How green is your evergreen tree?

TPP gets asked all the time about which is better for the environment, a "live" cut tree or an artificial tree for your holiday decorations? When you take the usual case, the answer is pretty simple. First please understand that no one is cutting down a forest anywhere to provide your tree.  They are farmed; they just take 7-10 years for the crop to get to a harvest-able stage. This means that the soil isn't being tilled/disturbed annually, so soil erosion is minimized, and some wildlife can live there too.  You natural tree can be mulched at the end of the season, totally recycled, so long as you don't use the stooopid plastic bags to stop a few needles from dropping on your carpets.  Just sweep them up. 
Most artificial trees are made of materials that are not recyclable, so even when you use such a tree for several seasons, it has a trash/land fill cost. You would probably have to use an artificial tree for 20 years to reduce the cost to a par with a natural tree. In TPP's opinion you can use natural trees with a more or less clear ecological conscience. Of course if you want a shocking pink tree to complement the leg in a net stocking lamp, well, then artificial is the way to go. Of course you could also flock your tree thus turning a natural tree into something nearly artificial. Who knows what that stuff is?
Signs for flocked trees generates some fond memories for TPP of his ancient school days when the assistant principle, a former Marine drill instructor turned punitive educator, used to impose detention upon students he caught cursing.  Now a good malediction is a useful thing for dealing with life's misfortunes and mishaps, particularly the unjust ones, but detention was awful. As bright, young enterprising youth interested in increasing our word power, a search was commenced for obscure words that sounded like swearing, but weren't. They just had to have a certain quality when said a certain way at the right time.  Our favorites were "scud" and "flock".  After being dragged to the Principal's office for saying, FLOCK!, because the contents of your locker spilled out onto the floor between classes.  And when asked about the swearing, you said, you explain "All I said was, flock, a group of sheep". The fun came from the look the Principal gave his Assistant.  
Now what was your question?

Messing with nature - you never can do just one thing

One of the most basic of ecological lessons, and a lesson most commonly ignored, is that you never can do just one thing.  Interactions among organisms and between organisms and their environment are complex and complicated, and when you willingly change one thing it can set off an entire chain or worse, an entire cascade of events.  Knock over one domino and it knocks down the next and so on, this is the simple case; what if when you knock over one domino, it knocks down three, and so on?  This lesson is at the absolute base of the problem of invasive species.  Here's an example.  Kudzu is a legume, a bean, and a vine.  It's a handsome enough plant under some circumstances and it was imported to North America as an ornamental species decades ago.  Because it can fix nitrogen like other legumes, kudzu will grow well on poor soil, so it was promoted across the south to help prevent soil erosion and help reclaim strip mine moonscapes.  But kudzu didn't stop there, and now the vine towers of kudzu are a familiar sight across the south as the vine clamors over trees, and fences, and barns, and anything else that isn't too fast moving.  The next event started in 2009 when a kudzu eating stink bug, also from Asia, was found in Georgia.  Somebody imported it because stink bugs just don't disperse that far on their own, and supposedly kudzu was its favorite food, but favorite doesn't mean only food.  What can possibly go wrong?  Well, what if this stink bug developed a taste for other legumes?  What if the legume was the soybean?  Somebody tries to be a do-gooder and import a bug that eats an invasive vine and the bug becomes a potential agricultural pest on a crop that is one of the USA's most important agricultural commodities.  See those dominos dropping?  Kudzu is also adapting to cooler climates and has been reported in Lincolnland as far north as Peoria, right in the middle of the maize and soybean desert.  And it appears this new invasive bug may be able to survive anywhere soybeans can grow.  So, there's the lesson.  Remember, you can't do just one thing.  Organisms just don't do what you expect them to do or want them to do, and you just start another cascade of unintended and unexpected events.  Let that be your lesson.

