelines for animal science

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okay recording in progress okay so we're very pleased to have Fred here we were hoping that Elita would be here with him but she's not able to make it but Fred will be talking on Mud Puppies slugs and pipelines and we have Becky lamb here who has who's the one who suggested that we try to have this talk um who's agreed to introduce Fred so go for it Becky thanks thanks Amy so uh Lita karstad and Dr Fred Schuler uh have been a biologist artist dynamic duo and partnership for half a century I had the pleasure of turning over a bunch of logs and rocks and Duff with them in early June in South Frontenac and they quickly became my personal nature Heroes because of their dedicated focus on both the native and non-native species and areas of biodiversity that largely get overlooked and underappreciated uh you can find both of them engaged full-time in observing measuring databasing painting drawing journaling blogging and even self-publishing on everything from mollusks to mud puppies and other things that might catch their eye along the way uh their work spans various parts of the country as well as their backyard in Bishops Mills Ontario they're incredibly generous with their deep knowledge and they love to share what they know and show people what they've found and I know I'm personally grateful to Fred nolita for introducing me to Aryan subfuscus which I recall Fred you guys were not as interested in the areas of Buscus but it was my first really uh named Slug and now I Inspire many other people to seek slugs uh and as you all know and as we're talking about there's never been a more important time to give a damn about nature and the world around us so it's such a pleasure to welcome Fred um who is not only the longest serving research associate with the Canadian Museum of Nature uh and coming to us as an impressive naturalist but he's also an advocate for database decision making for healthy ecosystems which we so need right now so thank you so much Fred please take it away okay um yeah how are we gonna okay so Fred what you do is if you go you can go to the bottom of your screen and press share screen okay and then I'm assuming do you have a PowerPoint to share um yeah let me just okay maybe you should open that up first and then you can share screen all right foreign here okay have you gone down to the bottom of your Zoom screen to share screen trying to find the zoom screen while I've got the other screen up oh okay so you'll go to share screen here okay Fred has started sharing screen that's good all right now I will try to do it up to foreign excellent okay that's great thank you all right so as Becky was saying we do um well we say that we're unemployable nomadic peasant Scholars and um and and it seems that oh that what we've done is is to look at kinds of mostly animals but also invasive plants that um where people sort of notice them but but don't identify them to species and to try to um try to to write documents and do documentation and talk about things that will will bring these species to people's attention and um and we're now um incorporated as as fragile inheritance which was the title of a book that we wrote that never got published because Conrad black moved in and screwed up the company that was was the publisher um so I'm going to talk about about our mud puppy nights in Oxford Mills the progression of different species of slugs that we've had through our village and our 2014 survey of the route of the proposed energies pipeline um and and here's the here's the the blurb of what we said we were going to do um and so so there's a lot of interest in in activities where people have form up on teams and and whack things around on the ice but um but if you if you pay attention to um reptiles and amphibians when when the winter comes around you're you're interested in Mud Puppies because Mud Puppies are our only around the amphibians that are most active in the winter and um and so we called our activity well we we revised an ecology chapter for the Rideau Valley conservation Authority about kempville Creek um back oh is it 92 and we put in some stuff about the mud puppies in the creek below the dam in Oxford Mills and it got edited out because there wasn't any potential funding that would come to the conservation Authority um by focusing on my puppies and so so we we started mud puppy night in Oxford Mills um which is every Friday after starting the first Friday after Thanksgiving and going through until the water comes up in the spring into fresh it and and we go out and we look at Mud Puppies um and and when I was back in the day when I was in high school one of the things we learned about Mud Puppies was that they had more DNA in each cell than any other kind of animal and nobody's actually worked this out but from the way they're equally active when the water is zero degrees and when the water is 32 degrees um we figure they must have thermal isozymes so that they can um they can be active at different they have different must have different enzymes that they use to be active at different temperatures and and you can see in the winter that they get most active and they swim against the strongest currents in February so um the other amphibians that hibernate in the water all all closed down their nervous system you can read that frogs only have 15 percent of their nervous systems active when they're hibernating and of course some of the frogs on land become Frozen lumps of ice and can't do anything um and so so mud puppies are what are called neotenic or padiamorphic in that that one of the things salamanders do is if if things aren't so good on land they develop sexual maturity with the larval morphology with external gills and Aquatic skin and and a little lateral line um sensors along their bodies that fish have and and they become sexually mature and and there's this species um oh and this amount in British Columbia where some populations come out on land and lived in ordinary salamander life and come back and lay eggs in the