In the seasonal tropics, fall is the end of the rainy season. The temperature doesn't change that much but the rains end and the leaves of many tree species fall to the ground. It is a little confusing because fall in the tropics marks the beginning of their summer. A dry season in contrast to their rainy "winter".
Here are a few pictures from the last few weeks I spent in Guanacaste. Sadly my waterproof, impact-proof, dust-proof camera finally broke after two years. I thought it was suppose to be "tough"! These were taken with my phone.
Some trees are losing their leaves while others stay green.
The ground is covered by leaves. Those are snake gaiters on my legs because I often don't see snakes in the forest until I am right next to them.
Snakes like this huge boa (which are no danger to me, but there are plenty of others that are dangerous.)
This orchid is flowering on a tree behind our little house.
The power of biodiversity is one of the most important lessons from the science of ecology. Higher biodiversity has been shown to lead to higher productivity (Cardinale et al. 2007), higher stability (Tilman et al. 2005), and greater resilience (Elmqvist et al. 2003). Now, a new study just published in nature supports the idea that preserving biodiverse ecosystems can reduce the prevalence of human diseases (Keesing et al. 2010).
Despite the value of biodiversity we continue to destroy habitat and alter the earth's biogeochemical cycles. Both of these actions are greatly reducing biodiversity and driving the current mass extinction. It seems that there's nothing we can't kill if we put our mindlessness to it (link).
Cardinale, Bradley J, Justin P Wright, Marc W Cadotte, Ian T Carroll, Andy Hector, Diane S Srivastava, Michel Loreau, and Jerome J Weis. 2007. Impacts of plant diversity on biomass production increase through time because of species complementarity. PNAS 104, no. 46: 18123-18128.
Elmqvist, Thomas, Carl Folke, Magnus Nyström, Garry Peterson, Jan Bengtsson, Brian Walker, and Jon Norberg. 2003. Response diversity, ecosystem change, and resilience. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 1, no. 9 (November): 488-494.
Keesing, Felicia, Lisa K. Belden, Peter Daszak, Andrew Dobson, C. Drew Harvell, Robert D. Holt, Peter Hudson, et al. 2010. Impacts of biodiversity on the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases. Nature 468, no. 7324 (December): 647-652.
Tilman, David, Stephen Polasky, and Clarence Lehman. 2005. Diversity, productivity and temporal stability in the economies of humans and nature. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 49, no. 3 (May): 405-426.
It turns out that coal, just like oil is going to run out. It looks like estimates of reserves are too generous and estimates of demands are too conservative. Read this article from Nature for more.
It’s raining here. This is a picture of me standing in the rain.
I haven’t felt like written much lately. I guess events of the last year on the ecological front have been particularly dark. Sometimes I when things get dark I wonder, what’s the point of doing anything if nobody else cares?
What do I mean? What is so dark? Obviously there is the Gulf of Mexico. It’s as if BP stuck a fork in the carotid artery of the earth. No wait, it’s worse than that. This wound is a mile below the surface. This is internal bleeding. The kind that’s difficult to see and understand from the surface.
Awful amounts of oil have been spilling into the ocean for months now. And the BP strategy of dealing with it? Add toxic dispersant chemicals that are not a proven ecological solution but a clear first salvo in the PR and legal battles that BP is ramping up to fight for the next 20 years (as Exxon did after Valdez). If the oil is dispersed (or below the surface) it’s not a problem people can see. And problems that we can’t see are problems that fall down our priority list below those that we can see. What do we care about? Oil spill? Sure but after the economy. After the immigration problem (what ever that is). After what ever pointless political controversy of the day rules the headlines. Somebody’s mistress, somebody’s gaff. After the war (or do we even remember that is happening anymore?)
Here are a couple pictures of fungi. They are detritivores. That means they make life out of death.
