Readable science writing

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, nature, science writing, nature writing, anthologies

Science and technical writing are notable for being unreadable. Fortunately, some articles are well written and readable. Some. For The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023, edited by Carl Zimmer, the editor and his helpers managed to find twenty articles and essays that are readable and informative, in a range of technical disciplines.

I don't intend to survey the whole book. This is more of an accolade than a full review. I used Dall-E3 to generate a number of images intended to evoke "science writer." I like this one best. For the sake of this volume, I chose a female writer because 13 of the 20 articles are by females, although one is amidst a transition to outward maleness.

In the Foreword the editor makes note that more and more of modern science and nature writing has a political flavor. This is not surprising. Many of the articles in this volume are based in research related to climate change, which has been overly politicized to the point that few granting entities are willing to fund work that is not explicitly supportive of the "mainstream view," no matter that it is very far from being the "settled science" that certain loud voices claim. While I am at it, I must say that two of the articles are not about science at all but are personal testimonies regarding the consequences of the political climate, related primarily to issues of gender and morality. While they are voices that deserve to be heard, they have no place in this volume.

My second favorite generated image is this one, of a naturalist in the field. Boots on the ground are sorely needed to winkle out all the effects of the increase of both temperature and atmospheric volatility. Articles about the changing populations of certain butterfly or frog species evoke the scientific spirit: "Why has this changed? and how?" 

Science is conservative, in the sense that new things, new ideas, new hypotheses must prove themselves. It is unscientific to accept a new "explanation" that lacks solid evidence. Environmental stewardship is also a conservative value. Social conservatism is different from political conservatism. Let us remember that prior to the Twentieth Century the conservatives (for example, the Tories in England and the Democrats in the US) were pro-royalty, pro-aristocracy, pro-feudalism, and pro-slavery. The constitutional liberals (who these days are called "conservatives" by leftists), particularly the leading Christians, led the way to abolish slavery. Their contention that all the "races" were equally human was based on scientific studies, on scientific conservatism, as much as on religious grounds. We are amidst a struggle to determine where the boundaries lie between scientific study of climate and political proclamations based on sketchy understanding of science.

Scientists would do well to learn better writing. For the moment, those who write well deserve appreciation, and this volume provides a little of that.

Blueness makes me happy

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, colors, nature, blue

When I was ten years old my parents bought a set of four drinking cups of different colors to use in the bathroom, and sets of similarly-colored breakfast plates. I was the oldest of four boys; the others were 6, 4 and 2. Mom had prepared for the coming moment by questioning each of us privately, what was our favorite color. The 2-year old didn't understand the question, the 6-year old said, very definitely, "Red!" and while I had also said "Red" at some point, I also liked blue, so when she showed us the four cups, I was quite happy to pick the blue one—it was really a lovely, dark blue—leaving green and yellow to the two youngest boys. The 4-year old was happy enough with green, so the youngest got yellow by default. In later years, I learned that blue is the most common favorite color. It made me wonder, if that is so, why does "feeling blue" mean sadness?

That latter point is scarcely touched in Blue: In Search of Nature's Rarest Color by Kai Kupferschmidt, but the book abounds with lore and learning about Blue: how we see it, use it, and value it. I did wonder, how is it so rare, when the sky is blue? As I soon learned, "blues you can use" are hard to come by. Thus, there are a number of blue minerals, also many blue flowers and fruits, but stable blue pigments made from minerals are historically scarce and thus highly valued, and blue dyes from plant sources even more so.

It's true that though there are a number of blue minerals, only one or two make useful pigments, and the primary one is lapis lazuli (lazurite to a mineralogist). It's scarce and hard to produce because it seldom occurs with much purity, being intergrown with pyrite and other minerals of similar solubility. One must almost pick it apart with tiny tweezers to get the blue mineral grains separated from all the others.

It's also hard to grow, unlike chalcanthite, AKA hydrated copper sulfate. I grew this specimen of copper sulfate in a jar, rather quickly. It is very water soluble, so as a mineral it only occurs in deserts, associated with copper deposits. Good pigments aren't water soluble!

I happen to favor blue minerals, as does Dr. Kupferschmidt. The two pictures below show one natural mineral, light blue fluorite, and a jar-grown phosphate (apatite, chemically).

There is also a chapter on color perception, with quite a discussion of the way some languages have only one word that covers both green and blue hues. Does this mean that some people can't see the difference, or that it just isn't important in some cultures? I do know this: my wife says the phosphate crystals are clear; she doesn't see the aqua color that is so distinct to me. She also tends to see some of my clothing as green, which I see as blue, but the Japanese language has quite distinct words for blue and green colors (she is Japanese).

Another chapter deals with plant dyes, which seem to produce every color except blue, with two exceptions: woad, Isatis tinctoria, and the indigo bean, Indigofera tinctoria. The Latin word tinctoria is from tinctura, meaning "dye". The two plants' extracts are the same chemically, but that from the indigo bean is more concentrated. Denim is dyed either with natural indigo, or a synthetic version. It has the charming characteristic of gradually coming out in the wash, so that older blue jeans and jean jackets (etc.) fade with many washings. If you want blue underwear, wash it with new blue jeans!

I was surprised that mollusk dyes were not mentioned (I happen to work in the mollusk collection of a natural history museum). Of course, "royal purple" is the most famous dye to be made from snails of the genus Murex. It was even more surprising to me because I found this statement, quoting philologist Lazarus Geiger, that "the Bible found 'no opportunity' to mention the color blue." This is blatantly false! viz:

The Hebrew word tekelet occurs 50 times, and nearly every version translates the word as "blue". Historically the word describes the blue dye produced from a secretion of the cerulean mussel; both Mytilus edulis and Mytilus galloprovincialis are found on the Phoenician coast where the purple-yielding Murex species are found. Jewish sources describe the color of "Tyrian purple" from Murex snails as having a range of colors, depending on how much ultraviolet the dye solution is exposed to during processing. The more UV, the bluer the result. Apparently, in the mix of dye chemicals, the red one(s) are bleached by UV. Thus, begin making dye in the late afternoon to get a more magenta, almost reddish color, or begin early in the day to get a sky-blue dye. The dye from the mussels tends more toward blue hues than from the snails. The common name "cerulean mussel" refers to sky blue, which is the color of the fresh shells. And here we mean the darkish blue of a clear winter sky.

The tapestries of the Hebrew tabernacle and later of the temple in Jerusalem, as well as the garments of the priests, were to be of linen embroidered with "blue and purple and scarlet", all colors that can be produced from mollusks. Now, perhaps Lazarus Geiger only had a New Testament available; the word "blue" does not occur in the Greek New Testament, where either kyanos or galazios would have been used. The NT does mention red, scarlet, green and purple.

On a further note, some consider the Hebrew word cappiyr, translated "sapphire", may refer to lapis lazuli, but from the root of the Hebrew word, it refers to the extreme hardness of the stone, and can only refer to corundum; sapphire is blue corundum. The "sapphire pavement" before the throne of God is intended to appear as the blue sky seen from above.

All that aside, It was great fun to read this book. There is much to learn about blue, including why its manufacture was so hard in the past, but is so common now. So I could have a dark blue plastic cup to use when brushing my teeth as a child. P.S. I still have that cup, and still use it!

Nature as healer

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, nature, the natural world, lessons for living

The trend to divorce humanity from nature began long ago, with the Greek philosophers of the 400's BC or earlier. I remember reading that they preferred argument to experiment, sophistry to evidence, such that they could argue for hours about how many teeth a horse has, and nobody would suggest going to the nearest horse and looking in its mouth. That's probably a bit exaggerated. Curiously, the rise of experimental science (first called "natural philosophy") during the Enlightenment seems to have cemented the divorce, at least for a time.

