Bog Water

Sean Mallory (smallory@ouray.cudenver.edu)
Wed, 1 May 1996 11:37:21 -0600

The real trick on bogs is that deep brown colored water that is
*really* low on free minerals. The brown is from tannic acids which
do quite a fine job at locking up most metals and other reactive
species about as tight as you care. The nitrogren compunds, oxygen,
phosphor, and other nifty non-metals that biological systems pay
attention to tend to be low because the water is slow moving and there
are a lot of competitors for thosee elements. About the only things
you really get a lot of it seems are tannic acids, carbon dioxide at
certain times of day (cattails in particular activly will move this to
their roots at certain times), and surface breeding insects.

So i suppose that if you were lacking distilled water, you might be
able to get away with a really stiff cup of tepid tea. Just so long
as it didn't have too many nutrients. Hmmm... I can see it now, "I'll
have a soda and my Darling. here will take an iced tea..." (Gotta
make cetain its roots keep cool!)

On a slightly different note: one of my friends was recently pondering
the lack of land-based filter-feeders. I tried to explain that i
thought the sundews and butterworts were an *excellent* example of
that. Alas, that was unsatisfactory though -- apparently not big
enough to be satisfactory. We'll have to work on that some more....

Sean Mallory smallory@ouray.cudenver.edu
Denver, CO, USA http://ouray.cudenver.edu/~smallory/

-- You cannot walk on water, you can only run. -- A basilisk instinct.