Category: Nature

I’m currently reading Carl Zimmer’s book: Parasite Rex. If, like me, you tend to think that parasites are not Nature’s noblest creations, you should read this book. You may not actually fall in love with parasites (one researcher wrote: "Trypanosoma bruceii has many enchanting features that make this parasite the darling of experimental biologists"), but I’ll wager that you’ll come away having a new-found respect for them.

Zimmer puts a persuasive argument that parasites have been a dominant force, perhaps the dominant force in the evolution of life. He documents case-studies that demonstrate how parasites influence ecosystems, often by affecting the behaviour of the host organisms. He writes well, too.

The United Nations has just published One Planet – Many People. It’s an atlas illustrating how human activities are affecting our world via the medium of satellite photos showing before and after images. While the publication is available as a book (at a cool $150), it’s also available to download in both print and screen versions.

Some of the images are stunning. The subtext is that we are having an impact on the world, and we need to manage that impact.

Another fascinating story in Nature – this time about a study of Buddhist monks. Just one nagging thought occurs to this cynic – how did the researchers know that the monks were telling the truth? As the saying goes: Mandy Rice-Davies Applies.

Today, we joined a neighbour when she moved her boat from a mooring in Gouda to one in Reeuwijk. That meant boating through Gouda’s rivers and canals until eventually we arrived in the lakes at Reeuwijk. A very pleasant way to spend a few hours. Some photos are attached.

In this month’s issue, Wired asks the question: "Are our memories suffering from our reliance on gadgets?". I think it’s certainly true that, like a muscle that doesn’t get exercised, certain aspects of memory will atrophy. So, if you have a mobile phone with all your numbers in it, you are likely to rely on the mobile, and not your memory.

By way of illustration, my mother, right up until her death a few days short of her 97th birthday, had a prodigious memory for telephone numbers. She could recall telephone numbers with no problem. This was almost certainly the result of being a telephone operator in the 1920s. Her job exercised that particular "muscle" in her memory – number memorising and recall – and she never lost the knack.

On a related ability, Isaac Asimov wrote a nice short story about this called "The Feeling of Power". Go and read it. I learned my "Times Table" in school – we didn’t have calculators in my day. I wonder if the facility for mental arithmetic is quite so well-developed in the average schoolchild today?

(hat tip to Mind Hacks)

Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to get across ideas. On that theme, and bringing it right up to date, this week’s issue of Nature has a go at predicting what a viral pandemic might be like by telling it in the form of a blog. 

Over at the Mind Hacks Blog, Tom Stafford refers to the intriguing theory by the evolutionary pscychologist David Buss that homicide is an evolutionary adaptation that we all share.

As Bill Hill has pointed out, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, our operating system is Homo Sapiens 1.0, it’s been in place, without any upgrade, for at least 100,000 years, and the design parameters that were used in its creation apply to very few of today’s humans.

Here at chez nous, Martin is the gardener – I just mow the lawn, or occasionally share some of the heavier garden work. Because of this secondary position, I don’t have very much influence over what goes into the garden.

I know this because I can’t have a Monkey Puzzle tree in the garden.

My better half has stamped his foot, and, being the head gardener, pulled rank on me. It is useless for me to say (quite truthfully) that ever since I was a small child, I have loved the look of the Monkey Puzzle tree, and always wanted to have one. In fact, I think it was probably a formative experience as a very small child that imprinted this desire on me. I must have only been about seven or so…

My parents had a hotel. To my seven year old eyes, in the winter, the out-of-season time, it was rather like having the run of the Overlook from Kubrick’s The Shining. The attic seemed to me to be huge, filled with mysterious things that either belonged to us, or were fixtures and fittings of the hotel that had passed their in-fashion date.  One day I was poking about in the attic and found: an artificial monkey puzzle tree. I had never seen anything like this before – and when I learned the name from my mother I was even more intrigued. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to have one in a garden that I can call my own. 

Flash forward to present time and "No, you can’t have a tree like that in the garden".

So – time to get sneaky, and this is where the Wollemi Pine enters our story. The Wollemi Pine is one of the world’s oldest and rarest plants dating back to the time of the dinosaurs.  Until 1994, when it was discovered at a secret location in Australia, it was known only in 200 million-year-old fossil records. With less than 100 adult trees known to exist in the wild, the Wollemi Pine is now the focus of extensive research to safeguard its survival. Its very dark green leaves and bubbly bark help mark it out as a close relative of the Monkey Puzzle tree (beginning to get the picture?).