In the recent generation or two increasing numbers of researchers and students have been willing to accept that we are part of nature. The "natural-artificial" divide is exaggerated at best, and flat wrong in most areas. It is true that human culture and technology have largely insulated us from many natural phenomena, but we see less efficacious technologies throughout the animal kingdom, in everything from bird nests to the tunnels of mice and hares, to bee hives and wasp nests, and to the tools apes and some birds use to winkle out termites and other insects to eat.

A side note: the just-delivered issue of Scientific American has, on its back page, a brief survey of the most numerous species of birds. The House Sparrow is the most numerous known wild bird, having a population estimated to be between 1 billion and 3 billion. A quick search for the numbers of mice yields an estimate of around 20 billion. There are also that many chickens and a billion swine (bonus results of the search), but those are domesticated, part of human culture; there would be far fewer of them if we weren't raising them. But this does indicate that, for our size, humans are much more numerous than we would be without our admittedly huge level of technology, even in the Third World.

It is good that at least some of us are getting more comfortable with being part of nature. The divorce from nature, almost exclusively in Western culture, has led to this quote, about the strain between proponents of the Enlightenment view and those who held back:

Those who balked at this epic drive to disenchant, who failed to champion the notion that there are eternal truths discernable, as Voltaire put it, by "anyone of good sense," were considered ignorant, underserving of respect of consideration. So should you ever wonder where hostility toward intellectuals comes from, or why educated white men have so often irritated the crap out of people from other backgrounds, the Enlightenment is a good place to start looking.

That is from page 55 of The Eight Master Lessons of Nature: What Nature Teaches Us About Living Well in the World, by Gary Ferguson. He has worked as a naturalist for the National Park Service, and writes about his experiences in this book, along with his interpretations of the lessons one can learn by spending more time in natural settings.

It is worthwhile for us to dwell on eight terms that I glean from his eight chapters:

Mystery, Connections, Diversity, Yin-Yang Balance, Zoomorphism, Efficiency, Resilience, and Memory (i.e. Mentoring)

I will dwell a moment on just three of these.

• Diversity is not just about racial balance in schools, cities, and workplaces. It is about variety versus sameness. A litter of kittens will have one or two that are bolder, another that is more skittish or shy; some will be affectionate pets and others more aloof. The intelligence of the womb ensures that at least a few of these cats will be well adapted to a changing world. A field of wildflowers of many colors is unlikely to be wiped out entirely by some sudden event such as a new disease or a giant storm: Even though some of the species in that field may be entirely destroyed, not all. We are happiest when we have learned to relate to people of different backgrounds. It is good to be "cosmopolitan". Excessive narrowness is unpleasant. I rejoice in having, among my closets friends and associates, people from a dozen nations and a half-dozen Western "subcultures."
• Yin-Yang Balance refers to the balance of masculine and feminine qualities, as traditionally understood. The Chinese Yin-Yang diagram is shown in several ways, with the dark section sometimes ascendant, the light section sometimes ascendant (more commonly), or with the sections side by side. I chose to put them all together, with the understanding that these are "clockwise" tadpoles, and a mirror image is equally possible. The "enlightened" suppression of any roles for women "outside house and home" is thankfully ending, but we still have a ways to go. Animals and plants cannot afford to suppress anything, for reasons expressed in the chapter on Efficiency. A man with no feminine attributes is as unpleasant as a woman with no masculine attributes. We each embrace both, even though each of us will emphasize them according to our nature and learning. More exposure to nature can help us learn to achieve a more harmonious balance.
• Zoomorphism is the opposite of Anthropomorphism. For a few hundred very unenlightened years, animals were treated as automatons, having only "instincts", and any evidences of pain or emotion were denigrated as "automatic responses." If we, at least those of us with a scientific bent, truly understand what Evolution means, we realize that our feelings and emotions and reactions descended from our animal ancestors along with the size of our bodies and the strength of our muscles. As a Cheyenne elder told the author, "We're the ones who took our qualities from the animals. It's never been the other way around." (p. 127) True science embraces this.

When you get down to it, we all feel better when we spend time in a natural setting. It is a rare person indeed who, taken into a field or forest, dashes back to a cubicle as though fleeing a monster. The author describes some chemicals in the air of a forest that may explain why taking a "forest bath" makes us feel so good. Chemicals or not, getting outside, even in a manicured yard, is better than spending all one's time locked away indoors. For myself, I know I must at least take a walk frequently; daily is best. I'd rather do that outside than do "mall walking" unless it is raining (and even then, if it isn't raining too hard…).

As much as the author has worked in the natural world, some glaring ignorances appear. On p. 76 he speaks of us sharing the planet with "more than a trillion species of plants, animals, insects, and microbes." The best current estimates of the number of species, including microbes, is between 100 million and 1 billion. Perhaps he was influenced by the understanding that each of us is host to tens of trillions of bacteria, primarily in our intestines. I am also not sure why he writes of 23 "universal proteins" in all life. There are 20 amino acids, which are used to make up all the millions of proteins found in living cells. The human genome is composed of 23 chromosomes, each of which consists of around a hundred million ACGT "letters". Again, perhaps two facts got mixed-and-matched in his mind.

The writing is lyrical and enjoyable. It becomes clear that the author is still processing the death of his first wife fifteen years ago. Having had significant losses in my own life, I understand that some things you don't get over, you just learn to live with the gap. I am thankful he has married again, happily.

Weather understanding for attention paid

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, weather, climate, nature

My favorite weather book nearly fifty years ago was Look at the Sky and Tell the Weather by Eric Sloane. When I saw The Weather Detective: Rediscovering Nature's Secret Signs by Peter Wohlleben, an author I've read before (The Inner Life of Animals, and The Hidden Life of Trees is on the agenda), I figured it might bring "naked eye" weather observation a bit more up to date. Eric Sloane is a hard act to follow, but Peter Wohlleben does a creditable job.

The author is a forest warden in Germany (the book was translated to English by Ruth A. Kemp). In such a trade, one must make the most of observations. Instruments are useful but don't replace our own senses. We come equipped with senses that can dig out a lot of information about, not just what the weather is now, but what it is likely to do soon.

He writes that the weather forecast on the radio or TV is pretty general, and to get the most out of our garden spaces, we need to know their microclimates. In the section on observing and measuring temperatures, for example, he points out that two plots sited just a few yards/meters from one another can have average temperatures in any season that differ by as much as ten degrees (that's °F, because the translator converted lots of units also). Of course, shade or its lack can have a big effect, but so can reflectors (nearby shrubs or walls) and screening plants that lift the wind.

He recommends getting to know the local plants, in addition to those you are trying to grow (flowers, vegetables, shrubs, whatever), many of which respond to temperature, brightness, humidity, etc. He tells of Linnaeus's "flower clock", with twelve segments containing plants with flowers that opened at each hour. It was insanely troublesome to keep maintained, because most plants bloom for a few weeks at most, so the gardeners had to rip out plants and set new ones every 2-4 weeks. That didn't last long!

There's a very useful chapter, "How to water properly", that describes what the layers in the soil beneath our garden or yard are likely to be, and why we need to water more deeply and less frequently, compared to the daily schedule many of us keep, particularly if we have a sprinkler system installed (much less common in Europe than America).

Here and there in the book climate change/global warming is mentioned. When he does get to discussing that matter, his approach is different from anything you'd read by an American author. No shrillness, no finger pointing. The current warming going on is a fact, so how will we cope with it, and how will we help plants and animals cope. Of course, most animals are mobile. Plants are not, but some can spread towards a better place surprisingly fast, by having seeds that travel or are carried by animals. For context, he discusses how living things adapted to a warming episode a few thousand years ago (more than two degrees warmer than now), to a similar but shorter one during the Middle Ages, and the "Little Ice Age" just 200-300 years ago.

