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a flock of passenger pigeons or a herd of mammoths as much as the next nature geek and i marvel at the scientific insights and creativity that go into the deextinction project these people are visionary brilliant but brand s title asks the wrong question it does not matter whether we as individuals are ready instead i would argue that what really matters is that we collectively as the stumbling architects of a new geological epoch are not ready for this responsibility moreover earth and its biosphere are not ready developing my argument would go well beyond a blog post but the summary is rather simple every species is part of a larger ecosystem this is the fundamental fact of ecology many perhaps even most extinct species belonged to ecosystems that were either coopted by humans or have changed irreversibly in their absence the forest grassland mosaic that was home to the aurochs another deextinction target across europe is now home to some of the densest human populations on earth the world of the aurochs is gone the glaciated home of the mammoth is gone and we are marching in the opposite direction climate wise the world is not ready for them to come back every revived species would need to have a place and yet we cannot even seem to make room for the species that are still here if we cannot responsibly manage the extant species do we really want to take on reviving extinct ones i argue that we are simply not ready not competent enough as a species to handle this task i have no illusions some form of deextinction will occur with sad solitary animals maybe even small populations consigned to zoos and reserves and i have no doubt that the projects that lead to these breakthroughs will yield tremendous insights both technical and conceptual some of those insights might even help rescue extant threatened species and that would be great but my fear is that news of these big ideas of this optimistic technologically advanced project will be interpreted as a solution to the biodiversity crisis no need to worry about tarzan s chameleon the spoon billed sandpiper the pygmy three toed sloth or any of the other 100 most threatened species just freeze some dna and we ll bring them back later species need space and food a functioning ecosystem not just a genome and a zoo perhaps the visionaries of deextinction have fallen prey to the most common form of hubris in science solving the problem of how they can do it without thinking deeply enough about the questions of why or whether they should do it what do you think the role of humans in the extinction of pleistocene megafauna and the nature of our interactions with neanderthals are still subject to investigation but while correlation is certainly not causation extinction particularly of large vertebrates does seem to have followed in the wake of the migrations of evolutionarily modern humans whether in eurasia australia oceania or the americas categories ideas sciculture uncategorized tags climate environment mass extinction event sixth mass extinction permalink march 14 2013 by drew kerkhoff 1 comment of π day plants and paleoclimates happy π day after not posting anything on darwin day i decided that i could not let another geek holiday go by without a post so let s talk about the importance of π in the global biogeocoenosis now you may say but π is just about geometry that s not biology or maybe if you ve blocked out 10 th grade math you may say but pie is just for dessert allow me to retort wrong biology is all about structure and function and the mathematics of structure and to some extent function too come to think of it is geometry much of evolutionary biology is concerned with the history diversification and development of biological form on some level most evolutionary biologists study changes in the geometry of organisms and why it matters also pie makes an excellent breakfast so because π relates the diameter of a circle and its circumference we need to think about the important circles of life i like trees and the cross section of a tree trunk is roughly circular so that seems like a productive place to start imagine a beautiful sugar maple like the ones local farmers here in knox county tap to make maple syrup early every spring my checker at wal mart told me that just last weekend her husband had really smoked up her house boiling down the last of their haul of sap for this season so where does that sap come from the tree stores starch in its roots and early in the season the roots start moving the starch into the sap to fuel the production of leaves way up in the canopy the sap flows through little tiny tubes just under the bark of the tree which is why we can tap into the sap these tubes collectively called the xylem system stretch continuously through the body of the tree from the tiniest tips of the roots to the veins of every leaf but how does the sap flow are there little pumps down in the roots that push the fluid up does it simply climb up the little tubes by capillary action for a long time this was one of the major mysteries of botany how do plants which have nothing resembling a heart get water from the soil to their leaves fighting all the while against gravity the answer which has only become fully established over the past few decades turns out to be a little crazy the water in the little tubes is not being pushed but pulled up the tubes the water molecules form long continuous strands from the roots to the leaves stuck together by the electrochemical force of cohesion and all those tiny strands of water are under tension they are being stretched like minuscule rubber bands and the crazy part is that they are being stretched by the air the underside of leaves are pocked by tiny pores called stomata and as the water evaporates it pulls just a bit on the strand of water behind it all the way down to the roots so simply because it is drier than the plant s tissues the air sucks water up from the soil perfusing all of the plants cells along the way plant xylem is one of the wonders of engineering accomplished by evolution in a single large tree the xylem can move hundreds of gallons of water over large distances without any direct input of energy on the part of the organism talk about efficiency about now you may be wondering what about the π to find the importance of π here we just need to consider the circles in the picture not just the big circle of the trunk but all of the tiny circles that make up the tubes of the xylem and how tiny they are matters because the same forces that hold the water molecules together in strands also make it stick to the side of the tubes in bigger tubes less of the water is in contact with the wall so it flows faster back in the mid 19 th century scientists figured out that the flow rate φ through a pipe could be described by the following equation so there there is my favorite pi in biology the π r 4 term where r is the radius has to do with the cross sectional area of the pipe and how much fluid is in contact with the wall of the pipe what is so important about it is not so much the π sorry but such is the life of a constant but the fact that the radius is raised to the fourth power that means that if you double the radius of a tube all else equal you actually increase the flow by a factor of 2 4 or 16 fold so plants with bigger tubes can move more water more quickly it turns out that this simple fact has terrific importance for both plant