Selling or using insecticides is a crime against the planet and mankind.

Bugs, Biology, and Molecules, part 2: Flame Off

The nature of our interaction with everything around us is molecular. 

We dwell within a sea of molecules, which we’re a very intimate part of. Although we believe that we have some kind of identity independent of the molecules, we don't. Even our thoughts themselves are a function of molecular relationships.

The planet earth has consisted, for much of its history, as a long experiment in not just mineral but also organic life. Minerals already make a complex enough set of intricate molecular relationships to begin with; but organic life is far more creative, and has resulted in a staggering number of new and novel molecules not found, for example, on Mars, where molecular relationships are extraordinarily simple by comparison.

Everything that we do ultimately depends on the relationship between the molecules in our body and the way that those molecules relate to molecules in our outer environment. They’re engaged in a perpetual and extraordinarily complex exchange with one another at every instant. In order to model the scale of data being generated and exchanged from moment to moment, consider the fact that no supercomputer on earth could come remotely close to calculating even a tiny fraction of all the molecular interactions that take place in a given instant in a single human body.

Despite the fact that almost everything we do depends on this, we largely ignore the fact that we’re molecular creatures and that we depend entirely on molecular relationships for our health and well-being. I explained much of this, at least from one limited point of view, in my blog The Microbial Octave, also a book—which I will provide a free link to if I can get around it. The point is that beneath everything we perceive lie the floorboards of molecular interaction. Microbes are in direct contact with it; and insects are in much more immediate contact with it than we are due to their tiny size. 

Think about it this way. I weigh 160 pounds (about 72.7 kg.) The average housefly weighs .007 g. I am 20 million times heavier than a housefly; and in a general sense — this isn’t exactly scientific, but it gives you an idea of the scale —a housefly is a staggering 20 million times more susceptible to the intimate action of molecular chemistry than I am, because every interaction is that much more concentrated relative to its size. Consequently, chemicals that we put into the environment that have almost no effect whatsoever on us may be catastrophic to insects. And, as we are in fact learning, they are. We’re flooding the environment with a vast range of chemicals that have staggering and life-threatening impacts on bugs. A chemical rated as “safe” for human beings by the FDA, for example, at 10 ppm (parts per million) may be absolutely deadly to insects and their larva at that level of concentration. Scientific studies have borne that contention out; many of the chemicals we produce that are deemed “harmless” create hormone analogs that are causing insect larva to mutate or die, and affecting the sexual reproduction of insects in general. Even more disturbingly, those same “harmless” chemicals are probably to blame for the fact that young women are reaching puberty at much earlier ages than they used to.

The problem is that we produce so many novel chemicals in our industries over the course of the average year that it’s next to impossible to study them all and understand even their short term impact, which is the only impact we have the attention span to study.

Because so many of the studies that do examine chemicals and their consequences have serious economic impacts on the companies that make them—almost always because it turns out they are very poisonous and really bad for us, as in the case of flame retardants – industry lobbyists have spent billions of dollars over the last 50 years lobbying in Washington to make sure that not a single penny of federal funds is spent studying novel chemicals and what they do. It's now literally illegal to use federal funds for that purpose, leaving all of what little research there is in the badly underfunded and relatively tiny private sector at universities. Even there, there are forces that don’t want anyone to look at these questions.

It might cost them money.

There aren't enough people interested in this problem. Over the past 40 years, America  consequently poisoned literally billions of American infants by saturating their mattresses with deeply carcinogenic flame retardants to make them "safe" from potential fires. We also applied those same flame retardants to all the cushions in our living room sofas, adult mattresses, etc. – and then sat around wondering why more and more people get cancer every year.

Well, wouldn’t you know. We finally realized how bad the flame retardants were, duh, because some of those pesky scientists were finally listened to. Finally, after their studies (which the chemical industry actively tried to discredit) made it absolutely clear that these chemicals were terrible for everyone and everything, they were banned — and the industry promptly came up with a whole new set of similar chemicals which hadn't been studied. They’re still in use because there simply isn't enough money to fund research on them. The little research that has been done suggests, by the way, that they’re just as bad as the original chemicals (surprise!) but no one is doing anything about it. Remember: it's against the law to use federal funds to find out if chemicals are poisonous to people. 

