BEGUES, TAKING CARE OF ENVIRONMENT & PEOPLE

Today, The Grandma has finished her formation with Sara in Begues.

 

It has been a great pleasure meeting this wonderful woman, and learning a lot from her.

 

They have been talking about taking care and protecting nature, specially its flora and fauna.

Good luck, Sara, and see you soon!

The wild boar (Sus scrofa), also known as the wild swine, common wild pig, Eurasian wild pig, or simply wild pig, is a suid native to much of Eurasia and North Africa, and has been introduced to the Americas and Oceania.

The species is now one of the widest-ranging mammals in the world, as well as the most widespread suiform. It has been assessed as least concern on the IUCN Red List due to its wide range, high numbers, and adaptability to a diversity of habitats.

It has become an invasive species in part of its introduced range. Wild boars probably originated in Southeast Asia during the Early Pleistocene and outcompeted other suid species as they spread throughout the Old World.

As of 2005, up to 16 subspecies are recognized, which are divided into four regional groupings based on skull height and lacrimal bone length.

The species lives in matriarchal societies consisting of interrelated females and their young, both male and female. Fully grown males are usually solitary outside the breeding season. The wolf is the wild boar's main predator in most of its natural range except in the Far East and the Lesser Sunda Islands, where it is replaced by the tiger and Komodo dragon respectively.

The wild boar has a long history of association with humans, having been the ancestor of most domestic pig breeds and a big-game animal for millennia. Boars have also re-hybridized in recent decades with feral pigs; these boar-pig hybrids have become a serious pest wild animal in the Americas and Australia.

More information: AZ Animals

As true wild boars became extinct in Great Britain before the development of Modern English, the same terms are often used for both true wild boar and pigs, especially large or semi-wild ones. The English boar stems from the Old English bar, which is thought to be derived from the West Germanic bairaz, of unknown origin.

Boar is sometimes used specifically to refer to males, and may also be used to refer to male domesticated pigs, especially breeding males that have not been castrated.

Sow, the traditional name for a female, again comes from Old English and Germanic; it stems from Proto-Indo-European, and is related to the Latin: sus and Greek hus, and more closely to the New High German Sau. The young may be called piglets or boarlets.

The animals' specific name scrofa is Latin for sow.

With the exception of domestic pigs in Timor and Papua New Guinea, which appear to be of Sulawesi warty pig stock, the wild boar is the ancestor of most pig breeds.

Archaeological evidence suggests that pigs were domesticated from wild boar as early as 13,000-12,700 BCE in the Near East in the Tigris Basin, being managed in the wild in a way similar to the way they are managed by some modern New Guineans. 

Remains of pigs have been dated to earlier than 11,400 BCE in Cyprus. Those animals must have been introduced from the mainland, which suggests domestication in the adjacent mainland by then. There was also a separate domestication in China, which took place about 8,000 years ago.

DNA evidence from sub-fossil remains of teeth and jawbones of Neolithic pigs shows that the first domestic pigs in Europe had been brought from the Near East. This stimulated the domestication of local European wild boars, resulting in a third domestication event with the Near Eastern genes dying out in European pig stock. Modern domesticated pigs have involved complex exchanges, with European domesticated lines being exported in turn to the ancient Near East.

More information: Animalia

Historical records indicate that Asian pigs were introduced into Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Domestic pigs tend to have much more developed hindquarters than their wild boar ancestors, to the point where 70% of their body weight is concentrated in the posterior, which is the opposite of wild boar, where most of the muscles are concentrated on the head and shoulders.

The wild boar is a bulky, massively built suid with short and relatively thin legs. The trunk is short and robust, while the hindquarters are comparatively underdeveloped. The region behind the shoulder blades rises into a hump and the neck is short and thick to the point of being nearly immobile. The animal's head is very large, taking up to one-third of the body's entire length.

The wild boar produces a number of different sounds which are divided into three categories:

-Contact calls. Grunting noises which differ in intensity according to the situation. Adult males are usually silent, while females frequently grunt and piglets whine. When feeding, boars express their contentment through purring. Studies have shown that piglets imitate the sounds of their mother, thus different litters may have unique vocalisations.