So the oil spill is one dark thing. The other is a while back. Long forgotten in this cynical view of the American public’s collective memory. It’s our failure in Copenhagen to agree to do anything about climate change. This isn’t just an American failure, in my opinion, it is a failure of the human species. A species of individuals too concerned with there own individual accumulation of riches (or imagined riches) to do anything about the foundation washing out from underneath them. Sure we can argue about the details. China said this… The US said that… If only X country had agreed to Y, an agreement could have been reached. But in the end the story is just that we’re not going to do anything significant to slow climate change in the next few years. The economic downturn/recession/whatever in the US has effectively killed climate legislation before it started. The administration, understandably, has to bow down to the public and corporate world’s demands for handouts so we can all still feel like we’re rich. The only successful legislation is that which can be cast as a hand out to public and corporate interests alike (healthcare anyone). Climate legislation is so easily cast as hurting both of these interests that it is a no go from the start.
It’s not as if I’m surprised. I’d be surprised it our species woke up one day and suddenly started acting as though the future mattered. In the history of our species the future has more often then not been better than the past. And understanding that invisible gasses or unseen oil spills are more important in the long run than making the mortgage payment on the house we “own” but can’t afford is probably too much to ask. Those unemployment checks are running out. Gas prices are going back up. You’ve got to leave work early to beat the traffic and pick up the kids on time to make it to Sam’s club and back through traffic to get home and get dinner ready and still have time exercise to keep your weight down not to mention read, watch, and listen to the news so you know what all the pundits have to say about what Sarah Palin said on her facebook page today.
Someone smart brought up the idea of collective madness to me the other day. I think of it as a group of people doing something totally crazy that seems normal because everyone else they know is doing the same crazy stuff. It’s even more bizarre when those collective mad recognize the problems with their behavior but keep doing it because everyone else is. But we do. We keep contributing because it’s the easy thing to do. Even if it means that future generations will not be richer, healthier, and happier than us (though we generally don’t feel rich, healthy, or happy now).
So how is collective madness stopped? What about human psychology got us here in the first place? Will we only change when we are forced to? What exactly would it take to force such change?
If I was smarter I would wax hopeful at this point. But I wont. I’m plum out of hope. At least in the short term. Right now I only hope that the thing that forces us to change is big enough to make deep changes in the culture of our species. I hope for a “never again” attitude to arise with respect to the destructive culture with created. But at the same time to hope for that kind of change means to hope for disasters so bad that we all feel the pain of them and that pain causes us to change. And I don’t hope for painful disasters. Only for the lessons learned through them.
This is a video of a dung beetle. He is rolling a ball of poop. One man’s poop is another man’s pleasure.
January is the start of the dry season in the tropical dry forest. The daily rains stop and don't return for around six months. The leaves of about half of the forest's trees turn yellow, red, and brown and fall off during January. This little Capuchin monkey probably doesn't care about the pretty colored leaves behind him. He's just hoping there will still be fruit to eat during the dry season.
I've been here for a few days measuring trees and downloading data from dataloggers I left in the forest. The scratching in this picture is evidence that I've already been covered with insect bites.
You can see in this picture something I call dry season gap exploitation. The large deciduous upper canopy trees lose their leaves and the lower canopy trees beneath hold onto their leaves and keep growing. These shorter evergreen trees must have access to water resources that the deciduous trees can't reach.
A lot of plants flower and fruit during the dry season. Here's some pretty pink flowers from a very common liana in this forest and the orange fruit of these huge bromeliads.
That's all for now. I'll leave you with this crabby ctenosaur who wouldn't get out of the road as I drove by him today.
I recently finished Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals. I'm not a book reviewer and I'm not about to try my hand at it but I think this book is great. It's the most honest perspective I've seen on coming to terms with the ethical, environmental, personal, and cultural questions surrounding meat eating. Foer presents a pretty gruesome but apparently honest view of industrial meat production and the issues surrounding it. Perhaps the most potent point he makes is that most of us participate in meat eating while pretending that the violence we are contributing to does not exist. Like how we've spent all this money on wars and not included the cost in our national budget. Like how we buy cheap junk from walmart while ignoring the impacts of its production. My mom recently said that Americans seem to be obsessed with "reality" TV but can't face reality. I don't want to tell people how to live or what to eat but is it asking to much for us be honest with ourselves about the consequences of our actions?
