Well, ain’t that just the sea’s bees?

Because of the way things can drift around in water, a lot of different aquatic organisms use a sort of “immersion” strategy for reproduction. Rather than going through all the bother of finding a mate and copulating, they just produce such massive amounts of gametic material that it’s guaranteed to encounter its target, just drifting around. This is particularly a good strategy for species that are either stuck to the sea floor, or that are themselves drifting without direction. Another version with which you’re probably familiar is the clouds of pollen released by trees and some other plants in the spring.

I had long assumed – and I wasn’t alone in this – that aquatic plants of all sorts relied on this dispersal method. It seems obvious, right? With water being an ever-present resource, why would any sort of “pollinator” relationship develop? Well, as always with evolution, the adaptations that provide immediate, short-term benefits are the ones most likely to stick around.

In this case, it turns out that red algae “pollen” is a bit sticky (as gametes are wont to be), and there are tiny creatures that make their living on and around the algae in question:

Are sea animals involved in the reproductive cycle of algae, like pollinating insects on dry land? Dispersal of the male gametes, or spermatia, of red algae generally relies on water movement, and up until now, scientists did not recognize the role played by animals.

Yet an international team led by Myriam Valero, a CNRS scientist affiliated with the Evolutionary Biology and Ecology of Algae research unit (CNRS / Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile / Sorbonne University / Universidad Austral de Chile) and Roscoff Marine Station (CNRS / Sorbonne University)1 , has revealed that tiny marine creatures called idoteas act as ‘sea bees’ for the red alga Gracilaria gracilis.

 

The image is a black and white microscope photograph of an Idotea isopod. It has a segmented body, with at least eight legs. It’s shaped a bit like a pill bug or a prawn – longer than it is wide, with what appears to be two long, thick, segmented antennae on its head. The only color in the photo is little green dots, highlighting the places where algal gametes are stick to the Idotea’s exoskeleton. There’s a circle around two of its legs, corresponding to a zoomed-in circular photo showing a more detailed image of the Idotea’s clawed feet, and the “pollen” dusting them.

Idoteas contribute to the fertilization of G. gracilis as they swim amid these algae. The surfaces of the male algae are dotted with reproductive structures that produce spermatia coated with mucilage, a sticky substance. As an idotea passes by, the spermatia adhere to its cuticle and are then deposited on the thalli of any female alga the crustacean comes into contact, thus helping G. gracilis reproduction.

But idoteas also stand to benefit in this arrangement. The seaweed gives them room and board: idotea cling to the algae as a protection from strong currents, and they munch on small organisms growing on their thalli. This is an example of a mutualistic interaction—a win-win situation for plant and animal alike—and the first time that an interaction of this kind between a seaweed and an animal has been observed.

While these initial findings do not indicate the extent to which animal transport of gametes contributes to algal fertilization relative to the role of water movement—previously thought to be the sole means of gamete dispersal—they do offer surprising insight into the origin of animal-mediated fertilization of plants. Before this discovery, the latter was assumed to have emerged among terrestrial plants 140 million years ago. Red algae arose over 800 million years ago and their fertilization via animal intermediaries may long predate the origin of pollination on land. Valero’s team now aim to focus on several other questions: Do idoteas trigger the release of spermatia? Are they able to distinguish male G. gracilis algae from female individuals? And most importantly, do similar interactions exist between other marine species?

First off, I just want to appreciate the way the authors take time to flesh out the historical implications of this discovery. Underwater ecosystems, as far as I know, tend not to have plants that evolve organs specifically to attract animals as pollinators. I could imagine a number of reasons for this, but at the same time, I could imagine reasons why it might not be a beneficial strategy on land. For one, if the current decline in insect populations continues, wind-pollinated plants are probably going to fare a bit better in the coming century or two.

Part of me wants to assume that if there were underwater organisms that used something like scent to attract “pollinators”, we’d have noticed that behavior in the animal in question. That said, our oceans are vast, treacherous deserts, with brutal, unyielding conditions that make study extremely difficult and dangerous at times. At the end of the day, I love reminders that there’s still so much to discover, and when I get a chance to throw in a fun pun for the title, well, that’s just the sea bee’s knees!

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Farmer: It looks like we’re avoiding mass famine this year.

The Majority Report has a farmer who calls in regularly from Nebraska, mostly to talk about the state of grain production both in the US, and globally. I’ve posted some of his calls before, because I find them useful. Longtime readers will know that I’ve been worried about the state of global food production for a while now, and that worry was increased by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, plus the many, record-breaking droughts that have been happening around the world this past year. As with a lot of good news relating to the climate, this is good because it means we’ve probably got a bit more time before catastrophe becomes unavoidable. That means more time for countries to try to change how they grow food.

I’ll be going more into this soon, but when it comes to food shortages, the middle and upper classes of rich, mostly white nations will see prices rise, but we are unlikely to actually starve at this stage. What will happen instead, is that food that would normally go to countries in Africa, in particular, will be diverted to places like the United States, Western Europe, and so on. It’s good that we’re probably not there yet, but make no mistake – that will come if we don’t change things. I’ve included a partial transcript of the video below, to cover Kowalski’s reasoning for this sort-of-rosy prediction.