-Alarm calls. Warning cries emitted in response to threats. When frightened, boars make loud huffing ukh! ukh! sounds or emit screeches transcribed as gu-gu-gu.

-Combat calls. High-pitched, piercing cries.

Its sense of smell is very well developed to the point that the animal is used for drug detection in Germany. Its hearing is also acute, though its eyesight is comparatively weak, lacking color vision and being unable to recognise a standing human 10–15 metres away.

More information: Animal Corner

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig.
You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

George Bernard Shaw

(68325) BEGUES ASTEROID, JOSEP MANTECA'S DISCOVERY

Today, The Grandma has returned to Begues to spend a wonderful day with Sara.

 

They have been talking about communications and technology, and they have remembered Josep Manteca, a local neighbour of Begues and astronomer, who discovered 68325 Asteroid, named Begues in honour to his hometown.

An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic or icy bodies with no atmosphere.

Of the roughly one million known asteroids the greatest number are located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, approximately 2 to 4 AU from the Sun, in the main asteroid belt.

Asteroids are generally classified to be of three types: C-type, M-type, and S-type. These were named after and are generally identified with carbonaceous, metallic, and silicaceous compositions, respectively. The size of asteroids varies greatly; the largest, Ceres, is almost 1,000 km across and qualifies as a dwarf planet.

The total mass of all the asteroids combined is only 3% that of Earth's Moon. The majority of main belt asteroids follow slightly elliptical, stable orbits, revolving in the same direction as the Earth and taking from three to six years to complete a full circuit of the Sun.

More information: Science Alert

Asteroids have been historically observed from Earth; the Galileo spacecraft provided the first close observation of an asteroid. Several dedicated missions to asteroids were subsequently launched by NASA and JAXA, with plans for other missions in progress. NASA's NEAR Shoemaker studied Eros, and Dawn observed Vesta and Ceres.

JAXA's missions Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 studied and returned samples of Itokawa and Ryugu, respectively. OSIRIS-REx studied Bennu, collecting a sample in 2020 to be delivered back to Earth in 2023.

NASA's Lucy, launched in 2021, will study eight different asteroids, one from the main belt and seven Jupiter trojans. Psyche, scheduled for launch in 2023, will study a metallic asteroid of the same name.

Near-Earth asteroids can threaten all life on the planet; an asteroid impact event resulted in the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. Different asteroid deflection strategies have been proposed; the Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, or DART, was launched in 2021 and intentionally impacted Dimorphos in September 2022, successfully altering its orbit by crashing into it.

Only one asteroid, 4 Vesta, which has a relatively reflective surface, is normally visible to the naked eye. When favorably positioned, 4 Vesta can be seen in dark skies. Rarely, small asteroids passing close to Earth may be visible to the naked eye for a short time.

As of April 2022, the Minor Planet Center had data on 1,199,224 minor planets in the inner and outer Solar System, of which about 614,690 had enough information to be given numbered designations.

More information: NASA

In 1772, German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, citing Johann Daniel Titius, published a numerical procession known as the Titius–Bode law, now discredited. Except for an unexplained gap between Mars and Jupiter, Bode's formula seemed to predict the orbits of the known planets.

By 1851, the Royal Astronomical Society decided that asteroids were being discovered at such a rapid rate that a different system was needed to categorize or name asteroids. In 1852, when de Gasparis discovered the twentieth asteroid, Benjamin Valz gave it a name and a number designating its rank among asteroid discoveries, 20 Massalia. Sometimes asteroids were discovered and not seen again. So, starting in 1892, new asteroids were listed by the year and a capital letter indicating the order in which the asteroid's orbit was calculated and registered within that specific year. For example, the first two asteroids discovered in 1892 were labeled 1892A and 1892B. However, there were not enough letters in the alphabet for all of the asteroids discovered in 1893, so 1893Z was followed by 1893AA.

A number of variations of these methods were tried, including designations that included year plus a Greek letter in 1914. A simple chronological numbering system was established in 1925.

