It seems wonderful that so frail and lovely a plant has such power over human hearts. I sat down beside it and fairly cried for joy. It seemed the most spiritual of all the flower people I had ever met.
No other bloom was near it, for the bog a short distance below the surface was still frozen, and the water was ice cold. The flower was white and made the impression of the utmost simple purity like a snowflower.
Entering one of these great tamarac and arbor-vitae swamps one morning,holding a general though very crooked course by compass, struggling through tangled drooping branches and over and under broad heaps of fallen trees, I began to fear that I would not be able to reach dry ground before dark, and therefore would have to pass the night in the swamp and began, faint and hungry, to plan a nest of branches on one of the largest trees or windfalls like a monkey’s nest, or eagle’s, or Indian’s in the flooded forests of the Orinoco described by Humboldt.īut when the sun was getting low and everything seemed most bewildering and discouraging, I found beautiful Calypso on the mossy bank of a stream, growing not in the ground but on a bed of yellow mosses in which its small white bulb had found a soft nest and from which its one leaf and one flower sprung. I had been fording streams more and more difficult to cross and wading bogs and swamps that seemed more and more extensive and more difficult to force one’s way through. The rarest and most beautiful of the flowering plants I discovered on this first grand excursion was Calypso borealis (the HIder of the North). These results are counter to expected antipredator strategies in white-tailed deer and exemplify how an adaptive response could be maladaptive in novel contexts.Ĭoyote Evolutionary trap Hider strategy Neonate Predation White-tailed deer.After earning a few dollars working on my brother-in law’s farm near Portage, I set off on the first of my long lonely excursions, botanising in glorious freedom around the Great Lakes and wandering through innumerable tamarac and arbor-vitae swamps, and forests of maple, basswood, ash, elm, balsam, fir, pine, spruce, hemlock, rejoicing in their bound wealth and strength and beauty, climbing the trees, revelling in their flowers and fruit like bees in beds of goldenrods, glorying in the fresh cool beauty and charm of the bog and meadow heathworts, grasses, carices, ferns, mosses, liverworts displayed in boundless profusion. Interestingly, neonates that moved less and bedded in denser cover were more likely to be depredated by coyotes, meaning that greater neonate movement rate and bedsites located in less dense cover were favored by natural selection. We determined selection gradients of coyote predation on neonate movement rate and plant cover and diversity at bedsites during the first 10 days of life. Neonate bedsites had greater plant cover values compared with random sites ( t = 30.136 p < 0.001), indicating bedsite selection was consistent with the hider strategy used to avoid predation. We used movement rate and bedsite characteristics of radiocollared neonates to evaluate their antipredator strategies in the context of novel predation risk in a structurally homogeneous, fire-maintained ecosystem.
The recent establishment of coyotes ( Canis latrans) into the southeastern USA has the potential to change white-tailed deer ( Odocoileus virginianus) population dynamics through direct predation and behavioral adaptation. Such traps can be induced by anthropogenic environmental changes, with nonnative species introductions being a leading cause. An evolutionary trap occurs when an organism makes a formerly adaptive decision that now results in a maladaptive outcome.
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