So at this point, he is discussing more than just what the weather is, but how things react to it. "Invasive" plants and animals are non-native organisms that wind up in a place they did not originate, and do well there. About 1% of them do so well they suppress the thriving of other organisms, or destroy them. I think of Kudzu, the Japanese wild vine that is covering trees everywhere in the southern half of the eastern U.S. (from Texas west, it's too dry); or the Spotted Lantern Fly, a rather lovely insect that came from Asia recently, probably by accident, but is beginning to do great damage in the northeastern U.S.; and then there is the Starling, a European bird that I call a "weed bird", because in many parts of the U.S. most of the "blackbirds" you see, flying in large, coordinated swarms in season, will be starlings.

The closing sections are an invitation to experience the weather with all our senses, to get to know it, to remember what follows what, so we can know what to expect from what is happening right now, and what just happened earlier. Humans have the best general vision system of any mammal or bird. It's there for a reason. By comparison, we don't hear or detect smells nearly as well as other mammals, but those senses are still very useful. We can actually hear how strong the breeze is, when it is still high in the trees where we don't feel it.

It's a good book to use to help you get acquainted with weather and weather signs where you live, wherever you live. By the way, I got curious about the author's surname. "Wohlleben" means "healthy living", a fitting name for a nature warden!

P.S. I finished this book three days ago, but the review sat nearly finished while I tended to other pressing matters. I shifted the publication date/time.

Can a scientist be well-rounded?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, nature, essay collections

Nearly a month has passed since I reviewed Eiseley, Volume One. Loren Eiseley's writing rewards close reading. If you are an aficionado of the Evelyn Wood speed reading method, you probably won't like Eiseley's essays. But if you can "slow down and smell the roses" you will find much to enjoy in Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos, Volume Two.

This book collects all of The Invisible Pyramid, The Night Country, and many selections from The Star Thrower. It is this last that probably engendered a parable about meaning that has circulated for most of my lifetime:

Walking along a lonely beach one windswept day, I saw that many starfish had been thrown onto the sand. I saw in the distance a man stoop, pick up a star, and sling it over the waves back into the sea. As I came up to him I looked around and said, "There must be thousands of starfish. You cannot throw them all back. How can it matter?" He held out a star and said, "It matters to this one," and flung it out to sea.

This is not a quote from Loren Eiseley; when he met a star thrower, he began throwing also, but said nothing to the man. That story is from an essay somewhere amidst Volume One. But, to take last things first, when he gathered essays to publish as The Star Thrower, perhaps he saw himself as one striving to do something "that matters to this one," among any who might read from him. These essays explore the boundary between science and, not just art, but everything else one might call "not science". Musing on the dramatic changes in human life that occurred once speech was attained, he considers the significant costs of our exceptionally large brain:

"His skull has enhanced its youthful globularity; he has lost most of his body hair and what remains grows strangely. He demands, because of his immature emergence into the world, a lengthened and protected childhood. Without prolonged familial attendance he would not survive, yet in him reposes the capacity for great art, inventiveness, and his first mental tool, speech, which creates his humanity. He is without doubt the oddest and most unusual evolutionary product that this planet has yet seen." (p. 357; emphasis mine)

The essay is titled "Science and the Sense of the Holy." Animals other than a very few primates (most especially humans) are divorced from considerations of time, space, and greatness (though not from rank: viz. pecking orders and the "Alpha male" phenomenon). A common house cat is able to anticipate tracking down the mouse she has just discerned beneath the stove in the kitchen. But for her, the next three or five minutes constitutes long-term planning. Your dog may consider you a deity, and thus the joking answer to the question some evangelists pose: "Why do we never see a dog set up an idol and worship it?", "Because dogs live among their gods!" But you dog's planning abilities are slender as compared to those of any toddler.

Eiseley gets to the meat of the matter in the essay "The Illusion of the Two Cultures." He writes here, and had written before, of the dismissive attitude he saw among numerous young scientists, that to pay attention to anything "arty" was quite suspect and to be discouraged, strenuously if necessary. These young Philistines are presumably in it either for glory or a good salary, but have no "sense of science."

Science is the art of the repeatable. The pinnacle of scientific achievement is to produce experimental results, publish them, and to have another scientist, or a laboratory full of them, reproduce the experiment and attain the same results. This is called "confirmation". Phenomena that cannot be repeated cannot be "confirmed" and are not admitted as science. Thus, one of my favorite parables (and less widely known than the one about the starfish), titled Non-repeatable phenomena:

There is a class of activity that is undertaken by nearly every person on Earth. Sometimes it produces great emotional responses—either positive or negative—and sometimes, not. Some people undertake these things alone, and some with one or more others; sometimes with many others. Some use various artifacts and implements, and others are able to obtain great results using only their bodily members. Some may attempt to repeat what others have done, to no effect whatever; others do so with greater and greater effect upon each repetition. There is no way to measure, ahead of time, whether a particular instance will be effective or not, or even perhaps quite negative. What is this activity? Music!

The same could be said of any performance art, of fine art, of "folk art"—which is fine art that hasn't been "discovered" yet—or even telling a story or joke ("Some can tell 'em, and some can't"). Thus, Eiseley gnaws at the great rift between "science" and "the arts" that had arisen in the past couple of centuries, and is growing still. Pointing out the need we all have for awe and beauty (I remember Einstein and his violin), he declares that this rift does disservice to both. It may not be possible to write great operas about the experiments of Edison or Faraday (though I once wrote a somewhat creditable sonnet about photosynthesis). Perhaps no painting can convey the beauty a mathematician sees in a new and succinct proof. But the best scientists everywhere confess that, when an experiment "comes together", they feel a sense of awe or beauty; when an astronomer has discerned a pattern in the dry data gathered from star after star or galaxy after galaxy, the emotional release equals that from hearing the climax of a great symphony as performed by a great orchestra. By the way, check out the audience who paid $100 or more to hear, say, the Berlin Philharmonic perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. People whose day job is technical or scientific will be well-represented. Thus Eiseley declares that "the two cultures" so frequently decried by some and touted by others, are an illusion. Without a sense of beauty, awe, and even holiness, few would persist.

I'll leave it to the reader to enjoy the first two-thirds of the volume and discover its delights. See why we are more similar to a slime mold than we may like to think ("The Star Dragon"), or how our attainment of wide-ranging consciousness of past and future has caused us to suffer "the wound of time" ("The Mind in Nature"). You won't be sorry.

The bones may be dry, but not the writer

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, nature, essay collections

Once or twice over the years I stumbled upon an essay by Loren Eiseley. He always had a fresh take on a subject, and his writing has a lyrical quality unlike anyone else from the mid-Twentieth Century on. So when I came across his collected essays in two volumes, I couldn't resist!

I've just finished reading Loren Eiseley, Collected Essays, Vol. 1, edited by William Cronon. This volume and its companion are the 2016 offering of The Library of America Series. Volume 1 contains in three sections the three books The Immense Journey, The Firmament of Time, and The Unexpected Universe, and a fourth section, Uncollected Prose.

In modern terms, Eiseley was primarily a hominin palaeontologist; he studied the bones and grave-related artifacts of ancient humans and their ancestors and related species such as the Australopithecines. He studied human and prehuman evolution. This is in contrast to an anthropologist who studies human artifacts as evidence of culture and technology. Gathering specimens of archaic humans has always been difficult and very few were known in the 1950's to 1970's when Eiseley was most active. As late as the 1990's you could fit all known specimens of non-sapiens hominids and hominins into a footlocker. A small one. In his day a largeish suitcase was probably sufficient.