in the water and other populations that stayed in the larval morphology through their whole life and just become sexually mature but the mud puppies have been doing this since the Jurassic and um and they used to be all around them are the hemisphere but now there's two Genera in the family there's one that lives in caves and the Balkans and then there's nectarus which are mud puppies or water dogs and live in streams and lakes in eastern North America sort of North to the Arctic watershed and um I will I will I will sing some of this um this is the mud puppy song nectarus maculosis they prowl the winter nights the tadpole is they snack food the crayfish there they lied when Oxford Mills in Curious has tucked itself in tight they wander cleaning up the creek beneath the shelves of ice the dam in Oxford Mills has got an ancient pedigree The Province nearly tore it down in 1953 repaired at bars the Rito Carp from running up the stream and stymie Springtime LED pout to support a fishery so so that the mud powder Brown bullheads run up the Rito and and there's a local fishery for them in the spring and um and also the dam keeps the carp out of the upper part of the creek but it also keeps the mud puppies from moving up into the upper part of the creek and and so below the below the dam it's it's a rocky warm water stream and there's lots of rock bass and and there's a much greater diversity of freshwater mussels um below the dam than there is above the dam because below the dam they don't have to deal with so much um so much lack of oxygen in the winter and and the female mud puppies the mud puppies breed about this time of year and the mothers lay the eggs on the undersides of rocks and defend them through the summer so they started the sperm all through the winter and lay the eggs in late spring and defend them through this the summer probably mostly living on the crayfish and pesky insects and stuff that would come in and would eat their eggs and then in August the the eggs hatch and you get these little um so they start up about an inch long and then they grow up but they have this um this sort of two-lined color pattern and they sort of disappear into the gravel and and nobody really knows what they do until they get to be about 10 centimeters long and come out and start to be noticed and um so this is a picture of the dam um at Oxford Mills in the kind of conditions where we see my puppies active there's sometimes that we have to just clear the ice um off of the stream in order to see the mud puppies below below the dam in January on the Bedrock floor you see one walking slowly then more and more and more stepping with the little feet and stubby fingers for the fan red gills inflects broad Tails beside the spillways Roar if you say keystone predator I think Nick tourists now most Creeks like winter foragers and so we must allow their presence here transforms the stream though we may not know how around these long-leaf salamanders flow Creeks life revolves and and so so they're going around in the winter eating all the all the the fish and um crayfish and tadpoles and things that are are slowed down by the creek and and this really must um influence the Ecology of the creek but but one of the things we've discovered is unemployables is that an awful lot of what goes on in the fall and winter just doesn't get studied because everybody's either in their classes or their offices and um and so if somebody's working on mud puppies and what they eat they go out in the summer when the mud puppies are staying under the stones and eating little insects and and isopods and amphipods and other little uh small stuff that comes in under the stones they don't see them when they're eating fish and crayfish and um and big tadpoles so there's the nectarus maculosis they prowl the winter nights the tadpole is their snack food the crayfish they're Delight when Oxford Mills in Curious has tucked itself in tight they wander cleaning up the creek beneath the shelves of ice and and so we started in 1989 see when the when the first Ontario herp Outlets the Ontario final summary came out that we started to get these mud puppy records from Ice fishermen um and and that's when it really became people really became aware that they were they were really active in the winter and here's one that's eating a tadpole um and and since we started to to notice them in the creek in the winter in 1989 and then and um and and but they don't have any status because they're not they're not a game species they're not a pest species they're not invasive alien um and and so they were just not so much ignored now but they were they were really profoundly ignored for such a a large distinctive um animal and this is a picture when we were starting out and we were carrying big jumper batteries to provide the light and there's David tomes with an ax clearing um Winters are colder than we had a lot more ice than we do now and so every Friday as I said um we're out looking for them teaching people about them and and here you see some kids on the ice seeing mud puppies in the creek with their lights and and what we thought we were doing was was we were going to show people that you could see them in the winter but but it turns out that it's so distinctive in Oxford Mills that the dam doesn't have a plunge pool into an ordinary stream bottom it just goes down onto flat limestone and and there's a big population of Mud Puppies Downstream which we knew what we've known about since 1980 um and and everything you know all aquatic animals that move tend to go Upstream because by going Upstream you compensate for not being washed Downstream so these guys they hate they really don't like it they like because they live under rocks they like to be in contact with stuff and this includes the hands of children um I I thought I used to take her boots off and just wade into the creek and catch them by hand um because even if the air was -20 the water was only zero and and they're very agreeable to being caught by hand and so so we've had just hundreds of people have come and her Pathologists