Bird Nest

I took this photo in the Butchant Gardens. The date was labeled at the right corner.

I used to be very interested in bird's nest because I think they are very cute. But I have hardly seen a bird nest.Recently I got a chance to see one, and I did some research about bird nest in order to know more.

 According to the National Geography, the ability to build nest isn’t a particular “bird skill”, but the techniques they use are unique and beyond comparison in the animal world. Building a nest takes effort, large amount of time, and is much harder than you can imagine. Due to the statistics, it took a whole week for a swallow to go back and forth for building materials (soil, grass, and branches) to build a bowl-shaped nest. A bird’s nest has mainly four uses: firstly, it protects the eggs from rolling away. Secondly, it provides shelter for fledglings. Thirdly, it can keep the temperature warm so that the fledglings can survive in cold weathers. Lastly, it can improve sexual reproduction. Most importantly, some birds know their nests better than their eggs, without the nest they wouldn’t even hatch the eggs

Fungi : Mushrooms

I took this photo in Victoria and the date has been labeled in the right corner. This mushroom attracted me because of its bright color. Then I wondered that whether it was a poisonous mushroom or a non-poisonous one. I heard that the more poison a mushroom has, the brighter its color will be.

Since I'm not too sure, I figured I’d do some research on that. I found something quite interesting on how to identify whether a mushroom is poisonous or not. And by the way I got to know that eating a poisonous mushroom will result in throw up, diarrhea, malaise, difficult breathing, mental disabilities, or even death.

Here are some ways to identify mushrooms: firstly, the living environment, normal mushrooms grow on clean grass or trees that give mushrooms natural good smells whereas the poisonous mushrooms grow in dirty, dark places and have stink smells. Secondly, nonpoisonous mushrooms have a smooth “head”, poisonous ones have “heads” with shape of “凸”. Thirdly, although the saying that the brighter the color is the more poison the mushroom has has not been scientifically proved, practically, it’s true as well.



Spider Net

     I took this picture of spider net in the Butchant Gardens in Victoria on Nov 13th, 2010. I extremely hate spiders, but I'm quite interested in how they make their nets. Although I've already had some knowledge about it, I decide to search for more information.

    As we know, spiders raddle nets in order to catch insects for food. Everyday they rest on their new-builted net and wait for victims. Spider's net is kind of sticky so that whenever an insect hits it, no matter how they try to escape, it mostly ends in vain. Sometimes even the spider itself will be stuck by its net; they usually move carefully and avoid touching those sticky areas.

    I heard a story about spider net before. It's about a huge spider eating a bird. It took place in Austrlia and someone has taken the photo of it. This shocked biologist quite a lot. The poor bird was stuck on the net and the spider was as big as human's hand. However the spider couldn't devour the bird at once. It used toxic fluid to decompose the bird and saved the body in the net; it ate it slowly afterwards.

    Isn't that fun? I think it's really interesting to observe spider net too, though a bit disgusting.

I Made An HIV Virus Model !!

This an HIV virus model made by a pear and some marshmallows.
HIV virus can cause AIDS and make human's immune system to fail. It can be transfered by unsafe sex, body fluid and contaminated needles. It is a dangerous virus and has killed more than 25 million people from 1981~2006.
One of the risky part for HIV virus is that whenever a person gets it, the symptons are quite similar to that of common flu. Therefore lots of people don't pay much attention to the risk, which leads to a more dangerous condition of human bodies.