Tag Archives: Science

Life between the tides: Australia reflections part 6

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That last post about climate change and politics was a bit heavy, for which I make no apologies. But there’s always space for something lighter on this blog. Sometimes it’s nice to reflect on what brought me to the point of being a scientist with an interest in biodiversity. Some of my earliest exposure to natural history involved peering into rock pools on the coast near Sunderland in the north east of England. In an old family album there’s a photograph of me aged about four, intently gazing at the welks, crabs and anemones as they wait for the next tidal surge to bring food or predators. If I wasn’t in Australia I’d go and hunt that photo down and share it with you. Right into my 20s my dad would tell any and every one about my childhood obsession with “gannin’ on the yocks”. The word “gannin'” is north eastern colloquial English for “going” while “yocks” was me not being able to pronounce “rocks”. “I’m gannin’ on the yocks” became a family catchphrase that could be used in any number of circumstances. It might just sum up my professional career if I think hard about it….

Later, at school and then college, I took part in several class projects that involved running transect lines down the shore and examining the zonation of the creatures: more hardy organisms, predictably, at higher points, the sensitive species lower down. Generations of biology students must have done similar studies. Do they still?

These rocky shore reminiscences have been inspired by a great piece of writing about tide pooling by Sarah Jean McPeek over at the Lively Discussions blog. I can’t match Sarah’s eloquent lyricism but I can match her love of a rocky shore. There are some great ones on the coast near Coogee, ranging from very small, deep holes, up to huge, artificial ones that were built as ocean swimming pools. Here’s some photos:

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Holes within a pool. This is a great opportunity for a rocky shore ecologist to do a replicated manipulation experiment:

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This is a different kind of experiment to test the hypothesis that water in large pools has evaporated enough to make it significantly more saline and thus increase the buoyancy of the human body. Hypothesis supported:

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A classic wave-cut platform:

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This very distinctive seaweed is known as Neptune’s necklace (Hormosira banksii):

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This pool is being influenced by a freshwater spring that’s coming in from the left:

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These fresh water streams and pools are important for the local coastal birds, including silver gulls (Chroicocephalus novaehollandiae) which belong to the same genus as black-headed gulls (C. ridibundus) in the northern hemisphere but which I think is a prettier species:

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Australian white ibis (Threskiornis molucca) also enjoy the fresh water pools:

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Humans have inhabited this coastal area for at least 20,000 years and its the traditional land of the Cadigal people. In more recent times the locals have enjoyed the huge tidal swimming pool known as Wylie’s Baths. I’ve snorkeled here a few times and seen some beautiful fish and invertebrates:

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Much further up the coast at Port Macquarie, which we visited over Christmas as I recalled in this post, the geology is very different. The rocky shores are composed of hard volcanic basalt rather than the softer Sydney sandstone:

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This is an incredibly dynamic environment. According to my relatives in Port Macquarie, the place where Karin is standing was until recently a rock pool almost two metres deep that was rapidly filled up by the shifting sands of the coast. Winter storms will probably scour the sand out again. Will the limpets and barnacles have survived I wonder?

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Climate change, politics and a host of viewpoints: Australia reflections part 5

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It’s impossible to get away from discussions of climate change and its role in the Australian bushfires at the moment. It’s all over the Australian media, at least that part of the media that isn’t controlled by the Murdoch empire. Politicians of various stripes are falling over themselves to declare their point of view and some careers are (hopefully) being harmed by crass statements that try to belittle expert, informed opinion – the latest example from Twitter is #NotAWeatherGirl, which has been trendingfor a couple of days now.