You can't make this stuff up. Unfortunately, you don’t need to.

Even more interesting and alarming — tests on a wide range of infant mattresses 5 to 10 years ago indicated that a lot of the banned chemicals are still in active use, because the mattresses are made in China where no one cares about this, and the industry is very badly policed.

These chemicals—the flame retardants are just one of hundreds of thousands of examples—which are acutely poisonous to human beings, are much MORE poisonous to tiny little insects. And we are dumping them all over the planet at an alarming rate. This is most likely why so many bugs are dying.

We ignore the molecular nature of our existence at our peril. Above all of the unsustainable things we do, novel molecules from the petrochemical, plastic, and pesticide industry are probably the number one reason that the insect apocalypse is currently underway. There are those who will argue differently than me — Doug Talamy, for example, who wrote “Bringing Nature Home" and other important books on the subject believes that it is our failure to plant native species. I agree with him; it's a major problem. But even native species cannot withstand the onslaught of the massive dumping of foreign and novel chemistry into the molecular environment which insect have to inhabit at all times. What looks like an innocent, healthy, natural environment to us has become a sea so polluted that much of the wildlife in it is struggling to keep its head above water. 

This is all taking place on a scale which we never give much thought to; but the chemicals I’m talking about here are going to kill a lot more people than Vladimir Putin’s depredations. We remain oblivious to the situation, and because of its nature are probably going to continue to do so until it is too late.

 

Wildflowers in Provence. The blue-eyed grass is an invasive species from North America, now widespread in the limestone hills of the region.

Bugs, Biology, and Molecules, part 1: Insect Apocalypse

A series of essays in memory of my mother, Helen van Laer.

A few weeks ago, Neal and I spent a week in Provence, France, a place known for its abundance of great food and natural beauty. It lived up to its reputation; but there was one thing missing—staggeringly and prominently missing—which became profoundly disturbing the moment you noticed it.

There are barely any flying insects in Provence.

Provence is a fairyland filled with an endless number of wildflowers, thyme and oregano, lavender, broom, and sage, that stretch into the far distance. The limestone hillsides are glorious riots of floral color. 

But there are almost no honey bees or butterflies, no native flying insects — no insect of any kind except, perhaps, a few ants — to be seen anywhere. This, in a landscape that ought to be absolutely packed with pollinating insects .

Consequently, there are almost no birds. Guess what? Most of the birds in Europe have already STARVED TO DEATH because of the lack of insects. No kidding.

This will be happening in your back yard next.

Last weekend, right after we got back, we went down to Morristown New Jersey where my friend Douglas and his wife have a farm with a large meadow, currently covered with clover in bloom. 

Once again, in this vast field of clover, a single honeybee: and a European honeybee at that, not a native bee. 

No flying insects to be seen. Nary a one. This in a place where there ought to be bugs everywhere.

Why are all the insects missing?

It is too late to fix this problem; the birds are starving and we can expect to fewer and fewer of them every year from now on. It turns out that Rachel Carson silent spring is nearly upon us. 

The likely explanations for it are numerous, but almost certainly include the following:

1. Overuse of pesticides. Human beings wantonly spread pesticides around like maniacs, and they are piled up at Lowe's and Home Depot for public consumption day and night. (This while the consumer industry worries about the poisons in your garments… because that's where the problem is, right?) The agricultural community uses pesticides with impunity, and the US government has found a dozen, or maybe even 1000, different ways to prevent research into what chemicals actually do to the environment.

2. Burning lights at night. It turns out, according to recent research, that keeping lights on at night disrupts the reproductive cycle of insects, for reasons that aren’t yet well known. Trees exposed to light at night end up having 40% less caterpillars than those in full darkness. 

“Who cares?” you might say. “They’re just caterpillars.” But baby birds eat caterpillars. No caterpillars, no baby birds. And make no mistake about it, we are already there. You just aren't looking around enough at the natural world that surrounds you to notice it unless your attention is called to it.

3. Carbon dioxide. It's quite likely that air pollution from automobiles has had a significant effect on insect life. Insects are far smaller than we are and their nervous systems and digestive systems are far less likely to withstand the assaults of particulate matter than our own.