Summer Lawn Care

Hot, dry conditions are always a challenge especially for lawns, so the Phactor is here to provide the advice you need.  The basic principles of ecological lawn care must apply.  So please understand the following.  Lawn grasses go dormant under hot dry conditions, so to deal with this you must do nothing.  Yes, that's right, do nothing.  On my commute to work this AM a fellow was doing it completely backwards, the lawn was being watered and stressed young trees were being ignored.  Wrong, wrong, wrong, and to compound the error this fellow will have be out there mowing his lawn in 103 F temperatures.  On the other hand if you have planted any trees or shrubs within the past 12-15 months, water, water, water them.  If no amount of water seems to help, then in all liklihood the root ball was not properly spread at the time of planting (Yes, you've been instructed about that too.), so now you will pay the price, and if it makes you feel any better the Phactor learned this lesson the hard way.  Hot, dry conditions provide the proving ground for proper planting, although at times there's just nothing you can do.  Three Japanese yews were planted in different locations; two are doing fine, and the third is showing severe stress and may not survive and who knows why.  At any rate, when you hear that comforting crunch under foot you know you are treating your lawn correctly.

Weedism vs. anthropocentric botany

This was awhile ago, but scholarship got in the way of blogging showing some misplaced priorities, but still this deserves a reply by way of understanding how things go.
Over at Casaubon’s Book, the Phactor added a comment stating that “Weeds were any plant growing where you didn’t want it, ” and Darwinsdog jumped my case:
“Who are "you" (or "me" or "we") to say where a plant should or shouldn't grow? I say inoculate the planet from orbit with the propagules of everything, and let flourish what will wherever it will. And let be out competed and go extinct whatever will. How about that? If it works for humans, why not for every & all other organisms? What's with such blatant anthropocentrism?” Oooo!

An old cartoon shows a dog at a computer saying to another dog, “The niftiest thing about the internet is that no one knows you’re a dog.” And maybe that explains why darwinsdog seems to dislike a human perspective so much. However, in one sense, and only one, is the charge of my being “blatantly anthropocentric” true. The current success of weedy species is completely a product of human activities. Just as a thought experiment let’s do as this cur suggests and let the chips fall where they may after inoculating the entire Earth with weeds of all sorts, with no regard for what humans want or need, and now, based on a knowledge of ecology imagine the outcome if humans were not involved.
Weeds in a biological sense are adapted to disturbed habitats, so there are two kinds of weeds, natural ones, and those that exist because of our activities, and without the agricultural/horticultural activities of humans disturbances largely disappear becoming smaller and less common. Nature produces disturbances too but as patches in a much larger landscape although some patches can be pretty big. Weeds grow fast and produce lots of offspring that are very good at dispersing, a necessary response to surviving in a patchy environment. A few weed offspring must find a new patch of disturbance because the patches themselves are short lived, replaced by a succession of organisms among which weeds are poor competitors. Initially weeds would have a field day, but their success would be short-lived as a success of better competing organisms began to push them back into the patches of disturbance that would naturally occur. In the long run, weeds would be put back in their rightful place. Weeds would be a minor element in the landscape as a whole, but only a very small population of gatherer-hunter humans would be able to make a living in that type of environment. So to take anything but an anthropocentric perspective simply ignores the current state of affairs, or you end up suggesting the human population should be reduced to pre-agricultural levels, which is a pretty drastic reduction. So our survival demands that we decide what plants will grow and where, up to a point. And this is my point, as it now stands, with vast tracks of land disturbed by human activities, we have provided vast opportunities for weeds, and we either let them take over, briefly, before nature relegates them to their proper place, or keep them in check in favor of our pet plants. If darwinsdog wants, he can have all the weeds recently removed from my asparagus for din-dins, while keeping my pet plant for myself. After all that’s the balance of nature, even if darwinsdog doesn’t seem to understand it.