If you have any interest in global climate change then the name of Prof. Michael E. Mann will be familiar to you, from his famous hockey stick graph, his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, his books on the topic, the RealClimate blog, as well as numerous media interviews and television appearances. Until yesterday we’d not met. But by coincidence, like me, Prof. Mann is also on sabbatical in Australia, is also working at UNSW, and is based near to us. Via Twitter I invited him for a meet up to discuss what’s happening in Australia at the moment and to set it in a global perspective. Karin and I met with Mike at a local café, along with an Australian journalist who has asked to remain anonymous, and we chatted for a couple of hours. From the position of outsiders coming from cultures that politically are moving closer together, and with an expert local perspective, it was interesting to consider what the USA, the UK and Australia have in common and what’s different. And of course, Karin’s Danish heritage provided yet another perspective. What follows is a short summary of our discussion and some additional thoughts.

One thing that’s clearly true is that the climate change deniers have lost. Period. There’s no faux science or dodgy statistics that they can fall back on that have any credibility. Fudging the data, as some have tried to do for Australia, does not work anymore: anyone willing to listen can see through this charade.

The world’s weather systems are changing, and they are changing EXACTLY in line with the predictions based on human-induced climate change. These changes are causing massive disruptions to natural ecosystems and to human societies, from the drought and fires in Australia and California, to the flooding in Jakarta and the American mid-west, and in parts of the UK. Karin’s been writing about this recently in relation to human stories from the bushfires and I recommend you take a look; as always, her take on such events complements my own.

The misery that these bushfires and floods have produced among citizens has prompted previously skeptical or agnostic politicians to act, or be seen to be acting. Those that don’t (and we’re looking here at Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the increasingly desperate Donald Trump – who’d’ve thunk he’d try to start a war in the middle of a personal political crisis….?) are going to find themselves quickly out of office. In this regard the British government is rather different, and Boris Johnson appears to be on board with the need to act on climate change. Even Piers Morgan seems to be hurrying to get on to the right side of history. But the danger is that it will be too little, too late. Denmark, of course, along with other Scandinavian countries is showing just how much can be done to cut emissions from energy generation, travel and agriculture, and to invest in a more sustainable future.

In the face of such overwhelming scientific evidence, the consortium of right-wing media barons, plus vested business interests and unfriendly foreign agents, have adopted a different tactic. Rather than deny the science they are targeting the individual influencers who they see as a danger to their power. The vile abuse of Greta Thunberg is the most obvious example, but Mike’s come in for his fair share of abuse too. Anyone with green credentials who flies or has a less than Spartan lifestyle is accused of hypocrisy, and the focus is being turned on to what individuals should be doing rather than what governments and industry can achieve much more easily and with greater impact. In Australia it seems there is a campaign to down-play the role of natural processes in the bushfire crisis by claiming that it’s mainly due to a spate of arson, and that “Greenies” have made the situation worse – Twitter bots and trolls have been implicated in this conspiracy.

All of this is an effort to undermine sustainability arguments: that we can have a sound economy based on social justice, environmental protection, green jobs, and a transition to a low-carbon economy. But we need some structural changes to the global economy, including getting away from this obsession with GDP and “growth”. This doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bath water and dismantling capitalism altogether. We were agreed that we need to build on the best bits of capitalism and open democracy, and move forward with that, rather than tearing down what has been achieved in terms of human progress. As I’ve mentioned before, Steven Pinker’s recent book Enlightenment Now has some great arguments on this topic.

Related to this is the fact that environmentalism does not have a political home – it is neither left- nor right-wing in focus: there are greens across the spectrum. Karin summed it up neatly this morning when she said: “Perhaps environmentalism is the catalyst to bring us together, no matter what our political beliefs or backgrounds are?”

This is important to appreciate because we all tend to gravitate towards others who share our views. Meeting face-to-face with people like Mike and the journalist is inspiring but there’s always the danger that we are talking within a bubble, an echo chamber that just reflects backs our own perspectives on the world. The same is true of social media. One of the discussions we had was about who we aim our blogs, books and Twitter messages at: who are we trying to talk to? Those people too entrenched in their views, who will deny the impact of, or solutions to the world’s environmental problems are a lost cause. Nothing will sway them. Those who agree with us don’t need any further convincing: they are already strong allies. But there’s a huge swathe of the population between these two poles that can hopefully be won over and convinced by sound arguments. That’s who we need to reach out to, that’s who I hope is following the tragic events in Australia and elsewhere in the world, and seeing what is really happening.