4. Aquatic pollution. Many insects depend on the same water sources that we do for survival, and we have been trashing them for over a century with chemicals now.

5. Persistent pollutants resulting from the breakdown of common household products. Plastics, contrary to popular opinion, don't last forever. They break down into smaller constituent particles, which are probably having effects on many different insects.

6. Decline of native species. Worldwide, human beings habitually landscape by inserting plants from entirely other countries into their ecosystems, and creating huge lawns which are ecological deserts for insects and birds. Every square meter of lawn and garden that isn't filled with native species deprives the ecosystem of the insect it needs to survive.

The bottom line here is that all of the forest and understory plants cannot live without the insects that pollinate them and eat them. In the long run, all of these vegetative systems will begin to die off and there won't be anything to speak of left. That is a real scenario, not an imagined paranoia. If you don't believe me, go out and get an education about it by reading some of the literature. This will turn out to be a much greater crisis than the loss, for example, of whales, which is tragic and deplorable but far easier to sell as an environmental cause.

To show how twisted our attitude towards insects is, let me give you an example from recent life. One of the women in the office, a person I generally otherwise respect, freaked out because tiny little red mites have infested our desks. These mites are absolutely harmless and should just be left alone; but she demanded that the company spray pesticides in order to fumigate because she thinks the bugs are creepy. When I was young and small insect got into the house and scared us, my mother always told my sister and I that they were "harmless creatures" –a statement that was not only true, but that eventually became family shorthand for crane flies, the species that was most often so labeled. 

My mother was a biologist and educated in these matters, and from the time I was a tiny little tyke in the late 1950s she trained me to understand that we should respect insects and not wantonly kill them as enemies. I grew up with that attitude, and I also grew up understanding that almost no one around me had any such idea. Fast forward to 2022: our ignorance and hatred for insects is about to destroy the environment we live in. It will destroy it very completely; many, perhaps as much as 90%, of the species that depend on the current state of the ecosystem to survive will become extinct with them. I'm not making this up.

Extinctions on the scale have taken place in the past. The planet has always recovered; but it takes millions of years to recover. I sincerely doubt human beings will have the staying power to be around for that. Certainly not the way we conduct our affairs right now.

Moral of the story is that you shouldn't be killing insects. If you are, stop. Find ways to help them instead of ways to kill them.

Plants love microbes

on the subject:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170810104857.htm

Chemical pollution threatens reproductive health

worth reading.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151001100058.htm

Of note:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140929180055.htm

Microscopic organism plays a big role in ocean carbon cycling

and this:

Ocean microbes display remarkable genetic diversity: One species, a few drops of seawater, hundreds of coexisting subpopulations

Microbes and language

of interest!

Microbes provide insights into evolution of human language

and this:

Rural microbes could boost city dwellers' health, study finds

furthermore,

Cow manure harbors diverse new antibiotic resistance genes

The butterfly bacterial makeup

Scientists have sequenced the bacteria in a butterfly species for the first time. Very interesting.

The fungus among us

Shades of the fungal jungle.

Readers who follow the link will see why I write this blog; and what is so interesting about the microbial life around us and its impact on our biosphere. It turns out, you see, that fungi in symbiosis with plant toots have a major impact on how much carbon the plants store in the soil.

No one suspected fungi could play such a major role in climatology; and who would have thought that microscopic fungi would have anything to do with global warming? The suggestion seems, on the face of things, absurd; and yet it turns out to be true. There are so many things we don't understand about the microbial underpinnings of our global ecosystems that we are just beginning to think about scratching the surface of the surface.

Mushrooms and fungi appear to us to be inconsequential unless someone serves them to us at dinner; this is why little or no time is devoted to studying to them, outside a relatively small circle of scientists. Now it turns out that we ought to be studying them more; and beyond that, finding ways to make sure we don't damage their ability to live and reproduce.

The future quality of the air we breathe and the temperature of the earth's surface may depend on it.

Animal Earth

gastrotich, from University of Washington web pages

For the past several weeks, I've been deeply engaged in reading Animal Earth, a fine book by Ross Piper. Very highly recommend; Piper writes lucidly and with a sense of humor, and the photographic illustrations are, to understate the case, superior.

