Theory of anything

 

Well, some people have interesting hobbies, I suppose...

Upplopp i paradiset

 

Kanaker och fransmän har ju aldrig gillat varandra, men den senaste tidens våldsamheter på Nya Kaledonien verkar vara orsakade av Kina, Ryssland och Azerbaijan (sic). 

Kina expanderar i Söderhavet. Ryssland expanderar på Frankrikes bekostnad i Västafrika. Och Azerbaijan är sura på Frankrikes stöd till Armenien. Eftersom Ryssland för närvarande har dåliga relationer med Armenien (annars en traditionell allierad), så kan man väl inte utesluta något slags rysk koppling även här.

Frankrikes president Macron har åtminstone retoriskt intagit en offensiv hållning i konflikten i Ukraina. Säkerligen p.g.a. de geopolitiska spänningarna med Ryssland. Kinas expansion i Stilla Havs-regionen kolliderar givetvis också med franska intressen. Har för mig att vissa småländer i regionen faktiskt varit pro-ryska tidigare, men jag antar att Kina är huvudaktören där.

Återstår att se om detta bara är en försöksballong, eller ett allvarligt menat försök att öppna en ny anti-västlig front från Rysslands och Kinas sida.    

Totalt kaos på paradisön

Undantagstillstånd i paradiset

The mysterious conqueror

 

Credit: Eric Hill 

Here´s a second and hopefully better attempt to review the French nature documentary "L´abominable mystère des fleurs". Apparently, Charles Darwin regarded the origins and evolution of the flowering plants or angiosperms an “abominable mystery” due to their seemingly rapid evolution and diversification. The documentary tries to shed at least some light on the problematique. One of the scientists featured is named Sarah Darwin and actually is a descendant of Charles Robert!

If I understand the documentary correctly, 90% of all plant species are flowering plants. They are believed to have evolved about 100 million years ago. At the very least, the oldest known fossil of an angiosperm is that old. If I understand it correctly, this fossil is already quite “advanced”. However, genetic studies of Amborella – a peculiar species endemic to New Caledonia and believed to be the last surviving member of a “basal” angiosperm lineage – suggest an origin already 140 – 250 million years ago. This gives ample time for flowering plants to evolve and diversify before they were preserved in the fossil record. Later, 214 million YBP was chosen as the definitive date. Hypothetically, the first flower was believed to have looked like a water lily! Somehow, I´m not surprised – I always got some kind of “dinosaur” vibes from those (but maybe that´s because of some old horror flick).

The most fascinating plant shown in the documentary is easily the Welwitschia, which is a gymnosperm rather than an angiosperm. Only found in Namibia and Angola, some specimens can become 2,000 years old (!). It´s also an extremely ancient lineage. Apparently, the Welwitschia has a kind of “failed flowers”, which has led scientists to wonder if it could be a (failed?) transitional form between Gymnospermae and flowering plants. Genetic studies suggest that there are similarities between how the Welwitschia forms its pseudo-flowers and how real flowers are formed. This could be a missing link establishing that the angiosperms are indeed descended from gymnosperms in truly primordial times.

Other topics covered in the docu are equally interesting. Thus, most flowers aren´t blue, which is also something of a conundrum, since insects apparently “like” blue colors! They are easily drawn to them. It seems most flowering plants have difficulty for various reasons related to chemistry and soil quality to produce blue pigments. However, there are ways around this. For instance, some non-blue flowers can produce the blue color by simply reflecting the light that way. More surprising is the hypothesis that flowering plants can pick up sounds! The buzzing of an insect can somehow be detected by the petals of a flower. The producers of the documentary have humorously placed two musicians in the middle of a poppy field, where they play Rimsky-Korsakov´s “The Flight of the Bumblebee”!

And yes, the documentary is available in an English-language version, with the ridiculous title “Flower Power: The Mysterious Conqueror”.