Jeff and Mike Mann

A land of fire and water: Australia reflections part 3

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Fire and water; those opposing elements have been our constant companions during this trip to Australia. All the major international news media have been reporting on how serious the bush fire situation is in the south east of the continent. In East Gippsland, Victoria, tens of thousands of residents and holiday makers have been advised to leave the area. Four thousand of those who haven’t left were forced to spend last night on the beach, as fires got closer to the town of Mallacoota. These are just the latest examples of climate change refugees in their own country, something I highlighted in a post about our visit to the USA earlier this year. Of course, Australia is a continent that is used to bush fires, they are nothing new. But what is new is the scale of these fires and the extended drought and high temperatures that are making the landscape more flammable than ever.

There’s currently a lot of media discussion in Australia about how landscapes were managed historically by Aboriginal peoples, whose selective and regular burning of the bush reduced fuel loads. Karin and I have just returned from Port Macquarie where we enjoyed Christmas with an Australian branch of our family. Several of them have spent a considerable amount of time working with remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. We were told a story about an Aboriginal elder who asked one of our relatives to drive him out to an area of bush that had not been burned for over a decade. It was that elder’s role to burn this land at regular intervals, a family tradition that went back generations. Having driven for several hours along dirt roads, the elder asked to stop; he hopped out of the vehicle, went up to a patch of dry grass, and casually set fire to it with a small lighter he was carrying. After pausing a few seconds to make sure that the flame had caught he hopped back into the car and said “Let’s get out of here”. An hour back down the road the companions stopped and looked back. The whole landscape was aflame, with a column of black smoke rising, I was told, in a mushroom cloud “like a nuclear explosion”.

This sounds extreme, but these areas are isolated and a long way from any human settlements or infrastructure. Such activities have been part of toolbox of ways in which Aboriginal peoples have managed these landscapes for thousands of years. By burning areas on a regular cycle the negative effects of large, out-of-control fires are reduced, and opportunities for seedling establishment and fresh foliage for animals to browse are created. There’s more information about these practices here and here.

In the more heavily populated parts of Australia, and in the adjacent national parks, fires have long been suppressed, such that when they do occur they are much more violent conflagrations, over a greater area, than would normally be the case.

On one of our trips near Port Macquarie we came across an area of woodland that had burned recently, separated by a small road from an adjacent block that had not burned. In the following set of images I’ve alternated the two blocks so you can see what the woodland looked like before and after burning. But remember that this was not an especially intense fire; the trees are still living, and there is foliage in their crowns. Once there’s been some rain and a chance for the vegetation to regrow, the previously burned block will look identical to the currently unburned area. Indeed in one shot you can already see some green shoots emerging from the ground:

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So fire in itself is not a problem for these natural communities. What is a problem, for nature and for the communities of people who live in and around these woodlands, is the intensity, the scale and the frequency of the fires that are currently occurring. This morning Karin and I watched silently to a news report of yet another volunteer fire fighter who had lost his life overnight. In this case he had been part of a crew whose 10 tonne fire truck had been lifted up and overturned by cyclone-strength winds created by the blaze itself – there’s a BBC news account of the tragedy here. “Unprecedented” is a word we’re hearing a lot on ABC News.

Evidence for the number and size of the fires was everywhere in and around Port Macquarie, as we observed when we took a drive up to the peak of North Brother Mountain in Doorgan National Park. From a height of about 470 m (1500 ft) we could see some amazing panoramic views of the region that also showed black fire scars on the landscape – this is looking south:

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Looking north there’s little evidence of the fires – some have occurred there but much smaller in scale. But there is a lot of that second element, water. We were able to explore some shallow coastal lagoons fringed with grey mangroves (Avicennia marina):