The book brings home the extraordinary diversity of life at the microscopic level, calling attention to overlooked yet essential animal phyla such as Loricifera, ancient lineages of animals which the general public completely overlooks and is probably even entirely unaware of. Yet we share our planet with tens of thousands of such species, which easily outnumber us both in numerical terms and that of sheer biomass.

No one—even specialized biologists—knows much about these creatures, yet they form the essential underpinnings of life on the planet. Marine plankton—the larval stages of a staggering variety of arthropods, as well as other animals—are one of the planet's great microbiological reservoirs, creating the invisible understory of all—yes, all— marine life. Yet damage to plankton populations is difficult, if not impossible, to gauge, and methods for assessing the overall health of plankton populations present challenges of scale and complexity it is nearly impossible to evaluate, let alone overcome.

Large scale activities that result in gross, easily visible habitat destruction and the extermination of larger animal species generate the overwhelming majority of concerns about ecosystem damage. These are often the result of mechanical processes such as strip mining, deforestation, and overfishing. Yet the chemical pollution of biological microsystems may well turn out to be the greatest long-term threat to ecosystem health. Physical damage can, after all, be overcome; but if the foundational microbiology of a system is disrupted, any short-term recovery may turn out to be impossible.

The fossil record, especially the Burgess shale and other benthic (sea-floor) lagerstätten, demonstrate just how long many of these species have been with us; 500 million years and more. Their durability testifies not only to their resilience, but also how essential to ecosystems they are. No organism can persist in a habitat or body shape for that long unless it is performing essential roles for which it is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly adapted. Many of the smallest life forms we encounter in the world of microbiology fall into this category. These small life forms are the ones most likely to be compromised or destroyed by trace chemicals in their environment; amounts that seem insignificant to larger creatures represent massive doses on a microbial scale.

It's unlikely that the world will see a rush to the serious study of such tiny creatures any time soon; and while we continue to ignore them, the destruction of their populations seems assured.

The situation presents powerful arguments in favor of the most conservative approach possible to the introduction of new chemicals intended for widespread use and distribution, and stricter controls on the emission and control of all chemical waste processes of any kind, not only industrial, but also household wastes.

A sense of touch

This article on the ability of bacteria to detect form through a sense of touch is very interesting.

As with other cases across the biological spectrum, we're continually astonished when "lower" organisms display the ability to do things we thought were unique to higher ones... especially humans. Yet in this case, we can safely say that all of the macroscopic sensory abilities and behaviors we see have their roots, as well as their parallels, in the microbial kingdoms. Macroscopic behavior is a reflection of microscopic behavior; big things reflect little things.

This fractal arrangement is consistent throughout nature, so much so that it gets glossed over. But even the smallest creatures are not, in the end, so much unlike us. The same, or at least similar, sensory tools are needed to orient, to taste, to "see," on every level.

Microbes, which perhaps seem to be alien creatures, as small as they are, thus share an oft-unrecognized kinship with us. Not only do they colonize us, parasitize us, and coexist with us; each microbe is a legitimate, unseen life carried forth and lived out according to imperatives that, to it, are just as compelling as our own. There is a sensory and molecular awareness within these creatures; and it's to be appreciated, not dismissed.

 

Nanoplastic and Other Micropollutants

In the world of the unseen, the law of unintended consequences dominates.

Our pervasive use of plastics... which don't biodegrade well, if at all... has inundated the environment with plastic waste. It's unsightly... and when we see it we're sometimes dismayed, even though by now the sight of it is so common that we've developed a sort of visual immunity, whereby we edit it out of our vision. This enables the vast majority of people to walk right past most plastic waste without picking it up. 

It's always someone else's responsibility.

What most of us don't understand in the least is that plastic, like all other materials in the environment, is subject to mechanical forces that steadily erode it. Abrasion takes place as plastic is transported by wind or water; it rubs against branches, grinds against sand and stones, and creates smaller and smaller particles... which, as it happens, aren't really much more biodegradable than the larger pieces the plastic first came from.

The net effect, over the past city or more years, has been the creation of a steadily increasing sand-like substrate of plastic nano particles, tiny little bits of plastic that are so small as to be nearly invisible to the naked eye.