all the herpetologists have been to mud puppy nights at least once and we even had a time when in Vermont mud puppies are species at risk because they live in in streams where the the poison the lampric side the poison they used to kill the sea lampreys also kill the mud puppies and so they they got Lake Champlain um classified in the U.S as as a great lake which meant that they could poison the lampreys even though the lampreys are perfectly native there because you know they come up through the uh the river to Montreal and and it's there's no dams between them and the ocean um so the Vermont multi puppy people would come up talks or meals just to see a bunch of mud puppies but nobody has been able to go home and find another place some people have photographed them recently in the winter but nobody's found a place like Oxford Mills where um where you can see I mean on a good night you can see 160 Mud Puppies and and here's the herp atlas map from Prince Edward County um mud puppies are are tough to find because in in streams like chemfield Creek where there's a lot of Flat Rocks and the water's shallow if they occur there and you go in and turn rocks you can find them but they're also in The Lakes um where you know they're there is as I say an inconveniently deep water um or they can be in places where it's just mud and and they're underneath um rotten logs and stuff and you can see in this map there's been pretty good follow-up um the yellow squares are places where they found both old records and current records the green is for this only recent records and the red is places where all the records we're more than 20 years old um when the herp Atlas closed down in 2019 so everybody should always be on the lookout for mud puppies and and one way to recognize them is to to learn the appearance of the um of the the vertebral column for skeletons washed up on the beach and 2016 we were we did a talk on Mud Puppies where we looked at the herp Atlas records and for both both Lake Erie and Lake Ontario Elita and I had found two mud puppies that each lay but that was half of the recent records from the Lakes for both Lakes so other people had contributed only two records for Lake Ontario and two records for Lake Erie um so it really helps to to learn this sort of lumpy with ribs appearance of the skeletons if you're walking on beaches so so those are Mud Puppies um so Becky was mentioning Ariane sabuscus which is one of my favorite slugs too um and and slugs are is this Wikipedia definition says if it's a snail and it doesn't have a shell then it's a slug and so there's different families of slugs that aren't particularly closely related um and that have each of the families has cluster relatives that are shelled snails and oh we had a a colleague who was a who was a terrestrial snails guy and like some of the rest of us he was diabetic but he was a lot more careless with this diabetes and some of the rest of us are and he died in he's competing he started a manuscript on introduced um Lance terrestrial gastropods and snails and slugs in Eastern Canada and he died from complications to diabetes and the Canadian food inspection agency took it up as the responsibility who invasive species got sort of parceled Out Among government departments that were already doing something related to the to the invasive species and the food inspection agency got terrestrial gastropods and um and so we worked Wayne's manuscript up into this book where we we had both the invasive species the the introduced species and the native Genera and it used to be free you just had to have the right phone number or email address and write to the food inspection agency but I just learned today that they've stopped printing hard copies and you can go to researchgate and Google the names the name of the book and get a PDF copy um but they're not we have a box full of them but they're not printing any more hard copies they have a few french copies left and um and so so I'm going to talk about the Slugs that we have in our village of Bishops Mills mostly Illustrated with the latest paintings that she did for the book um so so one of the things about slugs is that we have we have the one native little native species that we'll come to soon and in one native family that only lives in the Deep Woods but 99 of the Slugs that we see are introduced from Europe and and so in in identifying slugs the traditional way to identify slugs is to grow them up until you think they're mature and then kill them and cut them open and look at their internal the internal twistings around of their genital organs and and their oviducts they they're they're hermaphroditic so they have both es and ovaries and and there's lots of variation in the appearance of these and um and and so we have these introduced ones but we don't know where they came from in Europe and and they're a lot of the species have restricted ranges in Europe and and so there's a lot of stomach pain involved in trying to figure out what species of slugs you have and and whether the things that you call species are really two species or not and and whether the ones you've got came from Ireland or did they come from Spain or Finland you know um and so in 2014 this paper comes out where they say that they can't even identify the ones in the British Isles which is it's a great comfort to those of us in North America because if they've been studying them in Europe where they're native and they've missed 22 percent of the species then we don't have to feel too bad about our attempts to identify them and um and so what I've done here is to uh to go through just what we've called the species um and and look at the records we have of their occurrence in in the village of Bishop's Mills and so so one of the most conspicuous slugs we have is the rossos reticulatum and this is the one that crawls up and eats holes in people's um lettuce and pastas and produces a a sticky milky colored slime um which and these these these sentences here are elitas um sort of comments on the species that she got from from doing the paintings and you