Generating student interest in botany

A long time colleague used to say, "I'm going to teach them ecology if I have to rip their little heads off and pour it in." Such practices are widely frowned upon among the more enlightened members of our profession, but short of pouring it in, you can't make students learn anything that they are not interested in. Therefore the first and most vital step in teaching, especially subjects like botany and ecology that are viewed by many students as "boring" is to generate interest. Here's a nice post about how an aquarium visit generated student interest in ecology (and a link to a freebe publication), but generalized there is a lesson for all educators. Put something interesting in their hot little hands. The most successful general biology lab for non-science students the Phactor ever constructed consisted of a series of stations each with some intriguing problem that posed questions to be answered via a simple investigation by a small group of students.

Food Chains, Climate Change, & Penguins

Life is pretty simple in its basic concepts. Energy flows. You eat and get eaten passing energy from one to the next until ultimately all that solar energy captured by photosynthetic producers gets dissipated as heat, thus having delayed entropy, but not violated any laws in the process. Everything else gets recycled. In the specifics things get more complicated, but at the base of food chains you always find an autotroph, mostly green photosynthetic producers, but there are other types of bacterial producers too. All the solar energy used by the entire food chain enters at this point. So if something disrupts one step in the food chain, any organism further along the chain has a problem. In this particular instance some penguin populations are in decline, and it's probably due to a decrease in those small crustaceans called krill or the small fish that eat krill, but krill are not producers. Further down at the base of the food chain are phytoplankton, mostly green unicellular organisms that capture all the food for these ecosystems. High latitude ecosystems are very productive, seasonally because in these cold water areas nutrient laden deep cold heavy water more readily mixes with the brightly lit surface waters, so phytoplankton bloom seasonally. So how, perhaps by spreading out the seasonality, global warming is altering this pattern, and organisms way up the food chain suffer. How many such stories will have to be found before people begin to pay attention?

Ecologically we're all living a Ponzi scheme

In terms of sustainability, David Barash, a psychologist at U. Washington, argues that we're all Bernard Madoffs. Ecologically "you simply cannot keep moving and growing and developing and mining your capital, assuming infinitely available resources and a natural environment of such unfailing elasticity that it will swallow our effluent forever and continue to provide a steady supply of resources into the bargain." And it's true. Yes, old Malthus was right, and yet an economist at our university expressed surprise that biologists still believed in Malthus because he'd been so thoroughly disproven. And that may be part of the problem, economists don't want to deal with ecoogical reality. A story circulated a few years ago about an interdisciplinary conference on energy, and after one of the economists got done speaking, a physicist said, "that won't work because it violates the laws of physics." And the economist said, "Well, who knows what the laws of physics will be in 50 years." But it will be a challenge to live sustainably because our economic system has been built on exploitation of resources and people.

Let the Phactor know what you think.

Yard smart, gardener dumb?

The Phactor’s estate is without doubt an urban oasis for wildlife. Over 70 species of birds have visited in the past 10 years as well as the usual, and not so usual, assortment of small, and not so small, animals. So it was a no-brainer for when this property received Yard Smart certification. But the bucolic serenity of a balanced ecosystem remains elusive.

For several years ecology worked quite well. Red fox were common, and as a consequence, rabbits were not, a most satisfying, and extremely biological, relationship. But something has happened to these handsome canids; they have not been making their daily rounds. As a result the gardener-in-chief has had the Phactor busy conducting an interesting, and increasingly expensive, experiment in the gastronomic preferences of Sylvilagus floridanus, the eastern cottontail. The experiment is conducted thusly. The most precious, unusual, rare, or gorgeous plant in your yard gets eaten to the ground, or lower. This species gets designated the plant of 1st preference. To protect any remaining morsels that may be left, you erect protective fencing around that plant, and then record the next plant that gets eaten into oblivion. This species gets designated the plant of 2nd preference. And so on, and on, and on.