No big deal, you might think; but it IS a big deal, as scientists at Plymouth University reveal in the link. Plastics assist in the transfer of toxic chemicals into small marine organisms who ingest them; and these small, uninteresting organisms form some of the foundational elements in the food chain on shorelines—and, of course, in many other cases.

Not only are plastic nano particles present on shorelines, they are becoming increasingly abundant in suspension in water, where they affect aquatic food chains all over the world. Imagine living in a world where you began to have to inadvertently eat pieces of plastic with your spaghetti, your hamburgers, your bagel; these tiny organisms are already in that world. they can't escape the consequences of our polluting activity and they aren't able, as we are, to discriminate between plastic particles and food particles. It's absolutely certain that because of this, nanoplastic pollution is already wreaking havoc on food chains and biodiversity in the microsphere; and it's all taking place out of sight. the long term effects are likely to be severe, but the phenomenon is drastically understudied and the public is (as usual) not just uninformed, but completely ignorant—and, let's admit it, probably won't care anyway, at least not until it impacts their lifestyle.

Treating issues of this kind with a shrug of the shoulders and a "who cares" is not good enough. Much stronger environmental controls need to be placed on the production and use of plastics, which will take a major rethinking on the part of both producers and consumers.

Microbes and population balances

Readers will perhaps recall that in the last post, I explained that the application of fertilizers and mechanized agriculture have vastly expanded human populations... well, I didn't say that specifically, but we all know it's true. The sheer number of human beings on the planet has exploded; and the balances and population levels of countless different organisms have consequentially suffered or benefited.

One of the well-known situations in ecological analysis of the biosphere is that species maintain balances relative to one another — that is to say, they are not exactly "balanced," but the density of various  species is directly related. If one species becomes more dense, another one become will be less so, and so on.  There are winners and losers not only in the primary species, but in all of their accessory companions.

Dependencies change. One of the recent cover articles in Scientific American (see King of Beasts, in the November 2013 issue) explains that it's quite likely that the rise of human predators on the great plains of Africa led to a notable reduction in the diversity of carnivores who competed with them.

What I suspect is true — although I don't have any proof for it — is that the expansion of human population has had, and is having, similar impacts on the microbial world. That is to say, microbes exist in specific balances with one another and with the macroscopic species that they interact with. Drastic changes in the macro environment that affect microbes will ultimately have effects similar to the ones hypothesized by Lars Werdelin.

For example, wherever there are a lot more human beings, there's a proliferation of the specific bacterial species associated with human activity. This is self-evident. A second self-evident consequence is that these bacteria compete with other bacteria; and since, even on the bacterial scale, resources are limited, if bacteria and other microbes associated with human activity get a leg up because of all the humans they have to interact with and colonize, they are able to reproduce and spread at the expense of other bacterial species that would find other, different conditions more favorable.

This may not seem like it means a lot; but it what it means is that environmental holocausts, in which huge populations of important species are eventually lost (again, see Werdelin's article), can take place on the microbial as well as the macroscopic scale. The microsphere functions in essentially the same way the macrosphere does; and our manipulation of the environment may have the result of completely overwhelming important microbiological communities we haven't studied or looked at. This can lead to a wide range of malaises that affect the health of species such as, for example, bees.

 Let's think about that one for a minute. It's well-known that bee populations have been collapsing all over the world. Everyone assumes that this must be because of either a pesticide, a group of pesticides, a pathogen (infectious disease, whether viral or bacterial) or a new kind of parasite — although they haven't been able to identify any special new parasites, just lots of the old ones in weak hives. But what if it has something to do not with what the bees have — that is, pesticide or disease affecting them — but with something they don't have? What if we have inadvertently wiped out bacterial species that they need for their survival, which now can't populate their bodies and their hives properly? This "subtractive effect" — whereby a missing microbe is what causes weakness in a population — is much more difficult to measure, but it almost certainly exists.

 I haven't seen much discussion of this particular issue in scientific journals, but it strikes me that biologists ought to take a closer look at it.

Runoff

Agriculture has many unintended consequences. It has impacted the global carbon footprint for thousands of years; scientists at Lamont-Doherty (which is in my immediate neighborhood) discovered some ten years ago that evidence suggests this effect began as much as 5,000 years ago, as soon as mankind began clear-cutting large tracts of land for cultivation in Asia Minor. Interestingly, studies of arctic ice cores suggest that the carbon emissions produced by agriculture underwent significant dips during successive episodes of bubonic plague in Europe and the Middle East—plagues which substantially reduced populations and took large areas of agricultural land out of production, returning it (however temporarily) to forest.