can see that here there's there's an awful lot of variation in the color of reticulatum and there's somewhere there reticulated and then there's most of them they aren't really very reticulated and and so the numbers this this quote from Wikipedia is about how omnivorous it is and how it um is considered a pest in gardens and and how there's huge variations in abundance and and here's I've got a photograph of um the roadside at a place in the village where in 2020 you know there was one just every every half meter there was a a little drastically I'm making its way out onto the pavement and and there was nothing any more palatable looking than white pine needles and so it was hard to understand you know what their enthusiasm was if if they mostly eat lettuce and hostile leaves but um but that's where they were and and here's deroster's Levy which is our native darocyrus and it's it's very variable and and is obviously a species complex or something um and it's aggressive to other slugs when it's held captive with them um and and here's this is sort of across the street from where I showed the picture of where the reticulatum were abundant in 2020 and when we started to do the streets in 2002 this this corner where the telephone pole is there was always thrusters reticulate and they would come out onto the mud um when on wet nights but then in 2010 they disappeared and they didn't show up again until 2016 and this year and since then we've had sort of a modest number um at this place on the rainy nights and and this is what we call The Bishop's Mills type because we couldn't we didn't actually do dissections um but it looked the most like Ariana's sylvaticus but they were there were little we had Robert Forsyth who's the you know sort of Canada's terrestrial gastropod guide and he didn't he wasn't confident what species it was but this is this is a small little area on that um that we had it was the one we had around and um and here's Ariana fuscus which is a nice big very orange slug um these to go back to the durocular scenario and are in different families which aren't have they're not of slug lineage they each have closer relatives that have shells and so some fuscus lives in the woods and eats mushrooms among other things um but we never had them around Bishops until 2008. and then they showed up and um and we've had small numbers of them since then and um and one of the places that we that we check regularly for Slugs is this board out in the Cedar Bush on our land that we call the Nova 6inia board because um it used to have quite a lot of Nova succinia um under it these are what are called Amber snails um but something again has changed and we've only seen three of them under the Nova 6 India board since 2011. and this is the boards wear out after about a decade this is the current board and now here's here's Ariane hartensis which is really cute has a bright orange belly but when we did the snail book and then and then there's there's a um sort of a sister species or a very similar species Arion distinctives and when the leader did the paintings for the books we couldn't get any hortensus and so she painted um distinctives which is one of these things where they say well you can tell sometimes and other times you can't but the photograph there shows the orange belly and and the Blackish uh blackish color but before 2019 here's the painting of when we were doing uh the 30 years later trip we were in Nova Scotia this is the painting of the bridge from Dartmouth over to to Halifax and it was a real thrill to find an area hortensus there and in 2019 it showed up around home and it's now the Communist species around the houses and you turn any board over around our houses and there's a hortensis under it and and I I looked up whether they were under the Nova 6ini aboard because that's sort of out in the woods a bit and um on the 16th the only time we saw them there was seven under the board on the 16th of December 2021 and we haven't seen any there this year so so they come and go and there must be you know things we don't understand about what controls the the abundances so that we we haven't buckled down to it and done a huge regression analysis on all the weather data and then here's Aryan fasciitis um which is a very long narrow the slug and when Ken and Jenna's story at Carlton did some some freeze tolerance work on slugs they they didn't ask us to identify them and they said they had fasciitis and from the experimental Farm in Ottawa and we sort of rolled our eyes a little bit about that because we are having trouble identifying Arion and we'd never seen any fasciitis but now they've shown up and we've had a few of them around they're very cute very long narrow so now the Third the third thing I'm going to talk about is our our 2014. you know you get all these emails and they say on some environmental um problem they say take action and of course take action this is we just had this is giving Thursday or Tuesday and you know we've all had 840 emails from various organizations saying take action and take action always means send us money and and when the energy East pipeline was proposed we uh we composed this little song about by altitudes the open housing throng paid by Big Oil to say what they know is wrong with gentle grins they sweep the waste from tar sanding away deny denied it's the Industrial Way O Canada glorious and free will stand on guard against our sanding for thee and so we had what we could make out to be obligations in both New Brunswick and and Calgary in 2014 and we said well we'll take action we'll check out all the places where streams cross the pipeline and uh and see what our the organisms that we're interested in are are like at those um please I think we lost Fred we'll see if he can come back um I think we're still recording so we'll see if Fred comes back if everybody else can kind of turn off their cameras I think people have so we'll hopefully get this to work okay um there you are great when did that drop out um you were just had gone to you started the pipeline thing and you just gotten up