Currently all newly discovered asteroids receive a provisional designation (such as 2002 AT4) consisting of the year of discovery and an alphanumeric code indicating the half-month of discovery and the sequence within that half-month. Once an asteroid's orbit has been confirmed, it is given a number, and later may also be given a name (e.g. 433 Eros). The formal naming convention uses parentheses around the number -e.g. (433) Eros- but dropping the parentheses is quite common. Informally, it is also common to drop the number altogether, or to drop it after the first mention when a name is repeated in running text. In addition, names can be proposed by the asteroid's discoverer, within guidelines established by the International Astronomical Union.

The first asteroids to be discovered were assigned iconic symbols like the ones traditionally used to designate the planets. By 1855 there were two dozen asteroid symbols, which often occurred in multiple variants.

The first discovered asteroid, Ceres, was originally considered a new planet. It was followed by the discovery of other similar bodies, which with the equipment of the time appeared to be points of light like stars, showing little or no planetary disc, though readily distinguishable from stars due to their apparent motions. This prompted the astronomer Sir William Herschel to propose the term asteroid, coined in Greek as ἀστεροειδής, or asteroeidēs, meaning star-like, star-shaped, and derived from the Ancient Greek ἀστήρ astēr star, planet. In the early second half of the 19th century, the terms asteroid and planet (not always qualified as minor) were still used interchangeably.

More information: NASA

If you were to stand on an asteroid in the main belt
of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter in our solar system,
you might be able to see one or two asteroids in the sky,
but they would be very far away and very, very small.
So you wouldn't have this 'dodging through tons of rocks'
business you get in the movies.

Carrie Nugent

VISIT BEGUES, PROTECTING & TAKING CARE OF NATURE

Today, The Grandma has started a new formation with Sara in Begues, a beautiful town in Baix Llobregat. 

 

Begues is a municipality in the comarca of Baix Llobregat in Catalonia.

 

It is situated in the south-west of the comarca, and its municipal territory covers most of the Garraf massif including the peaks of el Montau and La Morella.

Sara and The Grandma have been talking about computing, communications and nature, and they have been discussing about the convenience of progressing without destroying nature and educating in nature and human values.

Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub is a biome defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The biome is generally characterized by dry summers and rainy winters, although in some areas rainfall may be uniform. Summers are typically hot in low-lying inland locations but can be cool near colder seas. Winters are typically mild to cool in low-lying locations but can be cold in inland and higher locations. All these ecoregions are highly distinctive, collectively harboring 10% of the Earth's plant species.

The Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub biome mostly occurs in, but not limited to, the Mediterranean climate zones, in the mid-latitudes:

-The Mediterranean Basin

-The Chilean Matorral

-The California chaparral and woodlands ecoregion of California and the Baja California Peninsula

-The Western Cape of South Africa

-The southwest and southern Australia

More information: Insights on India

The biome is not limited to the Mediterranean climate zone. It can also be present in other climate zones (which typically border the Mediterranean climate zone), such as the drier regions of the oceanic and humid subtropical climates, and as well as the lusher areas of the semi-arid climate zone. Non-Mediterranean climate regions that would feature Mediterranean vegetation include the Nile River Valley in Egypt (extending upstream along the riverbanks), parts of the Eastern Cape in South Africa, southeastern Australia, southeastern Azerbaijan, southeastern Turkey, far northern Iraq, the Mazandaran Province in Iran, Central Italy, parts of the Balkans (including Northern Greece), as well as Northern and Western Jordan.

Vegetation types range from forests to woodlands, savannas, shrublands, and grasslands; mosaic habitat landscapes are common, where differing vegetation types are interleaved with one another in complex patterns created by variations in soil, topography, exposure to wind and sun, and fire history. Much of the woody vegetation in Mediterranean-climate regions is sclerophyll, which means 'hard-leaved' in Greek. Sclerophyllous vegetation generally has small, dark leaves covered with a waxy outer layer to retain moisture in the dry summer months.