When writing for scientific publication, he could write prose as concise and acerbic as any. When writing for the public—and it is clear that this is what he most enjoyed—he wrote with heart and imagination and great lyricism. I know no other like him. He could immerse himself in a different viewpoint and somehow the writing drags us in with him. For example, writing of a spider, that was spinning a web in the heat of a street light late into winter:

  "Good Lord," I thought, "she has found herself a kind of minor sun and is going to upset the course of nature."
  I procured a ladder… There she was, the universe running down around her, warmly arranged among her guy ropes attached to the lamp supports—a great black and yellow embodiment of the life force, not giving up to either frost or stepladders. She ignored me and went on tightening and improving her web. … a kind of heroism, a world where even a spider refuses to lie down and die if a rope can still be spun on to a star. (p 111)

He notes that the web was her entire universe, and that she paid attention to nothing that wasn't in direct contact with her web. Then he wonders what we are missing, thinking that all the universe we see is all the universe there is.

He had a kind of sideways take on natural selection. Clearly understanding evolution and evolutionary theory, he points out that the popular image of "survival of the fittest" is quite wrong-headed and actually back-to-front. More than once he described how little lungfish struggle from drying pond to, hopefully, wetter ones, and calls them "fish failures". The genetic pathway their ancestors took made them less fit as a fish, but more fit overall, allowing them to endure where "fishier fish" could not. A species of lungfish or something like it evolved into the earliest amphibian. Those lungfish that still exist aren't much in the way of being fishes, nor of being salamanders, but are a compromise of both.

In the same way, proto-human primates were small, became hairless and rather weak, adopting an upright posture before they had brain enough to be much of a toolmaker. Somehow this "failed ape" survived long enough to develop toolmaking, fire, and broader social groupings, all with a brain not much larger than a chimp's.

But at a later stage, language erupted. To this day we know less about the development of language skills than about the depths of the sea. In several of the essays Eiseley waxes lyrical about what this could have meant. Language effectively brought most physical evolution to a halt, substituting cultural evolution. Human culture effectively shields us from most strictures of natural selection. But as compared to the lungfish, are we closer to the salamander, or still only a little ways beyond the ape? Are we like the lungfish in truth, no more than halfway developed in a direction we cannot discern? Are we still "failed apes" and "not-quite amphibians"…let alone a true "land" animal along the track of that analogy? In one of the last essays in the book Eiseley wonders if, having grasped the fires of the universe, will we survive our own half-formedness and grow to be worthy of the powers to which we aspire?

Indeed. I can hardly wait to dig into the second volume!

Does Nature care that we want to save it?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, nature, biodiversity, invasive species

I lived on Lake Erie through most of the 1960's. During my high school years I worked at Cedar Point in the summertime. When we moved to Ohio I recall being told that the "sewage treatment system" for Cleveland was a series of pipes five miles long that took raw sewage out into Lake Erie. We took a boat tour on the Cuyahoga River to see all the bridges and buildings and how cargo vessels had to negotiate turn after turn to get to the docks. It seems they were continually spilling bilge and oil as they did so. The oil and sludge on top of the river was about four inches thick. We learned after we moved away that the river caught fire in 1969.

Lake Erie was effectively dead in those years. Oh, there were a few kinds of fish that could tolerate the pollution, mostly carp and other kinds that weren't worth catching to eat. We were warned not to swim when there was a north wind: sewage would blow ashore. The water was gray, and if you put your hand more than half a foot down you couldn't see it. One of my teachers liked to SCUBA dive in a "deeper" part of the western lake: the western quarter of Lake Erie is usually only six feet deep (less than 2m), but in a few areas it gets 20-30 feet deep, yet there are "reefs", or shallow spots that come near the surface, but they aren't visible in the murky water. In class one day he told us of being "down there" and hearing a loud crunch. He ascended and found that a yacht had run aground on a reef. He helped the old fellow get loose. The next day's newspaper had a little notice that the president of the Rocky River Yacht Club had been helped by a local teacher after "his yacht struck a submerged object." He laughed and told us, "That submerged object was the bottom of the lake!"

Fast forward twenty years. In 1988 a few specimens of a little freshwater clam from Russia called a Zebra Mussel were found in Lake Erie. Soon they were everywhere, covering the bottom, clogging drains and other equipment, and basically wreaking havoc. The little ZM's were also accused of driving the native species of lake shellfish and algae and some finfish nearly to extinction. Actually, looking back, it is clear that those declining natives were on the way out and would have succumbed before the mid-1990's, but something happened to the lake first. Zebra Mussels, as all mussels and clams, are filter feeders. ZM's happen to tolerate pollution better than almost any other freshwater bivalve. In their quest for plankton (tiny water creatures like amoebas and diatoms), each animal filters a quart of water daily. It takes out not only the plankton but many organic pollution particles also (like raw sewage - yum!). Multiply by a few tens of billions: the whole lake was getting filtered through the ZM's every week or two.

In a few years the water was noticeably clearer. The last time I saw the lake, you could see to the bottom in six feet of water, and I was told visibility is 20 feet or more in most of the lake. Cleaner water meant the native clams and mussels got healthier and staged a comeback, including those thought to be extinct. More algae now grow there because light penetrates farther. The nearly extinct lake sturgeon is rebounding. Sturgeons eat mussels, and seem to relish the ZM's. So do a few other kinds of fish such as smallmouth bass. Lake Erie is alive again. All due to a "dangerous invasive alien" that had the entire environmental movement in a tizzy for decades.

The new book by journalist Fred Pearce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation, is full of such stories. I cribbed a few of the details above from his account, which is based on the published record. He also writes of the Guanacaste trees, the national tree of Costa Rica, which was on the verge of extinction. Its seeds need to pass through the gut of a large mammal and be partially digested to germinate, but all large mammals had been extirpated—by humans—and the trees only existed because humans had been planting the seeds. Some would grow if their shell rotted enough after planting. Seeds left lying on the ground just piled up like so many rocks. An ecologist puzzling over what to do suggested introducing horses to the area, and it worked. That fellow saved a beloved tree from extinction, but paradoxically earned himself the hatred of multitudes of doctrinaire "environmentalists.

Pearce writes of the forests of Puerto Rico, restoring themselves on land that was abandoned after plantations of sugar (and other crops) went bust. But they are not restoring themselves with the tree species that grew there before; those cannot tolerate soil changed by a few centuries of plantation cultivation. No, "alien"tree species that had been introduced or otherwise appeared in Puerto Rico over the generations, and were growing here and there, spread quickly over the disturbed land and created a new kind of forest. Later some native species were able to return also. To an untrained eye, it looks the same as the fragments of "original" forest elsewhere on the island.

To be fair, Pearce also tells of places that have suffered after certain alien species arrived. Seafarers that arrive anywhere seem always to have rats along. Some rats grasp the opportunity to go ashore. On occasion, havoc results, and they eat everything in sight, including the eggs and young of many native species. There have indeed been extinctions of endemic species on some islands and other restricted areas. Colonial America is a prime example, and one species that was nearly extincted in Virginia was the colonists, after the rats they had inadvertently allowed ashore ate through their grain stores!

Whether carried by humans or not, species have a way of getting around. As described by Alan de Queiroz in The Monkey's Journey (reviewed here), long-distance dispersal by all kinds of unlikely species happens over and over again. Of course, things that fly or float travel better than more sedentary critters, but one need look no farther than Hawaii for an example: the archipelago has many endemic species of both plant and animal, species that evolved there, and it has never been in contact with a continent, nor even closer than a couple of thousand miles. All the endemics of Hawaii are descended from animals and plants that traveled, or were taken, long distances.