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Mangrove habitats are fascinating places that are ecologically important as nurseries for marine fish and invertebrates. They also provide physical protection to coastlines, acting as a buffer to storm surges that would erode the land. In recognition of this, a recent project around Port Macquarie has involved restoration of these mangrove areas and was instigated by commercial oyster farmers and a local fishing society. I’m particularly intrigued by the upward-pointing aerial roots of mangroves; termed pneumatophores, they function to provide oxygen to the trees, but also increase the physical complexity of the floor of the lagoon, providing habitats for small animals:

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But evidence of the drought in this part of the world is never far away. On our seven-hour train trip back to Sydney we passed mile after mile of parched farmland, with dried-up waterholes and dust-filled streams. The only thing stopping it from burning is the absence of vegetation:

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As I complete this blog post, it’s 31st December and we’re back in Coogee Bay, ensconced in the apartment of my colleagues Angela and Stephen. They have headed to Stephen’s native Canada to visit family. It’s going to be cold! We’re very happy to house sit and see in the New Year in warmer climes. Best wishes for 2020 to all of my readers: let’s hope that it’s the start of an environmentally more enlightened decade.

Ash on the beach, fire in the bush: Australia reflections part 1

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Although we’ve only been in Australia for less that two weeks, it feels as if we’ve been here forever; once we got over the jetlag and the weird sleeping patterns, Karin and I have easily settled into the life of a Southern Hemisphere summer. It’s hard to believe that back home in the UK it’s cold, wet and (politically) miserable….

We’re based at Coogee Beach in the eastern suburbs of sprawling Sydney, just a short walk from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) where I’ve spent most of my time, and an even shorter walk from sand and surf. It sounds idyllic but one of the recurring features of the past week has been the amount of ash and charred leaves washing up on the beaches from the bush fires that surround Sydney at the moment:

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The region is in the midst of an extended drought and this has worsened the fire season. The Australian Government seems intent on denying that it’s anything to do with climate change, though recently one of the state ministers has broken ranks. That’s going to be little consolation this year but may mark the start of some changes in policies. Let’s see.

During our time here Karin and I have facilitated a workshop on “Writing for a non-academic audience” which was attended by 17 UNSW postgraduate researchers. I’ve presented a lecture on “Macroecology and macroevolution of plant-pollinator interactions: pattern and process at large geographical and temporal scales”…..

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….and spent a lot of time chatting with staff and postgrads at UNSW. In addition, Angela Moles, Stephen Bonser and I have made initial progress with a short paper that I’m hoping will be ready to submit before we head back to the UK in early February.

Time to actually get out and see some of the habitats and biodiversity of this part of Australia has been limited. But we’ve done a couple of hikes north and south of Coogee Beach, along cliff-top trails and boardwalks through remnant coastal heathland habitat, enjoying the novelty of watching rainbow lorikeets visiting the inflorescences of native Banksia trees:

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Yesterday we went further afield with a bird watching trip down to the Royal National Park (RNP) with Kew/NRI scientist Phil Stevenson (who is in the country for a couple of weeks on a flying visiting to speak at a conference and meet with colleagues); and Graham Pyke from Macquarie University, whose work on foraging behaviour of pollinators I’ve known for many years, but whom I’d never met. Leading our trip was Steve Anyon-Smith, a professional bird guide who literally wrote the book on birding in the RNP. Steve was great, highly knowledgeable, and a mine of information about the Australian environment. As well as seeing about 67 bird species we encountered a host of other wildlife, and I collected data on wind and animal pollination for another set of species. Here’s some images from that day:

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An orchid – Dipodium punctatum.

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The bower of a male satin bower bird.

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Not a great shot – it’s an Eastern dwarf tree frog.

2019-12-13 13.14.41 This is better – a very confiding Eastern water dragon along a well-used coastal trail.

Along that trail we also saw two forms of Banksia serrata – an upright one and a prostrate form – growing quite close together:

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I’ve seen a lot of birds visiting the inflorescences of this species but it’s suggested that mammals might be the main pollinators – the flowers have a very thick, yeasty smell. Perhaps it’s both?

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An Australian fringe-lily.