One of the most dangerous and pernicious effects of agriculture, however, has relatively little to do with its very serious impact on atmospheric carbon levels; and that is the application of fertilizers.

Fertilizers, which dramatically increase the available amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in soil, work hand-in-hand with fossil fuel (mechanized) agricultural production methods to magically boost soil productivity. As we have explained in earlier posts, this boost in soil productivity comes directly at the long-term expense of microbial populations; and the detrimental effects of that soil quality depreciation have only recently begun to be understood, because most of the negative effects are both long-term, and invisible. 

Today, when we see vast desert areas that used to be rich, fertile agricultural land (much of Asia Minor, for example, falls into that category) we assume it's because of climate change; but the first and foremost cause of the decline of the land into unusable desert began with the destruction of its microbial communities, a long-term degradation that was unseen and beyond the ability of the cultures causing it to understand or measure. We are now at a point where some few scientists do understand this problem; yet it is receiving little or no attention in the press, because it lacks glamor, and is difficult to solve. Nonetheless, it represents one of the greatest long term threats to human populations. Continued destruction of the microsphere (my own newly coined term for the microbial communities we rely on for survival) will eventually do society as we now know it in if it isn't halted.

This recent article about the effects of fertilizer runoff on coral reefs underscores the unseen effect of agriculture on ecosystems. Although the scientists involved had their attention drawn to the situation because of the damage being done to coral reefs—which are glamorous, touristy, and thus deemed worthy of consideration by the public—what the article does not make clear is that the damage extends to a wide range of other creatures which cannot be so easily seen. The damage cited here is, after all, damage specifically inflicted on very tiny creatures—coral polyps. The only reason we notice it is because these nearly microscopic creatures secrete exotic skeletal structures—corals—which we find aesthetically appealing. There are a host of other microscopic creatures around them, both in their immediate vicinity and all the way down to the reefs through the waterways that carry the pollutants—which are also affected. 

The damage to the coral reefs, which is grave, is thus only the last damaging effect we can see; the end result, so to speak, of a pollution event that has damaged ecological infrastructure all the way down the line from the place where it was originally applied to the soil. The soils have been negatively affected; the streams that carry the runoff from the agricultural areas are affected; the rivers the streams feed into are affected; and the estuaries the rivers run into are affected.

After running this damaging course which leads all the way to the sea, the runoff finally wipes out corals, and suddenly we are alarmed and take notice. It's kind of like having a cancer that has spread through the entire body but only gets noticed once it has erupted on the skin. There is widespread, systemic damage; but our assessment of that damage is crudely limited to the areas where it's most visible.

The coral reefs are indeed telling us we're in trouble; but what they are telling us is that the trouble is everywhere. Not just on the coral reefs.

Intelligent, long-term solutions to the problem of agricultural runoff are thus vital to the future of both agriculture and the ecosystems that support it. Mankind's future well being depends on understanding this properly.

How old is life, really?

I've mentioned the theory of panspermia in earlier posts; briefly put, the theory that life is ubiquitous and that it evolved somewhere other than earth.

A significant component of the evidence offered to support this theory is that life seems to have appeared so early on in earth's history that a molecular structure such as DNA—which is a highly evolved and optimized molecule that must have undergone millions of years of evolution to attain its present level of sophistication and efficiency—couldn't have had time to arise and refine its abilities.

Earth, after all, is presumed to have been a hot, molten ball of fiery magma for much of its earliest history, with properties that preclude the existence of life in any form, even that of extremophiles. The earlier that evidence of organized life turns up, the more likely it is that panspermia was the source of that life.

Now a new discovery has pushed the origins of life back even earlier than expected. This is pretty cool stuff, making it more and more likely that the fundamental building blocks of earth's life originally arose on another planet... more than likely, even another solar system. Life may be a heritage that dates back to the first billion years or so of the universe, when galaxies were still forming... in which case life is approaching 13 billion years old, or something like that. Given the propensity for carbon to be the arbiter of all organic chemistry, that life may well have been DNA based... at which point we would have to say (I think you can see this one coming) that life is built into the very DNA of the universe.