the um the the slide with the painting on it okay starting that okay I'll um stop my video here and mute okay so we started the blog um and the idea was we would well we did some crowd crowds sourcing of funding and got a lot of donations and and a lady did a painting at each place that we stopped long enough to uh for her to do a painting and um and we sold the paintings although all the paintings from east of the matawa river sold but none of the ones from the West sold because we didn't have very good Connections In The West so so we started on the 19th of March um Fred May interrupt a minute do you want to put your um your uh PowerPoint backup again because we don't have it up now oh well are you sharing my screen um well I think you need to re-share again because you left the zoom oh okay sorry about that that's okay um here here it comes okay there we go okay okay so so we started finding where see the energy East pipeline was going to take over one of the pipes of the um the gas pipeline that brings guests from Alberta to Ontario and Quebec and they were going to fill that with oil even though the pipe was 50 years old and of course it could have burst and it would have been and it wasn't just oil it was going to be the tar Sands dilbit stuff which just has totally wiped out the Kalamazoo River in Michigan where where one of it's a pipeline of it broke so so we started um here at at Hoople Creek near Ingleside in eastern Ontario and uh and this is a painting of the 401 going over Hoople Creek and and we'd stop there um a few years before and had found surviving um Union muscles which was very exciting because because there's not very much in the way of of um surviving muscle populations in the the direct tributaries to the St Lawrence in Ontario and and here's a here's a painting of um of the South Nation River at Cass Bridge which is uh one of our favorite places and now probably has Chinese mystery snails although we haven't gotten out here to find them and our latest thoughts on just sort of Tranquility of a June day even though there was plans for a pipeline and um and zebra mussels in the river and and ash trees dying and and all of that kind of thing that you could worry about we did hear mink frogs here which was uh uh a new record for that area because people tend to listen for frogs early in the season and hear the spring frogs but they don't go out um at least around here and record what's going on in the summer when the meat frogs are calling and and here's the tobik river um from the the porch of a the the parents of a Facebook friend that we we only knew by actually we've never met her um but when we announced we were doing this she said oh yeah that's going to cross the river right near my parents place so we're we're now friends with her parents and um we're sort of working on on the muscle fauna in the topic River and I don't know to what extent it's in from listening to us talk about conservation authorities and eastern Ontario but her father is now sort of getting together a volunteer or you know non-official conservation Authority like groups for their River just ice and and here's um you know can people see the the headings on this or is it all covered with just sharing my screen is it all covered with two it scrambled on online although all the text in the image was great but now it all looks good to me okay good um so this is this is the Saint Lawrence where the energies pipeline was going to cross it um it it in this case it wasn't an existing gas pipeline it was going to be converted they were going to have to uh have to dig under the river and um and put a new pipeline in down across Quebec and through New Brunswick down to St John but this is really interesting it's a freshwater Tidal uh River because the tides pushed the river the water up but they don't push it out of the way enough for it to be salt water and so we have all these um we have all these plants that we ordinarily know in different habitats that are growing in the uh in the the title you know submerged twice a day um situation and it's a real scramble of um these are the species that we've seen the aggressive Parnassus and marshmallow gold and Bone set and purple loose strife but there's places where chives grow intertidally and and we the the neat thing about St Lawrence is that that the Ottawa river water goes down the North Shore of the St Lawrence and and it doesn't have enough calcium to support zebra mussels and so you've got the Lake Ontario water on the south side which is just just full of zebra mussels because Lake Ontario is filled with zebra mussels but but on the north side all the way to Quebec City you've got Ontario Ottawa river water that doesn't have enough calcium and and there's a whole Fauna of native muscles that continue to survive there including What's called the hickory nut avivaria Oliveira and it's near here when when people started to begin to panic about muscles after the Zebra muscles in 1999 we we collected the first modern specimens of uh of the hickory nut in the St Lawrence here and now now we'll skip all the way across to Northwestern Ontario this is painted while we were coming back in the fall and and there was this this big bridge um we've had snapping turtlenecks in it and and the leader was sitting by the water gonna do the painting and she saw these little baby snapping turtles that had just crawled down from there hatching out of their nest snapping turtles have to hatch out um in the year that the eggs are laid because they're not freeze tolerant and I have to get into the water to survive their first winter and and one of the things bridges are are sort of interesting for turtles because because they're ambiguous they're they're high and they're exposed to the Sun and they're generally made out of the ridge embankments are made out of sand so they're really nice um nesting habitat but they are associated with the death the danger of Roadkill and in this case it looks like the the [Music] Bridge was a benefit to the turtles we have this in Kempo Creek around home as well that the turtles