Soundscape Ecology ::: Bernie Kraus

Endless forms most beautiful…

 

WILD CLOCKS 

by David Farrier

Attentive to the loss of age-old ecological relationships as “wild clocks” fall out of synchronization with each other, David Farrier imagines an opportunity to renew the rhythms by which we live.

Pile o’Sápmi Supreme

In every living thing, there ticks a clock. “Lodged in all is a set metronome,” wrote W. H. Auden: when May comes round, birds “still in the egg, click to each other ‘Hatch!’” and “October’s nip” is the signal for trees to release their leaves.

Once, these rhythms comforted and consoled, orchestrating innumerable ecological relationships and offering glimpses of the greater wheels within which our small lives turn. But as climate breakdown takes hold, more and more species are struggling to keep time as they once did. Biological clocks that evolved an exact synchronization over millions of years are falling out of sync: the beat does not fall where it should; syncopation becomes dissonance. Failing wild clocks are resulting in misalignments in time between predators and prey, herbivores and plants, or flowers and pollinators. The results can be catastrophic, as breeding seasons fail and the long-held relationships that weave species together around shared needs fray. In Australia, mountain pygmy possums are leaving hibernation before the emergence of their preferred food, the bogong moth, risking starvation. Plants are losing touch with their pollinators: warm springs in Japan have led to earlier flowering of spring-ephemeral plants relative to their pollinating bees. One study warns that the timing of phytoplankton blooms could be shortened if the oceans continue to warm, introducing a calamitous mismatch at the very base of the marine food chain.

In a time of ecological crisis, it can be difficult to know exactly what time it really is.

Continue reading:

https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/wild-clocks/

These Lizards Have Been Playing Rock-Paper-Scissors for 15 Million Years

Winds of Change - Breathing a New Disciplinary Matrix Into Biology 

Seth Bordenstein

Haulout 

Maxim Arbugaev, Evgenia Arbugaeva (2022)

Understanding Relationships and Ecology 

Fritjof Capra 

How trees eat salmon: The circle of life, explained 

Sean B. Carroll

Microbiome selection and evolution within wild and domesticated plants

Barnes et al., 2024 

Microbes are ubiquitously found across plant surfaces and even within their cells, forming the plant microbiome. Many of these microbes contribute to the functioning of the host and consequently affect its fitness. Therefore, in many contexts, including microbiome effects enables a better understanding of the phenotype of the plant rather than considering the genome alone. Changes in the microbiome composition are also associated with changes in the functioning of the host, and there has been considerable focus on how environmental vari- ables regulate plant microbiomes. More recently, studies suggest that the host genome also preconditions the microbiome to the environment of the plant, and the microbiome is therefore subject to evolutionary forces. Here, we outline how plant microbiomes are governed by both environmental variables and evo- lutionary processes and how they can regulate plant health together.

A model for the ecological and evolutionary processes governing the plant microbiome. The plant selects from the locally available microbes as proposed in the two-step model by Bulgarelli et al. [37] and expanded upon by Favela et al. [38]. Here we emphasise that variations in plant microbiomes can be derived from ecological and evolutionary processes. Environmental microbiomes change rapidly in response to stresses, such as abiotic stresses. Consequently, the plant microbiome is selected for by various mechanisms, being activated/deactivated to mitigate for these fluctuations (ecological model). Meanwhile, consistent differences between environments can lead to the mechanisms being encoded in the plant genome, thereby being constitutively expressed as part of adaptation (evolutionary model). This leads to genotypic variation in plant microbiomes being observed even within standard growing conditions.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966842X24003147

.

The Domestication of Fire, Animals, Grains and.......Us

 James C Scott