Now perhaps many people would be quite satisfied to have labored so long and so hard producing a botanical smorgasbord for little bun-buns, but the fun is seeping away. This is partly the fault of the plant purveyors who neglected to tell you that the newest, neatest addition to horticulture happens to be a rodent delicacy. Aren't they supposed to run field trials? And here are some results.

Mukdenia rossii 'Crimson Fans' does indeed grow well in the shade and it looks quite striking, but it is even preferred over Campanula takesimana ‘Korean bellflower’ previously ranked number 2. Number one, Callirhoe involucrata ‘prairie poppy mallow’, is no longer participating in the experiment (RIP).

Here foxy, foxy, foxy. Nice rabbits. If the Phactor were not so committed to ecology he might be fixing them one of Aunt Pearl's bitter pills.

Now, what preys on fox squirrels?

High tech field research

You hear so much about the high cost of technology to do research, and I wonder what all the fuss is about? Field season for the Phactor’s high tech research is just beginning (it never waits until the semester is over). So let’s see how the check list is going.

1. Find 100 one meter square quadrats after prairie has been burned. Check. Three “permanent” metal marker tags missing (par), all the locator spikes in place (wow!). Great! No careful work with high tech tape measures to find missing quadrats.

2. Eradication treatment. The prime subject of this research is a parasitic plant, so one of the treatments is to remove it from the nearly half the quadrats (less controls). Of course the plant also has to be eradicated from a 50 cm demilitarized zone around each quadrat, so the total area per quadrat is 4 meters square. So you get the idea, it’s sort of like removing a lot of dandelions from 200 square meters of a very weedy lawn. The cost of the high tech tool is not prohibitive, about $4 at any Ace Hardware.

3. Straighten back. Now that the Phactor thinks about it, his field research could be funded by the profits from converting his field work into an exercise video, “Weed your way to wellness”. Lose 10 lbs in 6 weeks and have publishable data to boot. Order yours now!

Ecological lawn care

The Phactor is an excellent source for advice on lawn care.

Lesson 1: Nothing is duller or more uninteresting than a monoculture of grass! This is a basic principle from which all else follows logically. Grassy lawns are such simple ecosystems they require a constant input to maintain, while if sufficiently ignored they will reach a more complex state of stability. A visitor to my spacious estate once asked how lawn weeds were managed in the shadier areas? Simple, they are left alone, of course, some are only weeds when in a lawn (scilla, spring beauty, bluebells, trillium)(see photo). My lawn ecosystem forms a green expanse, so what does it matter if the

chloroplasts are housed within a grass or creeping Charlie?

Lesson 2: Minimize lawn area. You can’t eat grass, so transform as much lawn as possible into gardens. Big beds of perennials will relieve lawn boredom and in the long run take much less work. You’ll be able to trade in that big honking Peterbilt riding lawn mower (you need the exercise of walking anyways) for a funky garden bench with a matching table upon which to place your margarita.

Lesson 3: Never, ever fertilize your lawn! Nutrients just make the grass grow and then you have to mow it. It’s a nasty cycle.

Lesson 4: Never, ever water your lawn! Didn’t you get the idea of Lesson 3? Don’t be a slow learner; the idea is to avoid mowing. Besides grass is supposed to turn brown and go dormant in hot, dry summers. Your neighbors probably don’t know this and they would appreciate the information. Lead by example; suburbia will raise a statue (or is that a statute?) in your honor.

Lesson 5: The plant diversity of your lawn and gardens is directly correlated with your IQ. This goes without saying, and it explains why lawn monoculturalists are so difficult to teach.

Lesson 6: Start writing a book. If anyone complains about your minimalist lawn care, simply counter by saying, with a slightly affected tone, “My book writing doesn’t leave time for things like lawn care.” This immediately puts the complainer on the defensive; what have they ever written? This has been working for the Phactor for about 10 years now and counting (hope my editor doesn’t see this).

Lesson 7: Plant lots of trees. Grass doesn’t grow well under trees so you can plant ferns and shady wildflowers and never, ever mow again. But don’t throw that old lawnmower away; they are pretty useful for chopping up leaves each fall which you apply as mulch.

