When things burn
Okay, I've been bad and have not added anything to this site in a long while. Bad me. I did not burn up, nor did my computer, although other places in my state have burned, and burned hotly. Husband has gone off on a fire or two, just little things compared to the big conflagration in southern California that burned 160,000+ acres. That fire, in Angeles National Forest has been in the news quite a lot the past few weeks. Hubby was sent a copy of this photo, and I just had to post it here.
Yes, the sign appears to be on fire.
If you've ever been in air as yellow/orange as what you see in the image, it is quite hard on the lungs. The Station Fire burnt approximately 160,000 acres in the San Gabriel Mountains which are on the east side of the Los Angeles basin. When that many acres of chaparral burns, it burns hot and puts out an awful lot of yuck into the air.
When I was a kid I lived in Sunland, which is one of the towns that butts up against the same area that burned in this fire. As a kid, I recall a huge fire that came from the mountains almost into town and saw huge flames on the hills that butt up against the town. This fire burned the same area, plus a heck of a lot more.
Chaparral is an interesting mix of plants that have evolved to survive fire. The plants will resprout after a fire, growing from stored reservoirs of energy that are in the plant roots. They have huge, bulb like swellings below ground level that store enough nutrients to allow regrowth. They are meant to burn. The plants grow very large and dense and every 30 to 50 years, fire burns things up. The roots remain, resprout, and the plants come back. Even oak trees that grow in chaparral tend to resprout.
I own a book on chaparral that discusses all sorts of interesting things about the chaparral plant community, including beetles that mate on burning branches! I never heard of these before reading it in the book. My fire-fighter husband never mentioned it at all, in all his years of working on wildland fires, until I brought it up. He said yes, there were such beetles and they come out enmasse during fires in the chaparral!
5 comments:
I believe you are referring to "fire beetles," actually hemipterans of the genus Melanophila and also called "fire bugs." Their attraction to fires is perfectly sensible, though. Thanks for bringing them up. We have them in FL but I don't know if they have the same firetime mating habit.
Yes, they are called fire beetles here, too. I forgot to name them! If you have them in Florida, you must have fire specific species of plants too?
Oh man! Do we ever! We have several types of fire-climax pine ecosystems like pine flatwoods, sandhill and scrub plant communities. Everything living in those habitats is fire adapted. Historically, those habitats burned naturally and were set deliberately by Native Americans, in frequencies approximating 3-5 yrs, 5-7 yrs and 40-80 yrs, respectively.
Holocene? Or Homocene? Or is it really the Pyrocene! LOL
I do wish they let the fires burn out. It really would help the ecosystem in the long run. But rich folks keep building houses out there which need to be saved.
So, I guess we are living in the pyrocene, big time? LOL. For some reason, with Florida so very flat and so much wet land there, fire seems like an oxymoron.
Scienceguy: Indeed, let the hills burn. It pains me mentally when I hear of firefighters dying or getting severely injured while working on a fire, especially in the mountains/hills where brush and trees are burning. Let those areas burn. And if residents refuse to evacuate? Charge them for the entire rescue. And if conditions are too severe, oh well, they "chose" to die by choosing to remain. Maybe that's a crass viewpoint, but dying trying to protect someone else's bad choice sure seems a sad way to end one's life.
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