Think about this: Every time a new species arrived in Hawaii and began to reproduce there, it was an "invasive alien" species. By the time the Polynesians, now Hawaiians, had been there a few dozen generations, and the first Europeans arrived, what looked like primeval forest to the Europeans was about half consisting of species the Polynesians brought with them. Since then, more and more aliens have arrived. Some, such as the giant African tree snail, are doing damage. Most have just found a way to fit into the existing ecology, have done little or no harm, and have actually enriched Hawaiian biodiversity.

This introduces a major theme of The New Wild. "Alien" does not mean "Evil". It all depends. Even seemingly evil aliens, such as the Zebra Mussel, can do good in the end. ZM's are now part of the ecology of the Great Lakes whether we like it or not. To eradicate them now would cost a great deal more than it would have cost us, by purely technological means, to clean up Lake Erie, and we couldn't even afford that! The "evil invaders" cleaned it up, but not quite for free: industries do have the cost of cleaning mussel shells off their water intake pipes and other submerged equipment.

There's a nature center we visit from time to time. On a guided tour the ranger moaned about their problems with Multiflora Roses. I guess they were originally transplanted there to start briar patches where there had been none. As it happens, Multiflora can tolerate the pollution and drought associated with the way the land had been left before the nature center was set up. Native roses from the area cannot. But now, Multiflora is considered an "invasive alien" and they are trying to root out all the rose bushes. They can't do it. It is a Hydra problem (harking to the Hydra of Hercules). If you dig out a rose bush, you leave disturbed soil behind, and Multiflora just love disturbed soil. Rose hips or fragments of root left behind typically engender several new bushes where there had been only one. One step forward, four steps back!

So what is the New Wild? It is best understood by contrast to the Old Wild, a world of wild places untouched by humans. Old-growth forests. Pristine landscapes. Primeval territories that actually have not existed for tens of thousands of years. The Old Wild exists only in our imaginations. The New Wild is a new understanding of how nature works on lands that vary from little-managed to extensively-managed to wholly cultivated, in all of which nature does what nature always does.

"Nature" is a mythical embodiment of the myriad environments and their living denizens. We think of the "forest primeval", such as the deep woods of Maine referred to by Longfellow in Evangeline, as a virgin product of nature. Humans have been in Maine, as they have been throughout the Americas, for at least 13,000 years. The Maine forests in the 1400's may have been less heavily managed than the maize-farming areas along the Delaware River, but managed they were, for the rather modest timber needs of the Penobscot people. Without people, what would the forest have been like? There is no way to know.

We do know that the forests of the northern 2/3 of North America, even those that have been little used by Euro-Americans since 1492, are substantially different now than before, because of a much-beloved (by most) group of alien species: earthworms. The silent-treading natives of legend and lore had something going for them that is seldom found now, a thick layer of moldering leaves on the forest floor. Wherever there is water enough for fallen leaves to remain a bit moist, they are soon consumed by earthworms. But this was not so from about 15,000 years ago until the 1600's when Europeans brought European earthworms ashore. This was usually not deliberate; worms came in the soil around the roots of plants brought by the colonists. Native North American earthworm species are found only in the southern half of the U.S. and further south; the northern half of the country was scraped clean of its entire biosphere by glaciers, and the native worms travel too slowly to have re-colonized the north in only 10,000 years. Earthworms are one of the most successful groups of invasive alien species. We are better off for them.

A second theme of the book is that current environmental dogma, that it is best to root out and exterminate all alien invaders, is usually wrong-headed. He gives numerous examples that show how "invasions" usually increase overall biodiversity of the invaded landscape; how the supposed extinctions the aliens are accused of causing were usually already accomplished by the time of the invasion; and how the ZM is but one example of a much-feared alien species that turned out to be a blessing in disguise and actually contributed to the overall health of the environment.

There is one metaphor that Charles Darwin used, which we must do away with: Nature as 10,000 tightly-hammered wedges. He wrote of inter-species competition as the removal of one wedge so a different one could fit in. This is not so. Take careful note: THIS IS NOT SO. Rather than many wedges tightly filling all space, think of Nature as a field with many plants growing, yet not all the ground is covered (even in a well-fertilized lawn you can see dirt between the blades). Perhaps there are 100 species of plants in this field. Cast in some seeds of another 100 species and wait a year. Then count the species growing there. Not all of the new seeds will have done well, and you may find only 75 of the 100 new species has taken root. And the original 100? You may not find every one of the original 100 species, but chances are, they are all there if you examine all the field carefully.

I recall taking a young man from Beijing on a field trip in 1984. It was only in 1980 that Chinese students were first permitted to study in American universities, so he was one of the early ones. He was a real city boy. We drove from Rapid City, SD to Billings, MT, the northern way, along US 212 through Custer National Forest (it ought to be named for Crazy Horse, IMHO) and two Indian Reservations. He saw cattle for the first time (beeves are also a hugely successful invasive species in America). Later he saw pronghorn antelopes among the cattle. I told him what they were, and he asked, "Don't they fight?" I replied that there was grass enough for both, plus the pronghorn would eat cacti and many kinds of wildflowers that beef cattle prefer not to eat. So although a state like Wyoming or Montana might have more beeves than humans, the native ungulates have not been driven to extinction. Had we passed through the national forest at dusk, we'd probably have also seen deer.

A few of the examples in the book have numbers, and they show how the usual result of multiple invasions is for species diversity to increase by 50% to 100%, both of plants and animals. An "ecology" is not a finely-tuned instrument, nor a finite collection of tightly-packed wedges, but a more fluid situation. Adding dozens or even hundreds of new species is unlikely (except on a few very small islands) to result in the extinction of any endemic species, and the new species fit in, forming a new assemblage that works as well, or often better, than before. Nature is not static. Left entirely alone, things change continually, and new species arrive while existing ones die away, from any particular patch of ground. Change is the only constant!

I've rattled on long enough. The New Wild is not quite a call to arms on behalf of a new understanding of the environment, but it is intended to open eyes to a new way of seeing nature. It is unlikely to change the minds of the old guard with their idée fixe of exterminating all alien species. It represents a growing understanding, which I hope will prevail quickly (and more quickly as that old guard retires and passes on). People tend to jump to conclusions. Influential people jump just as quickly as everyone else, which makes them dangerous. Remember the adage, "Haste makes waste." I add to it, "A sense of urgency is the Devil's tool." Y'gotta think things through. Fred Pearce has given us a book full of reasons for thinking through our environmental premises.

Anatomy without all the dissection

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, nature, illustrations

I sometimes wish I'd have kept up the drawing I did as a child. A lack of eye-hand coordination meant quick drawings weren't accurate, and to draw a good likeness of anything was much too time-consuming. I sometimes marvel at the drawing skills of naturalists, pre-eminently Roger Tory Peterson, whose Field Guide series sets a very high standard for nature illustrating. Nature Anatomy: The Curious Parts & Pieces of the Natural World, written and illustrated by Julia Rothman is not quite a field guide, so much as an enthusiast's collection of nature arcana, illustrated in a more cartoonish style.

The "anatomy" is primarily external, no dissecting knife needed. This illustration of the parts of a flower from page 62, and a cutaway of Earth on pages 14-15, are about as "deep" as it gets.

Many more pages are devoted to catalogs of interesting specimens from every natural realm, at least for critters and plants larger than an inch or so. There is a good illustration of the various kinds of feathers on a bird, and one of the external anatomy of a typical insect, using an ant. This page of butterflies of interest to the author is typical.

A book such as this is not intended to convey lots of knowledge. Indeed, if you add up the words, they amount to a small chapter. Rather, it introduces the reader/viewer to all the breadth of living things. Quite an enjoyable book.