seem to have learned not to go out on the road and they lay we have hundreds and hundreds of snapping turtles playing on one of the bridges near us and and here's the Cinnabon River this is a very spectacular place um where where they'd been a a flood that had had washed they did wash you know you read about how Egypt depended on the floods of the Nile to wash sediment up onto the fields to that provided the nutrients for their growing their grain and stuff and and this place in Manitoba they've had a flood that had sort of deposited 30 centimeters of mud on some of the of the Agricultural Fields down along the river and and they had washed all these these muscles um up onto the island I went downstream away from where Olivia was doing the painting and um and there's the photograph of me with the bag full of muscle shells but but there had also been a lot that were still alive that I'd thrown back into the uh into the river just spectacular and and these these u-shaped Prairie Rivers um there's so much that lives there that you don't see unlike the mud puppies the Cinnabon River sort of until the the Upstream most record of a mud puppy in the Cinnabon river is sort of 14 kilometers Downstream from the Saskatchewan border and and I'm sure that there are mud puppies in Saskatchewan it's just that there's no way no way to hunt for them um and it may be that people are going to be developing people have tried to develop environmental DNA to detect Mud Puppies but they they haven't been particularly successful yet and here I am with with a bag full of these huge shells and this is another place that the that the pipeline crosses and foreign when I was in graduate school I did a I was I was one of the things I was interested in was hybridization between species and um I did a little paper on hybridization between the broadleaf and the narrow Leaf cattails and and as you probably know the the narrow Leaf cat tail and the broadleaf Cattail hybridized and produce a hybrid that lives in deeper water than either parent and um and it at that time when we started and then in 1976 when we went out on our one of our earlier Trans Canada trips okay Fred we've lost you again I think we'll see if everybody can please turn off their microphones that would be great and your video cameras please they are all turned off Amy oh sorry about that that's okay foreign so here's this Pipestone Creek Valley that's just solid narrow Leaf cat tail and it turns out that it wasn't a native species that was anomalously spreading into the best habitat best suited for on the prairies that in the 1987 I think it was there were some people sort of looked back and found that the further back you went in museum I mean in Botanical floras or Museum specimens the further east the narrow Leaf Cattail was and and it turns out it's a European species that um that came across with columnists and then his spread and spread and and if you look at our our Counts from 2014 2015 the proportion of native to broadleaf native to narrow Leaf Cattails the broadleaf Cattail is a species at risk in southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan so so this is one of these situations where you have a very similar species in the same genus where where the European one sort of inconspicuously replaces the native one and I think the same thing is true with the big willow trees that um The salex Negro the native black willow but a huge percentage of the big willow trees you see are celix fragilus the um the European uh I forget what the English name is used for it what was going on okay so so here's the South Saskatchewan River um these gorgeous Bluffs of of lusts which is a relational wind blown material and um and and all these great big huge lamp muscle shells on the shore and on the island it's a ways Downstream where I went and and just so they're all white and and I talked to the woman who was managing the the campground and she says that they're they're they're eaten by the sturgeons that they have these great big sturgeons in the river there it's an isolated population it's sort of one of the the best populations on the prairies and that they they just engulfed them and eat the meat out of them and spit the shells off and there were so many shells on this island that you could see the whiteness of the shells on Google Maps from space and and there was only one moderately heavy shell plasma going to confinada and and no thin shell muscles which doesn't necessarily mean this thin child muscles weren't there but perhaps the surgeons just crunched him up I had no idea that sturgeons ate shells that were that big so so the energies pipeline wasn't going to start at Fort McMurray um where the tar sand work is but we we went up there to to see um see what it looked like and and we've we've got samples of of the bitumen which is just it's just it's tar Sands it's just tar and Sands and it comes out in chunks and and the river was already pretty polluted by the natural erosion um before the industrial processing started and um and there's just there were just Gravelly chunks of the tar sand in the river and um and and there's the painting that Elena did from Under the Bridge to Nowhere the bridge nowhere is called that because there wasn't it was built before the tar sand operations that it leads to had been opened and and you can see the the dust off the road that got into her pain as she was uh as she was doing the painting and and we we we spent the night there and well not quite there but you know a few hundred meters away and the RCMP banged on the door middle of night nest if we were from Greenpeace doing some sort of environmental um uh resistance and when we were under the bridge here there were inspectors from the uh the oil companies that were checking out the bridge and they climbed up to these uh these big pipes that went under the bridge and carried the water out to the processing plants and and the bitumen back to the processing plants and we pointed out that there was some of the protection of these uh these pipes had been driven over by ATVs and we're sort