Walk through the Trails on Newton Campus!
On this nature walk, my friend and I went over to Newton Campus (a throwback to last year) and walked along the trails out behind Keyes. The weather was a little bit chilly (low to mid-50s) and it was partly cloudy, but it was nice weather for a walk. During the walk, we came across a mostly dried-up stream that kind of made its own path, so we walked along the rocks and down the stream until we converged with one of the trails. There were a lot of shrubs and different types of trees, but the only plant that I captured in an observation was pokeweed. This plant grew in my backyard as a kid, so seeing it brought back memories from when I was younger and I felt like I had to make an observation. As for the fungi, I definitely saw more species than I initially expected to. The most common location to find these fungi species were in decaying or fallen trees, as the organic compounds of these dead organisms need to be decomposed and recycled back into the soil. Different species also tended to be observed decomposing different plants or growing on different decaying tree types, which makes me wonder if this is influenced at all by diversifying selection with regards to speciation. Does each species of fungi tend to decompose different plant species, like the maggots with their egg-laying in apples and hawthorns? If this were the case, it would definitely contribute to the wide variety of species that I came across during this walk and explain the variety of locations where they were found. In general, there was a lot of variety in the shapes, colors, and other physical attributes between the different fungi populations that allowed me to infer that they were different species, relying on the morphological species concept. For example, the bright orange coloring of one of the fungi made it easy to differentiate it as being part of a different species from the brown and circular fungi or the white disc-like fungi. As for other organisms, we saw a LOT of chipmunks and squirrels on the walk, including two baby squirrels which we gave some birdseed that we had brought with us. This was a great walk and a great start to this short week! I'll definitely do another walk on Newton campus soon to explore the rest of the trails, so maybe my next Nature Walk assignment will be here as well!
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