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This is Epacris longiflora – thanks to Ryan O’Donnell for the identification.

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And of course we saw a lot of the iconic laughing kookaburras.

Steve was really concerned that much of the forest and wildlife in the NPR may be destroyed over the summer. None of it has yet burned and, with temperatures due to rise enormously by next week, much of this habitat could be lost to fire by summer’s end. I sincerely hope not, it’s too precious and beautiful to lose. Vegetation in relatively light burns can reestablish itself given time, as we encountered in one of the Coogee remnants that burned a few years ago:

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But the bigger, hotter, more intense fires that are currently sweeping the state are something else entirely, and are alien to these forests. Aboriginal Australians carefully managed their environment using regular, small burns, a practice that has been lost in most areas.

Fire in Australia is a theme that I keep coming back to. A few weeks ago, during one of my second-year undergraduate grassland ecology lectures, I was discussing fire as a threat and a management tool in grasslands. I mentioned the situation in Australia with respect to Aboriginal use of fire and I asked my students what the purpose of their burning the grasslands was. Someone suggested that it might relate to their agriculture. My response then was “no” because Australian Aborigines were nomadic hunter-gatherers who never developed agriculture, which is what the received wisdom has been for decades. The answer I’d give now is: “yes, quite probably”. As so often is the case in science, the received wisdom was wrong.

My colleague at the University of New South Wales, Angela Moles, has loaned me a book called Dark Emu which draws on early European settler accounts, Aboriginal oral tradition, and recent archaeological discoveries to turn our understanding of the ecology of pre-European Australia on its head. In particular, it seems as though the (then) very large Aboriginal population was much more settled and had developed a sophisticated form of agriculture that included the creation and exploitation of huge areas of native grasses for their grains. This was all destroyed by colonial European agriculture within a short time period, before it was fully understood. One of the arguments in Dark Emu is that these native grasses are much more suitable to the Australian climate than wheat and may allow more sustainable agriculture in the future.

If you want to know more, here’s a link to a recent review and interview with the author, Bruce Pascoe:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/24/dark-emus-infinite-potential-our-kids-have-grown-up-in-a-fog-about-the-history-of-the-land

Strange as it might sound for a professor to say, I was happy to be wrong on this (or indeed any) occasion: scientific understanding only progresses by people being wrong and incorrect ideas being superseded by new knowledge. I made a point of sending my students an email telling them about what I’d discovered. It may well form a question on the test they have to take next term…..

Bound for the Great Southern Land

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Great Southern Land, in the sleeping sun
You walk alone with the ghost of time
They burned you black, black against the ground
And they make it work with rocks and sand

Great Southern Land by Icehouse

Today Karin and I are packing before heading to the airport for a flight tomorrow to Australia. It will be Karin’s first trip to the Great Southern Land, and my second: I spent part of 1993 and 1994 there on a short postdoctoral research project.

We’ll be there for about two months. Karin will be writing (she’s working on a book and will be contributing further articles to Medium and other outlets). I’ll be working with Angela Moles and Stephen Bonser at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) on an Australian Research Council-funded project looking at whether species interactions affect the invasibility of plants native to Europe that are running wild in Australia. So it’s test of the “enemy release hypothesis” (leaving behind the herbivores and parasites) but with the addition of a “making new friends” hypothesis, i.e. gaining pollinators and other mutualists. That grant, plus a Visiting Fellowship to UNSW, is funding the trip.

In a post back in May I mentioned the Australian PhD researcher, Zoe Xirocostas, who is also working on this project. Zoe surveyed plant populations in the UK, Spain, France, Austria and Estonia over the summer. She is now back and in the middle of surveying in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania.