Coming soon to this blog. How to get sponsorship for your gardening blog.

Everyday should be Earth Day

The Phactor remembers the first Earth Day in 1970; he was a senior in college and that does date him even if he was a bit precocious. Unfortunately it did not receive as much attention that year as it should have because there were so many distractions that revolved around anti-war protests (Vietnam), trying to graduate, and thinking seriously about a long-time girl friend.

In trying to think of something profound to say, I find myself simply saddened by the state of the Earth. The whole panoply of environmental issues always ends up being argued from a political perspective, but the ecological perspective is quite clear. Our species has exceeded the carrying capacity of our environment. Humans began the path to the present day when they stopped living as gatherers and hunters and shifted to making a living via agriculture. This is not an indictment, just history.

My own particular role in this has been the simple, but not always easy task of helping students understand how nature works and the place of humans in all of this, so that they may use that knowledge to make wise decisions. Of course the flaw in that is the assumption that knowing something is important to making decisions, which often has not been the case in politics. When ideology trumps knowledge it all goes out the window.

A great deal of the Earth’s natural communities have been altered, damaged, or destroyed, but there still remains a resilience that gives the Phactor some hope if we can abate the rate of destruction. Unfortunately so many people are so estranged from nature, from their food and resources, it creates an ignorance or indifference to the natural order of things. People just don’t know, care, or understand what living their lives is doing, insulated as they are by human technology. In the words of Porky Pine penned for Earth Day by the great Walt Kelly, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Being ethical demands that our actions not harm others, and that principle must be extended to actions that do not unduly harm the ability of our environment to sustain us. So be mindful of the full impact we make, both on our own personal little hummock, and elsewhere, and try to help others know why it’s important to have a "green" ethic, otherwise you become an enemy of people.

PS Many people attribute that quote to Pogo because of an Earth Day poster made by Kelly a year later, but he didn't say it in the original cartoon.

What's with microbiologists and ecology?

As a member of a biological sciences faculty, I regularly get to interact with colleagues with very different expertises. What a joy! Among this biological diversity, no greater rift in understanding and mutual appreciation exists than between microbiologists and organimal biologists. Even worse is that it's a very one-sided bigotry born of a narrow, biomedical, reductionist approach to the study of bacteria.

Twenty years ago our microbiologists complained about biological diversity and evolution as required courses. Apparently systematics and evolution where not subjects with any apparent importance to microbiology. The same was said about educating pre-medical students who had no need to understand the basic concepts of biology.

Well, thanks to Carl Woese enough progress has been made in the study of prokaryote phylogeny that these objections became pretty ridiculous. Now they object to the inclusion of ecology in the core curriculum of biology. Wow! Another subject without any relevance to microorganisms.

However, more than anything this simply demonstrates the remarkably narrow perspective of my microbial colleagues who cannot see beyond their reductionist approach to biomedicine. This is particularly amusing, or dismaying, because the worst offender studies resistance to antibiotics. What does he think is happening when antibiotics are used? Apparently he thinks antibiotics do not exert a selective force on bacteria and that the community structure of microorganisms is unaffected. More and more studies are finding that interactions among bacteria form communities that can be disturbed and cause severe health problems. My own daughter was given the wrong antibiotic for a C-diff infection (test gave a false negative) and it made matters much worse! C-diff is a natural part of our gut's bacterial flora and is held in check by interactions with other members of this community.

Fortunately not all members of this field are so narrow in their perspective. Microbiologists exist who have discovered evolution and ecology, and their relevance to research, even biomedicine. A google search on "bacterial ecology" generated 2,600,000 hits, and a great many of these were journal articles. A similar result was obtained by googling "microbial ecology" (3,480,000 hits), and of course there are journals that specialize in these fields.