Connections in the sky

kw: observations, nature, insects, birds

We just returned from a walk in a nearby schoolyard. It rained this morning, and the air is humid. When we walk there we sometimes see a few dragonflies zooming over the grass, catching small insects we usually don't see. This time, at one end, we saw dozens of dragonflies canvassing a small area of a couple of hundred square feet. As we made our rounds, we watched them. Then, we saw that there were many small flies, brown and a little larger than fruit flies. They were probably having a mating flight, triggered by the rain, and they were the prey of the dragonflies. At one point, my wife saw a dragonfly snag one of the little flies right in front of her.

On our last go-round, we looked up to see that there were actually a couple of hundred dragonflies filling the air, to a height of thirty or forty feet. In the top reaches of this insect abundance, three or four swifts were zooming back and forth, taking the occasional dragonfly. There we had it, three links of the food chain on display.

A bee and a catcher

kw: photographs, nature, bees, spider webs

Of the "nature photos" I took around the yard this year, these are my favorites. Click on either image for an 800x533 version. Both pictures were taken July 16, 2011.


I was a member of the Great Sunflower Project for a second summer this year. That means I spent 15 minutes at a time, a few times weekly, standing around waiting for bees to visit my sunflower blooms. Of course, when the nearby Hydrangea was in bloom, it got all the attention (it has nectar, and sunflowers don't). Among the visitors was this large bumblebee, and I got this great shot of it.


The same day that I took the picture of the bumblebee, I noticed this orb web attached to blackberry canes and fern stems, blocking my way to the faucet. I took several photos, including this one that shows the whole web in reflected sunlight. My best photo ever of an orb web. I waited until the next day to remove the web; didn't have the heart while it was still nearly perfect!

Nature calms my heart

kw: nature, astronomy, photographs

I suppose I ought to have a label for naked-eye astronomy. As dusk deepened into night this evening, my wife and I took a walk along and through a small patch of woods near our house. The Moon and Venus made a pretty pair as we got far enough from the trees to see them clearly. I was glad I had a camera with me.

You can just barely see "Old Moon in New Moon's arms", or earthshine off the Moon. In a darker sky it will be quite evident.

Just having the walk together makes us both feel good, and having a bit of relatively natural landscape nearby in which to walk is all the better.

Sunflowers fading

kw: nature, wildlife, conservation

My sunflower plants are done for the year. In a summer of recording bee activity for The Great Sunflower Project, I learned a few things:

• At this latitude, don't bother planting seeds until late May. The first plant didn't come up until June.
• It takes another month for the first flower to appear.
• On a robust plant (I had one very robust plant and two much smaller ones), a new flower will bloom every 3-4 days.
• Only the latest 2-3 flowers have any pollen.
• Don't expect to see honeybees; they concentrate on nectar-bearing blooms, and sunflowers have no nectar. (The GSP is all about native pollen-gathering bees)
• Goldfinches love half-ripe sunflower seeds. They picked the flower heads almost completely bare within a couple of weeks of each one getting seed development.
• There are five common species of native bee in this area: two sizes of bumble bee, 30mm long and 25mm long; a green-thorax-black+yellow-abdomen mason bee of the genus Osmia, 20mm long; a small green bee, 15mm long; and a bee colored like a honey bee but about 18mm long (honey bees are 25mm long).

During just over 60 days that my plants bloomed, I made more than 40 observations of bees, plus a few days when no bees landed on the flowers. The mason bees were most frequently seen, followed by the smaller bumble bee. I had a variety of other blooming plants that came and went in that time. The chives brought the most bees; they have plenty of nectar, though the flowers are very small. They were the only place I saw honey bees. The most common nectar-gathering bee, however, was a tiny black bee, 9mm long or less.

I am looking forward to next Summer.

A lyric of less-peopled places

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, essays, nature

People have two opposed yearnings, to be comfortable, and to be one with nature. The title of Susan Hand Shetterly's book indicates she's trying to have the best of both worlds: Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town. Nearly forty years ago, she and her husband moved to a cabin in Maine, with the stated desire to "get back to the land." She notes being amused by the word back; they hadn't been there before. And anyway, if you're "settled", is it "wild"?

She writes little of the struggles and privations of "the simple life". Indeed, as she and her husband both had "day jobs" that they could pursue from anywhere, they were not wholly dependent on their (slender) farming abilities. Ah, the age of telecommunications. Our author can write for Maine Times or Audubon Magazine while living anywhere at all. So she writes primarily of relationships, with both animals and people.

Two essays reveal her evolving relationships and accomodations with difficult neighbors. I don't mean bad neighbors, just good-hearted people with widely differing points of view. One of them, Ray, is a trapper and the author's dog was once caught in one of his traps. Though this got them started on rough footing, much of that essay is about Ray helping her clear her woodlot. She doesn't mention whether he worked for pay or was being neighborly. I suppose it doesn't matter. He and she were able to speak frankly of their opposed views on wetlands preservation, and of a growing accommodation that resulted.

For some years she was active in bird rescue, and she writes of raising this robin or that raven to self-sufficiency. She writes also of answering a call about a young bird "mourning" its dead mother. Upon arriving on the scene, she is able to instruct the onlookers that this is a Cooper's hawk, which is eating a larger bird that probably died from hitting a car.

There are hints of difficult times. The stresses of the lifestyle ended the marriage, and she writes a little about the extra planning one must do to cope with a Maine winter. But she primarily writes of enjoyment. There is much to see, and she wants to see it all. She writes of putting her children to bed when they were young, then throwing on a shawl to step outside to see the stars. There are few places left that you can do that and see a sky worth standing in the cold wind.

The reading is easy, and I finished the book all too soon. I am re-reading portions. Books like this make me thankful for the gift of written language. I could not long endure "going back to the land." But I can enjoy the experiences of one who has and could write such lyrical essays about it.

Steps on a spiral staircase

kw: nature, mathematics

By an interesting coincidence, both the book I most recently reviewed and the one I am now reading place a certain emphasis on epigenetics. The word means "beyond genetics" and refers to influences on the development of a creature that depend on something more than pure genetics. One example given is of elk that inhabit the Yellowstone ecosystem, which is very optimal for elk, with lots of open space (they can see predators from far away) and forage. They grow big there. By contrast, elk that live in more forested areas such as the Black Hills are smaller, though genome sequencing shows they are the same species, even the same subspecies. Offspring of elk from a forested area taken to Yellowstone do not grow as big as Yellowstone "natives", which is taken as evidence for epigenetic inheritance.

I'd want to see how the grandchildren do, because maternal nutrition affects the development of her offspring. We see this in humans. Children of a poorly nourished mother are smaller and develop later than those of a better-fed mother. Conversely, many immigrants to the US who bear children at least a few years after immigration find that those children are larger and develop more rapidly than siblings born in the "home country". They frequently grow to tower over their parents. This is not evolution in action, it is the expression of potential that is either released or repressed by environmental influences.

In the current book, much is made in one chapter of the spiral patterns seen in many plants and animals, and their relationship—not always so faithful—to the Fibonacci Series. This famous mathematical series is produced by successive addition of terms: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so forth, each term being the sum of the prior two. The ratio of successive terms converges on the value Φ (Phi), the Golden Mean or Golden Ratio, which is, to eight decimals, 1.61803399. Phi is also equal to one plus the square root of five, all divided by two, (1+√5)/2.

Do this: take off your shoes, and mark with a pencil on the wall the level of the base of your rib cage. This is your waist height. If you don't know your height accurately, mark that also. Measure. Divide your height by the height of your waist. For me, the two values are 72" and 44". 72/44 = 1.64. For most people, this ratio will be between 1.55 and 1.7. For a lot of people, the average is about 1.62, so that is often stated as an example of the Golden Ratio in human growth.