LOL.

Of course, all kidding aside, this would be miraculous news indeed. If DNA based life is indeed an integral and inseparable part of the universe's character and nature, it carries what are perhaps nearly metaphysical implications.

Rotifers

Speaking of the persistence of life, etc., etc, How cool are these? 

enjoy!

the blog author has a new book out. recommended.

Redwing

For many years now, I've been watching the enormous flocks of redwing blackbirds that gather in the Piermont marsh. If one is there at daybreak, one frequently gets to see them take off — almost at exactly the same time, relative to sunrise, every morning.

 I would guess there are probably between 5,000 and 10,000 blackbirds in the marsh.  One of our favorite activities on summer evenings is to sit up on our deck in the Sparkill Gap (the first break in the basalt dike of the Palisades north of Manhattan on the west side of the Hudson River) and watch the birds come back to the marsh; never in the huge flocks that they leave it in, but always in tight clusters of 10 or 20, sometimes 30 birds. On rare occasions a larger flock comes back; but never the masses that leave together in the morning.

One of the phenomena that isn't recorded in the video above is a strange and striking moment that takes place just before the flock takes off in the morning. When one walks along the marsh in the darkness, say, about 5:00 AM, the birds are dead silent; I can verify this, because I've done it many times. But as soon as the first light starts to show in the sky, some few birds begin clattering — at first softly, but then in increasing numbers. As the light intensifies, the clattering gets louder and louder, until — after perhaps 20 minutes or more of anticipation — it reaches a crescendo. At this point, it often sounds like a huge, rushing waterfall in the immediate vicinity. If you come upon it and don't know what it is, you will certainly think it is the sound of a large river rushing over stones.

At this point, an extraordinary event takes place. All of the birds instantly stop making all the noise, at the same time. There is no tapering off; it's as though someone turned off a light switch, and the power went out.

Moments after that, they take off.

Listening to this phenomenon, I've wondered exactly what it is that triggers the behavior. Whatever it is, all the birds instantly sense it at exactly the same time, as though they were psychic; but of course, birds make relatively imperfect mediums. There must be a natural cue.

 I think what it is is the total volume or decibel level. There's a point, a threshold, that's reached; and when this threshold is reached, it triggers the flight behavior.

I've never heard of anyone studying this before, although it's possible someone has. In any event, it's one of those miracles one has to be there to fully appreciate.

This morning, my wife and I were there just to take off, once again. We watched impressive masses of birds wheel and dive over the marsh, circling while more and more birds peeled up out of the phragmites into the dervish black cloud above it. They behave as though they were a single organism; and this kind of behavior, where large groups of organisms take collective critical behavioral cues from a threshold of chemical signaling, is well known in the microbial world. The chemical signaling is one thing; but this audio signaling is another story, a signaling of vibrations.

One wonders whether there are bacteria who do something like this as well.

Microbes are forever

I've been making the point for some time about how incredibly durable microbial life is, but perhaps this particular article makes the point better than I can myself.

The characteristics of these microbes suggest that life is not only durable, it's incredibly durable. The assumption that life arose on Earth, which is practically an obsession with some biologists, is most likely a deeply flawed one. We can see from the temperatures and pressures that bacteria survive at that many different planets other than Earth, and sometimes quite unlike it, harbor the conditions in which life could arise. Life may not be special at all; life is, more probably, a default condition, something that arises almost anywhere it can. We can assume, instead of presuming life's rarity, that life is everywhere, that it is common, and that it spreads in the same way that... well, that bacteria do.

As I've pointed out before, and as Simon Conway Morris indicates in his fine book Life's Solutions, the DNA molecule is an incredibly sophisticated piece of machinery that, to all appearances, has survived millions and probably even billions of years of evolutionary pressure to arrive in the condition that it operates in in ordinary life forms. Because it has been on the planet since the inception of life as we know it — this is nearly certain — we have to stretch the imagination past the breaking point in order to  hypothesize circumstances in which a long enough timeline existed on earth for this molecule to reach its current fine-tuned state of evolutionary sophistication. My own gut feeling, on the whole, is that life arose on another planet, and another solar system, perhaps billions upon billions of years ago, and that it may have evolved many, many times over the course of the evolution of the universe.