As well as that project I want to spend time finalising my forthcoming book, collecting some data on Apocynaceae pollination ecology (of course!) and do some community-level surveys of wind/animal pollination to add to a global data set I am compiling. Karin and I are also running a workshop at UNSW on “Writing for non-academic audiences” and I’m also giving a research seminar there and at Western Sydney University. In addition we are visiting friends and family over Christmas and the New Year. We’re packing a lot into a trip of two months! And of course work at the University of Northampton never goes away – I have project students and PhD researchers to advise and there’ll be the usual weekly blizzard of emails to clear…

Having not been back to Australia since 1994 it will be interesting to see how it’s changed – a lot drier and smokier I imagine… I’ll be updating the blog as the work progresses; over and out until we land in Sydney.

More on historical honey bee numbers in Britain

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Bees hives with earlier data points - 18th Nov

Following on from my post last week on historical changes in honey bee numbers in Britain, I decided to add the two extra, earlier data points to the graph just to illustrate what they mean for our understanding in how honey bee numbers may (or may not) have changed over the last 100 years.

The first data point is the Bailey & Perry (1982) estimate of 800,000 hives in the 1920s (which I’ve placed at 1929) that, as I mentioned, I think is wrong in terms of how they did the calculation.

The second data point is of 32,500 hives in 1919. It’s from the article that Andrew Hubbard drew my attention to, which seems to be a fairly solid government statistic, or at least no less solid that much of the other government stats (unless anyone knows any better).

If we accept the 800,000 figure at face value then we see a massive increase in number of hives of over 76,000 new hives per year between 1919 and 1929. And remember that’s being conservative as to what “the 1920s” meant to Bailey & Perry; if we peg the date at 1925 then we’re talking more than 127,000 hives being added to the British stock every year. In my opinion that’s not a feasible proposition.

A much more likely scenario is that the number of hives grew during the second quarter of the 20th century and reached a peak in numbers at some point between the 1940s and 1950s. That’s an increase of around 13,000 hives per year. It’s still a lot, but is not unreasonable in light of post-World War 1, and subsequently World War 2, agricultural reforms that I highlighted in my post about British bee and flower-visiting wasp extinctions. I’ve termed that “Jeff’s speculation” in the figure above because, in the absence of hard data, that’s all it can be.

As always, I welcome your comments.

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What exactly is a “pollination system”?

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Pollination systems

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for some time, but have never got round to. What’s catalysed me is an email this morning from Casper van der Kooi asking me about how I define the term “pollination system”, as he’d had some discussions about its use with his colleagues in The Netherlands.

“Pollination system” is one of those terms that seems to mean different things to different people. The way I use it, and I think the way we meant it in the 1996 paper Generalization in pollination systems and why it matters, is that the pollination system = floral phenotype + pollinators. That is to say, the colour, shape, size, odour, rewards, etc. produced by a flower (or an inflorescence functioning as a single reproductive unit) plus the animals that effectively transfer pollen.

To me this is distinct from a “pollination syndrome” which refers only to the floral phenotype, or “pollinator guild/functional group” which refers only to the flower visitors. However I have seen “pollination syndrome” used to include floral phenotype + pollinators. But to my mind they are distinct things.

I have also seen other authors use “pollination system” to mean the community of plants and pollinators in an area, or as analogous to the breeding system, but neither of those are the way that I use it. I decided to look at the history of the term on Web of Science and the earliest use on there is a paper by Levin & Berube (1972): Phlox and Colias – efficiency of a pollination system. There were a few other papers from the same decade and all were using pollination system in the way I described above, i.e. floral phenotype + pollinators.

To look for earlier usage of pollination system I searched the Google Ngram Viewer; as you can see in the image above, I found examples of the term back as far as the 1940s in which the pollination system of grasses is referred to as being “cross pollination” (i.e. what we would now refer to as the breeding system). There’s also texts from the 1950s referring to artificial wind pollination of date palms as a “helicopter pollination system”.

Does it matter how “pollination system” is used, or that it varies in meaning according to the author? Probably not as long as the meaning is defined in the text. Ecology is replete with terminology that has slightly different usage according to the researcher (“biodiversity” being an obvious example) and I don’t get a sense that this has held back the field. Or is that too optimistic a conclusion? Do you use the term in a different way to me? As always, your comments are welcomed.