I guess Michael Phelps, the swimmer, is a big exception. His waist is 4" (10 cm) closer to the ground than it should be. In one article it was stated this way: He has the torso of a 6'-8" man, and the legs of a six-footer. He is 6'-4" (193 cm). From this I infer that his waist height is, rather than the 47" we'd expect, about 43", and his height/waist-height ratio must be about 1.77. This departure from the norm, however, makes him "built for swimming", with longer arms and stronger legs than anyone else his size.

Plants exhibit more exact Fibonacci Series values than animals. This sunflower bloom has spirals formed by the ovules (soon to be seeds). If you print this image and count the spirals, you'll find there are 55 that sweep to the left as they spiral outward, and 34 that sweep to the right. These are the 10^th and 9^th Fibonacci numbers, a Fibonacci pair. Different flower species have different numbers of spirals, but always, barring damage during growth, they form a Fibonacci pair.

We could say the flower head has a problem to solve, to develop seeds that pack together so as to fill the space without wasting space. The solution developed over time by natural selection is to have the seeds gradually increase in size and plumpness from center to edge, and to segment the seed head according to chemical gradients based on Fibonacci pairs. Underlying this segmentation is a mechanism that begins with 2 and 3, the 3^d and 4^th Fibonacci numbers, and advances stepwise to the values used to place the ovules, each of which develops into one seed.

The series doesn't have to proceed nearly as far to generate the spirals seen in the base of a pine cone. This one has 8 and 13 spirals. Even though the sunflower plant is an angiosperm and the pine is a gymnosperm, similar genetic mechanisms underlie the development of these structures. The use of Fibonacci pairs to pack things into spherical or circular spaces was developed very early.

It reminds me of the principle of a knurler. This is a machine tool used to put the crosshatch grooves on a metal knob. I learned to use one many years ago. It has two smooth rollers and one with the crosshatch knife pattern, and works like a plier. The piece to be knurled, typically an aluminum knob, is centered in a lathe and is rotated at about 1-2 turns per second. Beginning with a light touch, the knob is grasped with the knurler and the machinist looks at the pattern to see how well it fits around the knob. It helps to start with a knob with a dimension that will be a good fit, but the fit will change as the grooves are deepened, so you have to start with a slightly oversize knob.

The knurler's handles can be twisted to make the tool bite at a little different angle, to improve the fit. When there is a near match, the machinist squeezes hard, and the pattern entrains and deepens. Four or five seconds is enough to get a good knurl. When it is done right, you get a nicely knurled knob without chatter marks caused by misfit.

The pattern of a sunflower blossom or pine cone is determined very early. The growth of the entity then fixes the pattern and retains the fit. This is how natural systems work. The sunflower ovules or cone scales, as they grow, are controlled by their surrounding fellows, so all grow evenly and the final product is very uniform.

But the most important learning from these patterns is this: They result naturally from simple rules followed when you have a finite number of items to pack into a space. They are digital items, and only pack well when they are arranged according to a Fibonacci pair. You are welcome to try to make a sunflower head that contains 9 and 17 spirals, or 40 and 60, for example. Of course such things can be drawn, but they'll look rather odd. More to the point, they can't be generated by simple addition from starting numbers like 2 and 3.

Plants like this succulent look a lot like an unopened pine cone when they are very small. They express Fibonacci numbers in another way. The problem to be solved here is to give each leaf maximum sun exposure. This is done by using the square of Φ, which is about 2.618 (in exact terms, Φ² = Φ+1). 360°/Φ² ≈ 137.5°. If you start with the top leaf, the next one down is about 137.5° around the plant, and so forth. For this particular plant, I counted round and round until I found a leaf that is just below the small one that points down and to the right. It is the 13^th leaf after that first one, and the number of turns around the plant stem is five. Five and 13 are not an immediate Fibonacci pair, but a pair with a skip.

Many plants have similar arrangements. Sunflower leaves tend to repeat after eight leaves and three turns. This leads to an angle of 135° from leaf to leaf. If any plant were to have exactly 360°/Φ² from leaf to leaf, then no leaf would ever be directly below any other. However, nature really isn't that exact. A 3-for-8 or 5-for-13 ratio is good enough.

If you make squares of dimension 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and so forth, they will pack together as shown in this diagram. The smooth curve is the Fibonacci spiral, and it is very close to a logarithmic spiral with a parameter of Φ⁴ (the parameter is the ratio between one turn's width and that of the prior turn). The turn-to-turn distance increases by Φ each quarter turn.

Curves that closely approximate logarithmic spirals abound in nature, because many creatures grow according to their current size, adding a certain percent each month, for example. This is different from the pre-patterning that leads to sunflower head spirals, but has a similar result: spirals that open up as they go out. If you compare the Fibonacci spiral here with the spiral patterns on the sunflower picture above, it is clear that the sunflower spirals of both directions are more open; they have larger parameters.

The chambered nautilus shell is a great example of a logarithmic spiral, as exact as nature is able to produce. Though it has often been stated that nautilus shells follow a Fibonacci spiral, this is not so. The blue line in the image is a Fibonacci spiral. Its parameter is Φ⁴, or about 6.85. The nautilus shell's spiral has a parameter nearer to 3. Snails also have spirals with parameters in the range around 3, which seems to be optimum for an animal to increase in size and have a living chamber that is deep enough to retreat into, but the shell doesn't get too heavy to lug around. No small-number addition here, just growing by proportion. Fibonacci ratios don't seem to have much to do with animal growth.

These examples are considered to express "laws of form" that nature imposes. I guess you can call them that. They emerge naturally from the growth and development of a creature subject to the constraints of its environment: gravity, nutrient availability and space. I suspect a chambered nautilus that experienced a period of near-starvation would have some kind of variation in the curve of its shell. Nothing stays the same, and just as one can grow a cubical watermelon by growing it into a Plexiglas box, we find that genetics provides the potential, and environment either nurtures or hinders it. But it would take one heck of an environmental upset to produce a sunflower that had straight radial lines and concentric circles instead of spirals, if it were possible at all!

Windy sunset

kw: photographs, photography, nature

The nice thing about wind at sunset is that the clouds move, so the view changes frequently. The trouble with wind at sunset is that the clouds move, which causes jitter in HDR images. I'll be teaching photography classes this Summer, and there is always demand for learning special techniques such as HDR. Sunsets are good for that, and I knew a cloudy, windy day would probably have a nice sunset. I popped over to a wildlife refuge in New Castle County to see if I could get a few example image sets.

By the way, HDR, for High Dynamic Range, ought to be called CDR, for Compressed Dynamic Range, because that is actually what you are doing. You are bringing in the washed-out highlights and the blacked-out lowlights to show more of the details the eye can see better than a one-image camera can. The software I use is EasyHDR Basic (the free version). My camera can exposure compensate beyond the +2EV/-2EV limit of most cameras, so I tried one image with five exposures (-3EV, -1.3EV, 0, +1.7EV, +3EV) and the software did its thing just fine. I won't be showing that here, though, but two of the 3-image (-2,0,+2) sets and singles for comparison.

Early on, just after the Sun moved behind the bar of clouds near the horizon, I shot a series that included this, which the camera tells me is its best exposure. One has to peer closely to see any detail in the nearly black foreground, and the reddish area below the clouds is washed out.

I optimized this HDR image to emphasize the sky colors, so the foreground is still rather dark. However, the red area below the clouds shows up much better. Note that the clouds look "stuttery" compared to the first image. That is due to cloud motion between shots. The wind was 40+mph at ground level; there's no telling how fast the clouds were moving!

Here is a zoomed-in image, a single again, with the Sun just peeking through the trees. The light meter in the camera was pointed at the sky above the clouds. I like this image. Let's see if HDR can do better.