So here’s the schtick – how can my gardening husband possibly refuse the chance to help propagate an exceedingly rare species of tree?

We can register online at www.wollemipine.com and get involved in what is a worldwide conservation project. So I get something that is closely related to the mysterious tree of my childhood and he gets the feelgood factor of helping to preserve something extremely rare. A win-win situation, I feel. I’ll let you know how it goes when I drop this on him.

One of the threads that Peter Watts wove into his picture of Vampire Domestication was the connection with the human brain’s facility of pattern matching and the apparent ability of savants to "calculate" difficult mathematical problems instantly. I put quotes around the word calculate, because a savant isn’t really "calculating" at all – the answer is just apparent to them.

By coincidence, I was reading today in the Guardian about the documentary that has been made about Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant. That triggered a memory, and sure enough, I had read an article on Tammet in the Guardian a few months back. Tammet is unusual in that he can describe how he does these feats of mathematical wizardry to ordinary mortals like us. The article is well worth reading and gives a brief glimpse into another way of experiencing the world.

I cycled out into Reeuwijk again today, and managed to see a Black-tailed Godwit (Limosa limosa) and a pair of Barnacle Geese with their young.

According to The Sunday Times (OK, stop sniggering at the back), climate researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream – the "mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing".

If this is true, perhaps our future plans should not be merely to move to higher ground within the Netherlands, but to up stakes and head south to Spain… Quick, where’s that Spanish course? 

I took Vincent’s advice and went cycling. Bought a few plants at a local garden centre. In order to continue the celebration of Spring, I’ve uploaded a few more photos taken in the last couple of weeks around the neighbourhood. See Spring Day 2.

Don’t you just love Nature, particularly in Springtime? Well, don’t get too carried away, Mother Nature has a way of revealing her not-so-nice-side.

Today was a pleasant day, I went out cycling in Reeuwijk and took my camera. A small selection of the photos are in the photo album here called "Spring Day". Simple pleasures.

First of all it was the disillusionment that set in when confronted with the fact that farting cows are a major source of greenhouse gases. No longer could I gaze at a field of grazing cows in a contemplative mood – all I could think of was the fact that each cow would be letting slip 200 litres of methane per day.

Now comes the news that wood-burning pizza ovens are likely to fall foul of new environmental restrictions.

I predict that in less than 10 years time we’ll have an army of inspectors poking around our wood-burning fire in the living room complaining that it does not conform to some new batch of environmental laws. We’ll probably have to replace the thrill of a real fire with a flat-panel screen showing an endless loop video of flickering flames. It’s not the same, I tell you.

…is the realisation that I live in a manmade environment. The area where I live is almost the lowest point of the Netherlands – at least 6 metres below sea-level. One of these days, something is going to happen. Will I still be around to see it? I don’t know, but sometimes I think I should relocate to higher ground for my twilight years…

Addendum: I did relocate in March 2006 – to a point that is 19 metres above sea-level.

Another of life’s simple pleasures is the ability to get on my bicycle and cycle to Reeuwijk – a 15 minute journey. There you can guarantee to see a variety of wildlife. Today, for example, I saw at least ten pheasants rummaging around, and on the lakes was a variety of birds. Including this pair of Red-Crested Pochards…

One of life’s simple pleasures is sitting at the table at breakfast with a cup of coffee and watching the birds through the window…

So there I was, wide awake and waiting for the song thrush. And it did not disappoint – it started even earlier this morning, at 4:23 am. And then at 4:40am, Martin turns over in his sleep and starts to snore. Welcome to the new improved Dawn Chorus. Oh joy.

And how do I know? Because for the past three days a song thrush has decided that it will start its routine of singing its little heart out in the tree outisde our bedroom window. Trouble is, it starts at 4:30 am each day. So the dawn chorus is starting to tune up for the season. Soon the thrush will be followed by other birds and their counter-melodies.

I don’t really mind being woken up by birdsong – even if it is before dawn. At least it makes a change from Martin’s snoring.