Because carbon has unique properties, the argument most biochemists would make is that all life forms will be carbon-based, and that almost all of them will share molecular structures quite similar to the one we see in DNA. Biochemistry, you see, is subject to tight constraints given the laws of physics and chemistry; only so many things can happen, not everything. Once you stray from the tried and true, known proven principles of known biochemistry, you have to jump through incredible hoops in order to create a condition where life employs different molecules in order to work. As Morris points out in his book, the organic chemistry of life in Betelgeuse is going to look like biochemistry on earth.

 Not only that, most of the life forms will look like the ones we have here, especially on planets similar to Earth in terms of temperature and chemical structure. What we see around us is what works; leaves look like leaves because that's what works. Fish look like fish because that's what works. Tens of thousands of Hollywood alien movies notwithstanding, alien life is going to look pretty much like life looks here. That's because evolution continually produces the same solutions to problems within the same narrow range of chemistry and physics. If life evolves again somewhere else, its chemical structure will probably look like ours; and the physical organisms it produces will probably look like us as well.

Above all, what we need to do is cultivate a respect for the durability of these organisms around us, which we seem more interested, generally speaking, in exterminating than finding ways to live with. Our habit of attempting to exterminate bacteria instead of understanding them has led to a deepening set of problems that are going to be difficult to untangle; and we will address that in future posts.

Bacterial Bonanza!

No new post today per se, but A number of new articles are available at my resource web page on

gut bacteria and their effect on the human body.

Thermal ranges and microbiota

Temperature has been much in the news over the past few years. It's becoming apparent that no matter how much clamor the deeply misinformed far-right climate change deniers raise about it in the United States, the story is here to stay.  

We live within an extraordinarily tiny range of temperatures; a slice, so to speak, from the spectrum, as though we were a pair of eyes only able to see orange. Living organisms around us, in the meantime, have found ways to colonize a much wider (although still relatively tiny) range of temperatures; microbes (and, let's be fair, some larger organisms) are able to fully function from temperatures near freezing all the way up—in the case of microbes—to temperatures in excess of the boiling point of water. These creatures are called thermophilic organisms; and their presence in underground high-temperature waters, such as those found deep in South African diamond mines and at the mouths of undersea thermal vents, suggests that thermophilic microbe may well have been among the first life that evolved on earth, perhaps even the very first life.

Our presumptions about the temperature ranges and conditions life can function in have been progressively challenged over the past fifty years; microbes, it seems, can probably even survive the condition of interstellar space without losing the ability the thrive and reproduce if they make it to a new solar system. While the idea of intergalactic travel seems, today, impossibly remote, it seems to be reasonably certain that among the trillions of galaxies, ours cannot be the only one that supports life.

Life on the smallest scales displays a resiliency absent in larger forms. The conditions it needs to support it are, for one, far more focused. Nutrients can be derived from far more basic building blocks—even molecular ones— with far less obstacles to finding and assimilating them. The difficulty of procuring food, it might be said, is roughly inverse in proportion to size. Small creatures need little food; large ones need lots of it. Microbes, in this sense, have the decided edge in the competition for energy resources. They can live in marginal circumstances, subsisting on marginal resources; larger creatures need far more tailored environments, built on far more complex food pyramids. So microbes have the advantage not only in terms of temperature, but also scale.

We humans see ourselves as flexible in terms of temperature and scale; imagine ourselves as supremely adaptable to a wide range of environments. Yet microbes outperform us handily in this area, and they do so without any of the specialized equipment we require when operating outside our comfort zone. Speaking as regards to suitable habitat, we're actually confined to an incredibly narrow range of circumstances; even a tiny step outside them causes us to resort to protective clothing and vehicles. 

We think we rule the earth; but in reality the bacteria do. They live and reproduce in massive numbers in places we will never go; places deep in the earth, where life has found what are, to us, completely alien paths to survival. They share the same DNA, but their destinies diverged from ours billions of years ago.

Even then, some of them have developed novel approaches to DNA and reproduction itself; which shows you just how incredibly creative archaic microbes can be.