of crumpled up and they hadn't noticed that they just climbed up their ladder and looked around at the top of the ladder and hadn't noticed the damage and uh and then let's see so so as you've probably heard the energies pipeline was canceled probably mostly because Quebec didn't want to have all this bitumen running right across the province with no um no benefit to any quebecers coming from it um and and so but it was just such a beautiful experience to go to all these places and and just have these arbitrary um because because there was no impact from the pipeline it was just there were arbitrary selections of places and um and to just see this sort of random sample of of the of what was living where and there's a picture of us and I don't know how I've done in terms of the amount of time I was expected to talk but um that's a bunch of uh URLs for stuff that we're doing which I'll send us an email afterwards and I suppose that's about it that's wonderful Fred thank you um if you stop sharing screen we can take a look at the chats that that was just really terrific and thank you for your patience with the uh coming leaving and coming back in well I think that's my computer does that I I think at home I thought it was sort of a shaky email um connection but I meant my daughter and son-in-law's place where they have a an in-town sort of Internet um so I think it must be something my computer does so if there's let's see get the chat up I'm gonna get this on the other View okay Jerry do you wanna yes I I will um read what is on the chat after uh after Jane I think we read James already also encourage our new counselor so that that was um about Bill 23. Paul appeal if you'd like a list of specific changes that are being proposed the Ontario well and evaluation system will help writing your letters feel free to email me and Paul has given everyone her email address there and now to um to Fred's um presentation from John Foster he just downloaded the identifying land snails and slugs in Canada PDF from researchgate so thanks for that tip um Brad and it 175 pages though you might not want to print it um but we're we're talking about um there's people really want one they could write us a very impassioned letter because we have a box of copies and we're we're thinking we we self-publish on lulu.com and one could well we're gonna try to upload the PDF to Lulu and see how much they charge the the online publishing if it's black and white it's pretty cheap but if you have color inside then they have to have the potential of color on every page and so it gets pretty expensive to to have 175 page book um but we're gonna um we're gonna nose around and see what we can do we have the blessing of cfia for that they've also got a um John Reynolds has has published in earthworms of Canada um and John Reynolds is is he's a both a policeman and a worm guy and um and his earthworms of Ontario it was 1977 and and that was the that was the book it's one of these transformational books when you realize just how much of what goes on in the forest floor is the European species that have been brought over by settlers and and I read that when we were doing the herpetology of the Bruce peninsula in 1983 and and here were these everything everything everything eats earthworms because they've all migrated I mean they all went during glaciation down into where the North American earthworm fauna is and then they moved up here with all the behaviors needed to eat earthworms I mean robins and wood Turtles and everything and but the earthworms hadn't crawled North um because it's just a long ways to crawl if you're an earthworm and they've only had you know 10 000 years um and then the Europeans brought in all these European species and and we have friends who were doing a reptiles and amphibians of Quebec video and and they had to give it up because the way they got all the species to do something worth filming was to feed them earthworms so they had toads and they had Turtles and they had Bullfrogs and everything to they were just so many of them were eating earthworms it just got too funny and they had to give it up um but anyway John Reynolds on the model of our snail and slug book has written uh an earthworms of Canada and um you can get that on researchgate and they have a few hard copies at fcfia um but we said we'd like six copies so we had a lot of people interested in Earth rooms and and Martin said well I can only send you five okay thank you um so just looking here again yes um so from Paula Paul appeal beautiful paintings are they all together in a gallery somewhere where people can go see them and Becky uh replied to that you can see some of elita's amazing work here and then she's given you the URL so you can copy that if you want if you want to and John has given the the complete URL for uh for downloading your book right right if we can't write you a passionate passionate enough in fact in fact I believe it is coming back to a show of the North Greenville Historical Society um we're going to have a show of a partly partly physical and partly online uh We've scr got all the boxes of paintings that have been hanging around in the Attic um for all these years and so there's going to be a huge show of of her paintings and I'll send a link to that when our daughter gets it up um please that's the next huge Enterprise is to get the catalog together and get them all scanned well enough and I think for the energies pipeline we're gonna put them together in a book because we have the accounts of what we found at all these places and and the species and and everything commentary is as beautiful and moving as her paintings the travelogue is so moving and your prayer the streams and rivers at the end of your presentation inspiring um yeah it was a beautiful presentation uh Fred that that prayer like thing is is the essay in 20 we did a calendar for 2015 after we done the energy East um and uh and there was one of these 13-month calendar formats and so that essay was at the back end and you can find that if you go to the vulnerable Waters blog it's the whole