Such ignorance would be quite amusing except that the education of our students suffers from these narrow-minded views.

Dealing with ecological rejection

I firmly believe in sabbatical leaves, and it is my great good fortune to have been allowed to take four of them. The academic world of science is difficult and it takes a concerted effort to try or explore new things, to learn new areas of science, and while taking a break from the week to week routine. As this is being written my fourth and last sabbatical leave is winding to a close. I'm taking a week to visit friends, a week to attend national scientific meetings, and that leaves two weeks to prepare for classes. Already I have people clamoring for a laboratory guide.

As part of this leave's exploration into new topics, I collaborated with an old friend and colleague. I dragged him to the rain forest to study insects that consume flowers, but aren't involved in pollination (my usual tropical topic). These insects had never been studied before, and in fact no one even knew these flowers were their brood substrate, or that they had two broods, a smaller one that produced bigger adults, and a larger one that produced smaller adults, or that they had a female biased population, and a number of other things. And we had fun doing it.

Oh, but science isn't science until its published, and our manuscript was just rejected. And the reason was it was too much natural history and not enough ecology. This means we didn't conduct an experiment aimed at determining some ecological principle, but just figured out a previously unknown biology. In the eyes of ecological snobs, ecological studies trump natural history. But ecological study is impossible until you know enough about the system to manipulate it.

Ecology is coming of age. It's getting snobby. Long treated as an inferior, less than demanding, descriptive field of science, barely divorced from Victorian natural history, ecology is now asserting itself by dumping on the very field that gave rise to ecology. This is because biology is done by people, and many people have need of a pecking order and having someone lower down to peck at to feel good about themselves. And this is nothing but someone inforcing their personal belief that ecology, as they define it, is better, more important, higher quality science than natural history.

Fortunately I know how to deal with such rejection. My lapsed membership in the organization will now be on permanent hold. Another publishing venue will be found, and our natural history will become part of biological knowledge, and then some stinking ecologist will use our study to do some "real science" that can get published in a top ranked journal, well, top ranked for ecology.

Field work and blogging - incompatible?

April stands for so many things: spring begins, tax season ends (very significant if you're married to a CFP), the end of the semester is in sight, deadlines and events abound, and all of this pales because it is also the beginning of field season, that time of year when the natural cycle of your research organism requires that you begin spending significant amounts of time out of your office, out of your lab, and away from your university. There is a satisfying component to this work, especially if you are smart enough leave electronic communication devices turned off (or, if you are truly enlightened and have achieved oneness with creation, you do not own such things).

It is a good sign when you manage to find 107 out of 108 quadrats after your prairie has been burned. The 108th is still there, but it's location somewhat uncertain until the corner pin is found using a metal detector. And it is a good sign that the exposed bones do not belong to that graduate student who went missing last semester. It is always a surprise to see how many skeletons, both big and small (deer, beaver, fox, vole), are visible after a prairie burning. I wonder if my patch of prairie is something of an elephants' graveyard that all injured or terminally ill animals seek out.

But in spite of the fact that I am relieved of teaching and administrative duties this spring, I find it difficult to have the time to do field work and keep up with everything else. Two journals are waiting for me to review articles on floral biology. A doctoral research proposal is demanding my immediate attention. My own expansive estate is calling for attention. And I have a book manuscript and three research articles to complete.

And then there is the Phytophactor. In the middle of winter, when field work is out of sight and out of mind, starting a blog seemed like a good idea. I like the venting blogging allows. But I wonder about other bloggers, especially those in science. Apparently very few do field work. Maybe very few do science either judging by their attention to the pseudproductivity of blogging. Many seem rather young, and perhaps they have fewer responsibilities beyond their teaching and research. Or they have much smaller gardens, if any. Very few seem to be ecological or botanical. Does this say something about the temperment of botanical ecologists, or is this just a measure of how much time they have, or how little sleep they need? Dare I suggest field work and blogging may be incompatible? Nah!