Today I learned about the existence of oxbow lakes. These are pockets of freestanding water left over when a river meanders away, leaving an echo of the river from a previous course.
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, writes an intriguing piece about plant cognition in The New York Review of Books. She writes:
Several recent books contend that the latest discoveries in plant cognition are so significant they force us to rethink our view of life itself. Depending on how you look at things, this prospect is thrilling to contemplate or nothing less than tragic.
It goes on to describe some examples of complex plant behaviour:
Plants communicate with animals as well, sometimes honestly, sometimes not. Corn plants that are being nibbled by caterpillars release chemicals that attract parasitic wasps. The wasps lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, killing them
Randall has a way of making me think about things I never considered before. Now when I turn on the tap that provides near-infinite clean drinkable water I’ll think about how crazy it is that it just works.
Bees are incredible. Just a bunch of ladies hanging around flowers all day and making candy. Did you know when they fly they beat their wings at over 230 beats per second?
Thomas Seeley has spent a lifetime studying bees, and though his book also gives a good overall sense of how amazing bees are, it centres itself on one tiny facet of their behaviour—how they choose where to live. When bees need a new place to live, they form a swarm—a big bundle of bees which gather on a tree branch, or building, or other temporarily safe spot with their queen in the middle.
What they do next is fascinating, they send out scouts to look for suitable places to live. when these bees find a spot, they return to the swarm and perform a waggle dance for their peers. The angle and duration of their dance, similar to those they do to tell their hive-mates where to find sources of food, expresses both where the potential new hive is and also how suitable it would be to live it. Bees have a number of criteria for their abode, including the size (15 litres or more), size of the main opening (15cm square or less), height above ground (10-15 feet off the ground is best) and direction (Southward-facing if possible).
As the scouts return and perform their waggle dances, a sort of debate takes place. Competing spots are advertised, visited, and if found suitable, other bees will waggle dance in advocacy for them. Over a few days, the swarm slowly reaches a consensus, and eventually sets off for their new home.
This is the sort of book that could only be written by someone who has made their life studying bees. The author seems to be positively overflowing with the sort of deep knowledge that you only get after a lifetime of studying, and loving, something very specific. The book feels like it can barely contain all the author has to say on the subject—as if the author could have gone on for hundreds more pages on the subject. Paul Stamet’s Mycelium Running about all matter of funguses seems like a worthy comparison.
Built in the 1950s to test a rather ambitious plan to build a series of dams across large parts of San Francisco Bay, the Bay Model is an impressive, multi-acre scale model of most of the lower part of watershed. The model found that the plan was extremely flawed, and would likely cause extensive flash floods, but it lived on as laboratory to study the movement of water in the region until the early 2000s, when computer modelling became feasible.
The model was built with three different scales, with the vertical depth being exaggerated in order to improve the accuracy of depth measurements, and the scale of time on the model condensing the tide cycle down to under 15 minutes.
We unfortunately visited it when the water was not flowing, but there is a great little summary by Tom Scott:
A fascinating and risqué new podcast from the creators of Canadaland. Some viewer discretion advised.
From gay swans to self-pleasuring elephants and amorous giraffes, they learn how scientists have been understanding and misunderstanding queerness in nature for centuries. And they introduce us to a bold researcher in the 1990’s who helped us see nature for what it is – queer as fuck.
Friend of Elsewhat Jason Roberts has a new book, out yesterday, called Every Living Thing. His last book, A Sense of the World was beautiful and amazingly well researched, making this an instant buy (from your local independent book store, not Amazon).
The book follows the paths of two scientists endeavouring to come up with a taxonomy system to classify, well, every living thing. From the New York Time’s review:
Roberts’s exploration centers on the competing work of Linnaeus and another scientific pioneer, the French mathematician and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Of the two, Linnaeus is far better known today. Of course, Roberts notes, the Frenchman did not pursue fame as ardently as did his Swedish rival. Linnaeus cultivated admiration to a near-religious degree; he liked to describe even obscure students like Rolander as “apostles.” Buffon, in his time even more famous as a brilliant mathematician, scholar and theorist, preferred debate over adulation, dismissing public praise as “a vain and deceitful phantom.”
Their different approaches to stardom may partly explain why we remember one better than we do the other. But perhaps their most important difference — one that forms the central question of Roberts’s book — can be found in their sharply opposing ideas on how to best impose order on the planet’s tangle of species.
In preparation for my first ever total eclipse on Monday, I’ve repeatedly come across attempts to put the otherworldly experience of seeing a total eclipse firsthand into words. In Rivka Galchen’s Guide to the Total Solar Eclipse in The Atlantic, a cultural guide of sorts about eclipses, one of her interviewees says:
Describing an eclipse to someone who hasn’t seen one is like trying to describe the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine” to someone who has never heard music…You can describe notes, frequencies of vibration, but we all know that’s missing the whole thing.
I have seen a partial eclipse, but from all accounts that pales in comparison to the full show. XKCD summed up the difference between being in the path of totality or not in graph form:
But the best summary of the difference comes from Annie Dillard’s wonderful classic article Total Eclipse in The Atlantic. It dates from 1982, but feels as though it could timelessly apply to any total eclipse. It’s certainly worth a full read.
It comes with a reminder of how big a deal it is to be within the path of totality:
Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.