thing [Music] okay um thank you so in these very well first of all I want to uh to thank you for the amazing presentation on on the mud puppies and the Slugs it was so informative and so well done thank you okay um there was one particular slide and it really hit home to me because of what we're all going through here with Bill 23 and beside ourselves and we've been rallying and writing and doing whatever we can and I forget which slide it was but you it was a sort of take time to smell the roses slide you don't don't be completely consumed with oh Bridge is that it again yeah yeah so I think that's good advice for all of us in these desperate times that were living in the chain about the South River nation was that yeah yeah that's that's the one you're referring to yeah thank you thank you so um we have a speaker's gift here for you and Elita and we will deliver it to you on one of those Friday nights uh and mud puppies um of our appreciation and oh one more thing from John Foster he's given us the URL to the right um book I guess that that would uh yeah that would be that John Reynolds yeah yeah one of the things one of the things we do is is the New Brunswick Museum has what they call biota MB and and the province I mean the story of this told is they have these protected natural areas which are the tops of the mountains above where the Irvings had cut down all the trees and um and so the New Brunswick museum has gotten just fantastic funding to go every year to one of these protected natural areas and and they get [Music] they get they get a community organization or a caterer to provide suppers they have a they rent a hall a courthouse or a Community Hall or um to they move about a third of the museums lab equipment in freezers and and dryers for barbarian specimens and and it's two weeks long each summer and um and there was a while there where every time I caught a garter snake there'd be a publication you know maybe the birth weight of of Maritime garter snakes but there was one where I caught this garter snake and it obviously eaten a bunch of stuff and I regurgitated it out and it had 17 worms all of the same species and John Roberts was there and so he identified them all and we published I was belligeria eating such and such words that's a good approach for research so I'll pass you back to to Amy um but thanks again all right that that was really terrific Fred thank you so much and again thank you for the patience with the the technical stuff going back and forth um I wanted to mention too that I know that Paul catling is here and he's done a lot of stuff on on snails but it just made me think about you know earthworms doing the work of what snails did in Ontario for a while and all of that too with these uh non-natives coming in um but that that was just terrific I also sent it I sent a message trying to figure out the chat thing to Peter Fuller who's here from Miami Manitoba and asked him if he'd seen the broad the narrow leafed you know if he'd seen the broadleaf you can't tell what did you say Peter oh just narrow Leafs in the big marshes and roadsides he's been doing uh bio blitzes with his nieces in around the area of Miami Manitoba which is Southern Manitoba so it made me think about that so that's great but um Fred thank you so much and thank you to everyone for coming we will be planning we'll we'll get some when Sheila's back we'll work on doing an email out to the membership to try to work out some sort of carpooling to Oxford Mills for for a night okay we'll try to get down to Prince Edward County this summer I mean there's so much stuff that we just haven't I mean even our our favorite muscle lagumi and nazuda is in West Lake in in the the marshes that lead into the lake um and then sepia hartensis which is one of the two species of big yellow snails is down at sand banks and we've heard about these but we haven't gone down and snooped around as I said in one of my emails the last time we were in Prince Edward counting my daughter and I were in 2006 we were doing chorus frogs but the funding had come late and they were only calling during the night and so we drove around but didn't hear any during the day but we had to get down to to Essex County to to and to do it nighttime work and so we didn't stay for the night okay well we'll keep on you know we can keep out our members to to send photos too yeah fresh muscles gels along the lake because I could have talked about muscle shells reinvading the Great Lakes you know we'll look for those um there was one question that Les and Ann asked one question for you are Mud Puppies vulnerable to electroshing or do they go into rigor I don't know what elect electricity okay oh Dr Fisher okay sorry yep I don't really know um but I think I think the Vermont people caught them by Electro fishing without harming them okay but I don't really really know but I'm pretty sure that's what I've heard okay well I can ask I'm sure he has um that's uh John rohrabek um less um and then um John Foster wrote I photographed a mud puppy in South Bay so here we are in Prince Edward County too and and I think I told you that my cousin had seen them in Weller's Bay and I think she wrote you about that too she couldn't make it but she'll watch the recording so um Fred thank you very very much and our best to Elita thank you everyone for coming um our next meeting will be January 31st with uh with with um with oh why am I I'm so sorry I'm very Pamela stag sorry I'm very tired tonight after everything and uh we'll keep in touch with everyone about Bill 23 whatever we can come up with and thank you all for coming in the meantime I hope everybody has a good holiday season in the winter and thanks again Fred okay well thank you for asking me okay we look forward to a mud puppy evening too great okay beautiful images and I did send out some of the links to um to our members too so uh with the blogs and stuff I think I told you that too okay great okay thank you everyone okay good night everyone good night good night bye-bye good night thanks friend Happy New Year Happy New Year okay now