But Darwin was right

 

Credit: Thomas Schoch 

"L´abominable mystère des fleurs" (The Abominable Mystery of Flowers) is a French nature documentary. The title is apparently a reference to a statement by Charles Darwin, who considered the fast evolution of flowering plants to be a serious problem for his theory. It´s therefore somewhat piquant that one of the scientists featured is named Sarah Darwin. And yes, she really is a descendant of Charles Robert!

The docu takes us to a literally blooming desert in Namibia, an 800-year young (and very bizarre) Welwitschia plant (also in Namibia), the French Alps and assorted laboratories. On the main island of New Caledonia, the scientists pluck an Amborella, the only species left of the oldest flowering plant lineage in Earth history (or something to that effect).

The evolution of flowering plants was clearly stimulated by insect pollinators, and geographical isolation can speed up speciation. 

But somehow, we knew that already. More intriguing is the research done on the Welwitschia plant, which is a gymnosperm. Presumably, the flowering plants (angiosperms) must have evolved from gymnosperms. And indeed, the Welwitschia turns out to have a kind of pseudo-flowers which are genetically similar to the real thing! Is this an actual "transitional form" still around today?

It seems Charles Darwin was right, after all. Next week: Einstein right, too?

Another world

“Wild Pacific” (also called “South Pacific” in some jurisdictions) is a fascinating documentary series about animal and plant life in the South Pacific and Hawaii. New Guinea, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and Polynesia are featured (including Easter Island).

If you like weird stuff, this is definitely for you! How about real footage of large sharks gathered to eat young albatrosses which are learning how to fly? Apparently an annual spectacle on a certain reef in the Pacific. Meanwhile on New Zealand, you can run into penguins in the forest. Another island features enormous crabs living in the palm trees. The poor cat Tibbles, who supposedly exterminated an entire species of songbird, is mentioned in one episode, although it seems feral cats had decimated the population of Lyall´s Wren already before his arrival at Stephens Island. Also featured are underwater volcanoes and above-water ones at Hawaii. Somewhat surprisingly, “Wild Pacific” promotes the idea that the culture at Easter Island might have been destroyed by rats.

One problem with this series is that most episodes tend to depict the Pacific as some kind of pristine paradise, which it definitely isn´t. This is particularly galling when discussing Hawaii, “the most isolated island chain in the world”. Yeah, except for Honolulu and the little detail that Hawaii is the 50^th state of the Union! Nothing about the civil war at Bougainville, the near-civil war at New Caledonia, the nuclear tests at Mururoa, the military coup at Fiji, you get the picture. Instead, we are shown happy natives living in fundamental harmony with nature. Only in the last episode do we get some insight into the environmental problems besetting the region, such as overfishing, coral death and climate change threatening to wipe out entire island nations.

That being said, “Wild (or South) Pacific” is well worth watching, and I therefore give it five stars out of five. And yes, I´m still eating tuna…

The crow remembers

Previously posted on Amazon. Several people have pointed out to me that a flock of crows is called "murder" in English! 

I'm not sure why this product is titled “A Murder of Crows”, almost like an episode of “Game of Thrones” or some other suitably dramatic fantasy story. While it's indeed a very interesting documentary, featuring famous crow expert John Marzluff, it says very little about crow mortality and absolutely nothing about “murder”!

Most of the documentary explores the intelligence of these black, ominous-looking passerines. American Crows have an uncanny ability to recognize specific humans in a crowd. Apparently, the crows remember their faces. Several crows in Seattle have inherited their parents' fear and loathing of a mysterious humanoid creature who "threatened" their nest, really Marzluff wearing a special mask for research purposes. The crows have long memories, too, since they remember Marzluff's mask after several years!

The documentary claims that crows can “explain” new threats to the mates in their flock, but it's not clear how this is done if the other crows don't actually observe the threat? Unless I'm mistaken, Marzluff says in one of his books that a colleague of his was mobbed by every crow in South Carolina, including at places he had never visited before! Perhaps some of the crows were the same. Or perhaps something *really* strange was going on... ;-)

The super-intelligent New Caledonian Crow is also featured, and so is the European Carrion Crow and the Asian Jungle Crow. It turns out that that all of them are pretty smart, and the enthusiastic scientists – perhaps inevitably – claim that crows are more clever than parrots. A scientist working with parrots would presumably say the opposite!