evolution and perhaps even for the history of earth s climate back in the cretaceous 65 5 145 million years ago earth s vegetation was dominated by conifers and ferns no triceratops ever munched on a sugar maple the lineage of flowering plants that are so common today were only just beginning to evolve and evolutionary biologists have long marveled at their rather explosive in geological evolutionary terms at least diversification and rise to dominance darwin himself called it an abominable mystery what were the secrets to their success almost certainly some of them were physiological and one of the most notable differences between flowering plants and their cousins was in the xylem flowering trees had not just discovered flowers and animal pollination another of the secrets to their success they had also found a way to make the tubes bigger than those of conifers and not just a little bigger a lot bigger up to fifty times wider and because of the π r 4 term even though one of these humongous vessels takes up as much space as 2 500 smaller tubes the flow rate increases more than 6 million fold at the same time the leaves of flowering plants were changing too the density of leaf veins increased enormously during the cretaceous bringing more of the water and soil nutrients in the sap closer to the sites of photosynthesis and releasing much more water vapor into the atmosphere the evolutionary relationship between these innovations their relative order and mutual influence remain uncertain but together they changed the world in fact they sped it up provided with more water and nutrients the photosynthetic machinery of the leaves went into overdrive vegetation became more productive capturing more carbon from the atmosphere though it released more through respiration as well those faster living leaves also died younger speeding up the cycling of nutrients through decomposition and after the cataclysmic transition from the cretaceous to the paleocene whole forests of flowering trees became dominant over large swaths of the continents and they even began to make their own rain with their huge vessels and richly veined leaves theses trees collectively accelerated the hydrological cycle moving water into the atmosphere that eventually had to return to the ground as rain even erosion may have increased recent modeling studies suggest that if amazon rainforests were constrained to more ancient conifer style rates of water transport the dry season would lengthen by up to 80 days well beyond the tolerance of most rainforest species and in making their own world here on earth the flowering plants have made our world no primate ever knew a world without them even our climate is a product of their evolution and we could not understand it without understanding that the ratio of the circumference to the radius of a circle is a transcendental constant π for now evolutionary research on the vascular innovations of flowering plants is incredibly exciting right now two recent interesting papers which i drew on for this post include c kevin boyce and maciej a zwieniecki 2012 leaf fossil record suggests limited influence of atmospheric co2 on terrestrial productivity prior to angiosperm evolution proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the usa taylor s feild timothy j brodribb et al 2011 fossil evidence for cretaceous escalation in angiosperm leaf vein evolution proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the usa categories ideas linkage research tags climate nature plants science permalink february 13 2013 by drew kerkhoff 1 comment the anthropocene gets its own journal my last post was on the dawning and a bit about the conclusion of our own geological epoch the anthropocene now a new open access journal launched that is dedicated to the science of the anthropocene elementa science the journal is produced in collaboration with bioone dartmouth the georgia institute of technology the university of colorado boulder the university of michigan and the university of washington they will begin accepting submissions in a wide variety of scientific disciplines this april and best of all all of their published papers will be freely available to all as a teaser they posted this slick little video to me the most important part is the words at the end which largely echo my last post let s make it count categories education ideas sciculture permalink january 28 2013 by drew kerkhoff 4 comments ibs part 3 the anthropocene biogeography from the far future at a scientific meeting like the ibs most of the presentations detail specific narrowly focused studies the bricks and mortar of the scientific edifice but sometimes there are fora in which we get to explore big ideas one of the saturday sessions at the ibs meeting delved into an important recent big idea by examining the biogeography of the anthropocene so what s the big idea the anthropocene it has been proposed as a new geological epoch reflecting the emergence of humanity as a global force of nature on a par with the other phenomena that shape the planet things like asteroid impacts glacial cycles massive volcanism and plate tectonics you get the idea if you take a look at our global transportation system we are big but what is the evidence for the dawning of the anthropocene that was the topic of the first talk of the session by tony barnosky from uc berkeley for you see the anthropocene is an epoch that does not yet officially exist it is being considered by the international commission on stratigraphy which after careful consideration will deliver a verdict on the status of the anthropocene in 2016 barnosky is part of the working group doing that careful consideration what was most interesting for me was that barnosky s talk was not about the abundant current evidence for human impact but about how those stalwart stratigraphers would go about delineating the boundary of the anthropocene he emphasized that while we think of epochs as periods of time and thus ultimately intangible they are in fact defined by the most tangible of earthly things rocks each age in the geological time scale corresponds to specific rock strata deposited during that period in earth s vast history and the boundaries of the period must be clearly defined by globally observable stratigraphic zones in particular biostratigraphic zones delineating particular changes in fossil assemblages have been instrumental in defining distinct geological epochs and like any other epoch the anthropocene requires a stratigraphic definition listening to barnosky i imagined a time far in the future tens of millions of years after the last human passed away our species extinct a ghost glimpsed in fossils artifacts and fragmented indecipherable texts and codes if some newly sentient and scientific creature were to arise on earth or if you prefer arrive on a spaceship equipped with rock hammers and microscopes how would they recognize the fact that a single species of at least semi intelligent primate had come to dominate the biosphere and change the planet according to barnosky ample fossil evidence will point to big biogeographic and biogeochemical changes centered around our present geological instant mid to late 20th century for example one future paleontologist a specialist in fossil seeds will note not only a global proliferation of maize seeds out of what was once north america but also a synchronous differentiation of many new forms in the lineage like the super sweet varieties w...