My name is Blake Spears. I am a senior Anthropology student. I am a biological anthropologist at heart and so all biology fascinates me; human, animal, plant, mushroom, you name it I wanna know what it’s working with. I currently live off Badger, but I am not originally from Alaska. I have only been here since 2020. So I am excited to be able to take this class and become more familiar with the Alaska wildlife. I work as a College Intern/Fish and Wildlife Tech over at Fish and Game Division of Subsistence. It’s part of my job to be knowledgeable about the kinds of subsistence resources that are in Alaska so I can survey people across the state in various communities for all kinds of projects, but this class will greatly broaden my expertise. I don’t have a microscope yet, it is on it’s way (I opted for the visor ones because those can be easily repurposed). But I do have a SLR camera (pictured below) that can take some fantastic pictures of the moon, so I am fairly confident it will take fantastic specimen images. I have provided some other images that I have taken with this camera just as evidence (and for your own enjoyment). I look forward to seeing what everyone else manages to find during the course of this class and what I gain to learn from this course set up.
Welcome Blake,
thanks for sharing these wonderful images! I think you will be able to take some awesome images with your camera. I still use my SLR (not as fancy as yours) for all my field shots of flowers. I know it well better than my cell phone, and I can focus much better with it. Love the cow picture, I remember helping out on my relatives dairy while growing up and cows (and the calves) always struck we as very curious. When I need to get really close and personal with flowers, I use a camera attached to a microscope, and that set-up is pretty powerful. This is a longitudinal section through a blueberry flower (Vaccinium uligonosum). These ‘hooks’ on the anthers are appendages, they act as trip hammers covering the pollinator in pollen when it is trying to get to the nectar in these pendant flowers.