My main problem with “A Murder of Crows” (apart from the bizarre title) is that bird intelligence is constantly portrayed as something entirely unexpected and hence sensational. I understand that this may be the dominant paradigm, but it strikes me as absurd and anthropocentric. If evolution is true, we should expect both “transitional” forms of intelligence between the dumb brute and the creative human, and convergent evolution during which intelligence emerges on several different branches of the “Tree of Life”. Intelligence, after all, has survival value (at least among “other animals” – among humans, I sometimes wonder). That a perching bird can understand very simple logic, develop problem-solving capacities or remember human faces may be a bit spooky, but it shouldn't really surprise us…

But yes, I'm a bit partial. I happen to think crows and other corvids are pretty cool! I understand that's a distinct minority position in most subsets of the human population. Ironically, it seems most people would rather have coyotes, wolves or bears stomping around their backyard! How clever *that* might be, is of course an interesting question…

That being said, I gladly award this feast for crow-lovers five stars.

Bizarre birds

The order Caprimulgiformes may be *the* most bizarre group of birds known to science. It includes nocturnal birds making weird noises easily confused with the song of crickets, birds that actually hibernate, other species that mimic tree-branches, and the ultra-bizarre oilbird, which lives in caves, echolocates like a bat and only eats fresh fruit.

"Nightjars and their allies" is a 773-page book, or rather encyclopaedia about the Caprimulgiformes. This "night jar bible" (as the other reviewer called it) is part of a series called "Bird Families of the World", published by Oxford University Press. The volumes published so far only cover a smaller amount of all extant bird families, however. OUP's series is intended to cover essentially the same ground as "Handbook of the Birds of the World" (HBW). If it will succeed is another matter entirely, since the HBW already covers all bird families in 16 volumes and have more photos and colour plates, giving it a very commercial appearance. "Nightjars and their allies" doesn't even come close, and look more like a boring reference work. The editors of the OUP series seem resentful of HBW's success, suggesting that their references really are better! There's nothing wrong with "boring" reference works about nightjars, provided you are an ornithologist with distinctly nocturnal habits, but most libraries would probably prefer the flashier HBW (which covers the Caprimulgiformes in volume five).

That being said, I don't deny that this mastodon book really does cover everything you ever wanted to know about caprimulgiform birds. How about the timing of their radiations in relation to continental drift, clinal patterns of variation in wing-length of Tawny Frogmouths in Australia, the number of beetles consumed by Common Poorwills, or the relation of moult to the annual cycle of nesting and migration in populations of Chuck-Will-Widows nesting at different latitudes (according to Rohwer 1971). And this just in the introductory section!

The species accounts are just as bizarrely detailed as the ones in HBW. I admit I was impressed by the length to which scientists are ready to go in their study of even the most obscure species. Faeces and stomach-content is studied to see what kind of insects the nightjars have devoured, the scientist sometimes subjecting the poor bird to a technique known as "stomach-flushing". Every preserved museum specimen is analyzed to get insights about moulting. Expeditions are launched to the interior of New Guinea to map the exact range of various species. Indiana Jones and the Crocodile Hunter, please sign in to the left! Despite this, some nightjars have managed to escape the attention even of these thorough ornithologists. The elusive New Caledonian Owlet-nightjar is known only from one museum specimen collected in 1880, a confirmed observation in 1998 and...late Quaternary fossils! It's good to know that there are still some mysteries out there (others would include the relationship between consciousness and matter, the existence of God or the election bylaws of the State of New York, but I'm digressing).

In summary, I can only concur with the other reviewer: if you're writing a PhD thesis on oilbirds, frogmouths, potoos, owlet-nightjars or nightjars, this is definitely a must-have. The rest of us are gasping...or busy checking out the photos in HBW, volume 5.