Phytogeographers consider the fynbos (South Africa) as a separate floral kingdom because 68% of the 8,600 vascular plant species crowded into its 90,000 square kilometers are endemic and highly distinctive at several taxonomic levels. This is equivalent to about 40% of the plant species of the United States and Canada combined, found within an area the size of the state of Maine. The fynbos and Southwest Australia shrublands have flora that are significantly more diverse than the other ecoregions, although any Mediterranean shrubland is still rich in species and endemics relative to other non-forest ecoregions.

-Forest. Mediterranean forests are generally composed of broadleaf trees, such as the oak and mixed sclerophyll forests of California and the Mediterranean region, the Eucalyptus forests of Southwest Australia, and the Nothofagus forests of central Chile. Forests are often found in riparian areas, where they receive more summer water. Coniferous forests also occur, especially around the Mediterranean. Pine and deciduous oak forest are widespread across California.

-Woodland. Oak woodlands are characteristic of the Mediterranean Basin and in California. Pine woodlands are also present in the Mediterranean Basin. California additionally has walnut woodlands.

-Savanna and grassland. The California Central Valley grasslands are the largest Mediterranean grassland eco-region, although these grasslands have mostly been converted to agriculture. The remaining woodlands feature mainly oak, walnut and pine. The cork oak savanna in Portugal, known as montado, is a good example of a mediterranean savanna.

-Shrubland. Shrublands are dense thickets of evergreen sclerophyll shrubs and small trees. They are most common near the seacoast, and are often adapted to wind and salt air from the ocean. They are called chaparral (California and southern Portugal), matorral in Chile and southern Spain, garrigue or maquis in France, macchia or gariga in Italy, phrygana in Greece, tomillares in Spain, fynbos, renosterveld, Succulent Karoo, and strandveld in South Africa, kwongan in Southwest Australia and batha in Israel. Northern coastal scrub and coastal sage scrub, also known as soft chaparral, occur near the California coast. In some places shrublands are of the mature vegetation type, and in other places are the result of degradation of former forest or woodland by logging or overgrazing, or disturbance by major fires.

More information: Eden Project

Fire, both natural and human-caused, has played a large role in shaping the ecology of Mediterranean ecoregions. The hot, dry summers make much of the region prone to fires, and lightning-caused fires occur with some frequency. Many of the plants are pyrophytes, or fire-loving, adapted or even depending on fire for reproduction, recycling of nutrients, and the removal of dead or senescent vegetation. In both the Australian and Californian Mediterranean-climate eco-regions, native peoples used fire extensively to clear brush and trees, making way for the grasses and herbaceous vegetation that supported game animals and useful plants.

The plant communities in these areas adapted to the frequent human-caused fires, and pyrophyte species grew more common and more fire-loving, while plants that were poorly adapted to fire retreated. After European colonization of these regions, fires were suppressed, which has caused some unintended consequences in these ecoregions; fuel builds up, so that when fires do come they are much more devastating, and some species dependent on fire for their reproduction are now threatened. The European shrublands have also been shaped by anthropogenic fire, historically associated with transhumance herding of sheep and goats.

Though adapted to infrequent fires, chaparral plant communities can be eliminated by frequent fires. A high frequency of fire (less than ten years) will result in the loss of obligate seeding shrub species such as Manzanita spp. This high frequency disallows seeder plants to reach their reproductive size before the next fire and the community shifts to a sprouter-dominance. If high frequency fires continue over time, obligate resprouting shrub species can also be eliminated by exhausting their energy reserves below-ground. Today, frequent accidental ignitions can convert chaparral from a native shrubland to non-native annual grassland and drastically reduce species diversity, especially under drought brought about by climate change.

Mediterranean ecoregions are some of the most endangered and vulnerable on the planet. Many have suffered tremendous degradation and habitat loss through logging, overgrazing, conversion to agriculture, urbanization, fire suppression, and introduction of exotic and invasive species. 

The ecoregions around the Mediterranean basin and in California have been particularly affected by degradation due to human activity, suffering extensive loss of forests and soil erosion, and many native plants and animals have become extinct or endangered.

More information: Botany Wisconsin

 Of course I prefer to have nature around me,
but it doesn't have to be with the exact
original vegetation for nostalgic reasons.
Nature is moving and making new things.

 

Theo Jansen