This is closer to what I could see, though still not quite what I'd like. The red area is very nice, more balanced, and the sky looks good. It is pretty hard to get the foreground to show anything. The car in this image was in just one of the images used for this composite.

OK, one more bit of tinkering. I cropped a chunk out of the middle of the prior image and boosted the lowlights a little with the "brighten" function in Irfanview. There is little detail in the clouds, so the image still lacks something. It might benefit from a heavy dose of Unsharp Masking, which Gimp can do (also Photoshop, but Gimp is free), but at this point, it is probably better to await the next pretty sunset.

Will the valley ever return?

kw: observations, musings, nature

Last evening we watched the new PBS show on national parks, "America's Best Idea". It is the first of six two-hour weekly shows.

In a long segment on Yosemite, the first piece of land set aside, when they mentioned the 1890 legislation setting aside the larger Park, they mentioned that the Hetch Hetchy Valley was included, but didn't go into the later battle over damming up the latter valley.

This is about half the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and its dam in 2006, clipped from Google Maps. At that time, the water depth was about 230 feet. There are two nearby reservoirs ("nearby" means they are roughly as far away as the size of the reservoirs), Lake Eleanor, also inside the Yosemite Reservation, and Cherry Lake, just outside. I wonder if they also drowned beautiful valleys.

From an economic standpoint, it is easy to see why Hetch Hetchy was chosen for a dam. It has the narrowest neck of the local valleys. Of the three sister reservoirs, Hetch Hetchy has by far the greatest ratio of water to dam. It was dammed in 1913, Eleanor in 1918, and Cherry Lake in 1956. The last of these has a dam with about ten times the volume of the others.

There is an ongoing effort by the Sierra Club and others to restore Hetch Hetchy. I would like to see that, but I don't expect it to happen. Growing populations need ever-larger amounts of water; increasing prosperity (yes, it is still increasing) requires more water per person. More people keep moving to California; not many people think as I do, that it is too crowded for comfort (I call L.A. County "the anthill").

I wasn't in favor of the much more recent formation of Lake Mead, but I'll say this for it. Getting around by boat, and visiting some pretty spectacular side valleys, is a lot easier now than it was before, by car on bad roads. I'll have to visit HH Reservoir in my circuit of National Park visits, and see what beauties still remain for someone boating around.

The last egg

kw: nature, photographs, birds

This image, very close to life-size on a 100dpi monitor, shows the egg of a Carolina Wren that didn't hatch. As I wrote in early June, one of the nest boxes I keep track of started the season with five or six Wren eggs, and at least four nestlings fledged. A day or two after the fledglings left the next, we found a single egg in the nest. In hopes that the birds were trying for a second clutch, as they sometimes do, we left it alone.

That was two weeks ago. Today, that single egg was still there, and we concluded that it was one that never hatched in the first place. We cleaned out the nest box. This is the nest with its lonely, dead egg. But it provides a good record of the appearance of the egg. The eggs of Carolina Wrens usually have more definite speckles. This one is more nearly a smooth, graded beige-to-brown with the darkest brown at the large end. Five weeks ago all the eggs had this appearance.

I found it interesting that the wrens nearly filled the box with twigs before making a soft nest near the top. They really like the smallest cavity that will accommodate their brood, with no leftover. Maybe this discourages cowbirds, which would also have a hard time entering a box sized for bluebirds. The first time I saw a wren nest, I thought it was starlings; this was before we had a front with a smaller hole put on this nest box. But a colleague assured me that is how the wrens build their nests.

A Photo day at Rockwood

kw: photography, nature, sightseeing

In May I visited Rockwood Park and Museum to scout the area for a photographic field trip (and posted on it here). Today was the field trip, with four photography students. I've put just a few more photos here, and you can click on each for a somewhat bigger version (up to 800px).

This is the house, from a bit different angle than before. I hoped to get a good picture of the other side of the house and its veranda, but it is being maintained, and there are blue tarps everywhere. This image is a panorama from three vertical images, so it is pretty wide angle, about 140°.

As luck would have it, today was the first summery day, warm and humid, that we've had this year. It has been a cool Summer so far along the mid-Atlantic. Nonetheless, we rather lackadaisically strolled about the grounds and tried out all kinds of photography. Since all the students this time are experienced in landscape photography, we spent much more time on intimate shots and even macro images.

Of course, we could not pass up the architecture. This "fruit cellar", which I can't tell from a root cellar, is not far from the main house. It could keep fruit longer just as a refrigerator can, for the same reason. Shaded by trees and built into the ground, it would stay 20°-30°F (~12°C) cooler than the house.

It seems we spent the first half hour making sure everyone could recognize poison ivy. The stuff is everywhere along the pathways outside the immediate grounds about the house. I didn't take any pictures of it; maybe I will for a future post.

Near the parking lot is "Edward's play house", now in ruins. Before the students arrived, I had my wife take this picture of me taking its picture. People have been wondering what I look like: I look like a tubby middle-aged guy, yes?

Perhaps this, or a similar shot, will be used by the Darlington folks for the promotion of future photography workshops. If you live in the West Chester/Concordville/Wilmington area, have a look at Darlington Arts Center as a place to learn music, dance, theater, and fine arts…and occasionally, photography.

The students were all interested in close-up and macro photography. These days it is pretty simple to put your camera in "flower" mode. Waiting for a live subject to "pose" is another story. In this case, it took a few minutes before this wild bee landed on a coneflower close to me, then I shot as soon as she crawled around the flower head. This is a full-resolution clip, a small part of the whole image.

It turned into quite a nature tour at one point: a few frogs and a snake, but I didn't get any usable photos of them. I was busy keeping everyone together. But there were enough insects to get another shot or two.

For example, this dragonfly kept landing on the same rock, so by keeping still a while, I got close enough for this somewhat distant shot. Again, this is a full-resolution clip from a much bigger image. To do justice to insects, I need to use a longer lens so I can photograph them without spooking them.

We were scheduled for four hours together, but the students all agreed they'd got what they came for by the three hour mark. We'd stopped and gone into the museum's ticket shop to get water, and it had begun to rain. I'm glad they liked it. It made for a pleasant day away from the office, and when I got home I had a nice, refreshing nap.

A few pix I like

kw: photography, nature, kaleidoscopes

The ice storm we had a month ago was about all the winter we've had so far. This storm had a sharp edge, both for precipitation and for temperature. Half an hour to the north, there was a couple inches of snow. We got sleet followed by ice. Half an hour to the south, just a spattering of rain.

I got outside just as the Sun broke through, backlighting the icy twigs and branches behind my neighbor's house. It is a pity that ice storms are so damaging, because they can sure be pretty. This one was mild, leaving only a thin sheen of ice. I've seen them load trees with an inch of ice all around all the twigs, bringing large limbs crashing down.

Nearly two months prior to the ice storm, the fall leaves were still pretty. I like this one as a reminder of the beauty that led to the cold. I like taking pictures of fall leaves. This is one of just a few I had time to take this year.

When I was a child, my father would load us all into the car and drive up into the mountains as soon as the leaves turned. He would take dozens of pictures of the leaves, and a few of all of us among them. One of my brothers still has some of those old Kodachrome slides.

The "best" leaves are always considered the red and orange ones. I wonder how our perception of fall would be different if fall leaves also came in blues and bright purples. Even among flowers, blue colors are comparatively rare.

On an entirely different note, I happened across this image, and backtracked it to Nikolas Schiller's blog, where a bunch of them may be found along with a host of other pictures of various kinds. The blog writer calls these images "quilts". I call them kaleidoscopes. They are high-resolution aerial imagery of selected cities, sliced on an angle and repeated into an electronic tiling. Very nice. Mr. Schiller sells high-resolution posters of them.