[…]
It is looking like the U.S. is going to be producing very similar to last year. Not exactly a record, [but] mildly above average, which is good. Commodity prices have been coming down lately. There’s some good signs out of China that [their] summer crop was a bit better than they were expecting, but I personally won’t believe that until about December, when we know that definitively. They’ve done this before in order to drive down prices to buy South American grain cheap, but it looks like they probably are doing all right.

But aside from that. just there’s been too much heat in Europe. but they’re probably going to be okay. The U.S., the droughts in the southwest are still not great but there’s enough irrigation for now, so probably no major famine, but food prices will probably be up, especially in places like the Middle East and East Africa.

A lot of this is not good long term. If the fertilizer situation is not resolved… Basically, the ground can store nitrogen for a while, but from what I’ve been reading, a lot of places especially with marginal ground (particularly in like Africa and South America; [tropical soil is not as good as temperate soil, so] they rely more heavily on artificial fertilizers in order to have […] a crop that would be considered pretty poor in the States, and if they don’t get more fertilizer. they’re just there there isn’t going to be any left in the soil to use next year.

I know this might feel bleak for “good news”, but it’s important to remember that the fact that we know this stuff, means we have the ability to do something about it as a society. As ever, the goal is to build up our ability to wield collective power, so that we have the leverage to create change even if those at the top don’t want it.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms cause ecological devastation.

The odds are good, if you live in the contiguous United States, that you’ve never seen a native earthworm. It also turns out that the invasive European earthworms, that have been colonizing North America for centuries, are causing radical changes to the landscape. I periodically talk about the various environmental problems that would merit concern even in the absence of global warming, and this is one of those. Invasive species can do incredible amounts of damage, and often in ways that nobody sees coming. Apparently the ways in which they alter soil structure and soil chemistry decrease water availability for native plants, warm the soil, and they’re even contributing to the so-called “Insect Apocalypse”. For all I grew up thinking of worms as Good For Plants, it turns out the wrong kind of worms can cause as much damage to a forest understory as I’ve ever seen from things like garlic mustard or honeysuckle.

Tegan came across this breakdown of where the current front of the invasion is, and how it’s doing harm, so I thought I’d share it. There are also a couple links above with more information. The first link above indicates that they might help with natural carbon sequestration, but it’s unclear to me how certain that is, or how it would balance with the cascading harms done by their activity. To my knowledge, there’s not anything that folks like us can do about this at this stage, but I’ll keep an eye out for any direct action that could help. It seems like some forest makeups are hostile to European worms, so maybe there’s a way to do a little ecosystem engineering of our own, to fight back. Beyond that, this is one of the many ways in which human activity has had a huge and fascinating effect on this planet, from an ecological perspective.

https://beast-glatisant.tumblr.com/post/692980318805901313/fatehbaz-fatehbaz-more-on-worm-invasion

 

Good news! Scientists have made progress on safely destroying PFAS!

For those who don’t know, PFAS are a category of so-called Forever Chemicals:

  • They can be found in many everyday products – outdoor clothing and equipment, textiles, paints, food packaging, photographic coatings, non-stick coatings on cookware as well as fire-fighting foam.
  • They can have harmful effects on human and animal health and stay in the environment and in our bodies for long periods of time where they can increase in concentration. They are often referred to as “forever chemicals”.
  • Some PFAS have been linked to an increased risk of cancer, high cholesterol, reproductive disorders, hormonal disruption (also known as endocrine disruption) and weakening of the immune system.
  • Human and environmental exposure to PFAS can arise from contaminated water and food, PFAS-containing consumer products, household dust and air as well as the reuse of PFAS contaminated sewage sludge as fertiliser resulting in PFAS pollution in soil and crops.

The most recent headline that drew attention was the fact that even the rain is contaminated with this shit.

This is one of the many forms of cleanup we need to do, if we want to take our reliance on nature, not to mention public health, seriously. As with plastic (which is now eaten by several kinds of bacteria), there’s been a fear that these PFAS will continue building up indefinitely, bringing new, and potentially devastating health problems to all life on Earth. That’s still a valid concern, in my opinion, but now researchers at UCLA and Northwestern have developed a method to break down at least some of these chemicals.

Northwestern chemistry professor William Dichtel and doctoral student Brittany Trang noticed that while PFAS molecules contain a long “tail” of stubborn carbon-fluorine bonds, their “head” group often contains charged oxygen atoms, which react strongly with other molecules. Dichtel’s team built a chemical guillotine by heating the PFAS in water with dimethyl sulfoxide, also known as DMSO, and sodium hydroxide, or lye, which lopped off the head and left behind an exposed, reactive tail.

“That triggered all these reactions, and it started spitting out fluorine atoms from these compounds to form fluoride, which is the safest form of fluorine,” Dichtel said. “Although carbon-fluorine bonds are super-strong, that charged head group is the Achilles’ heel.”

But the experiments revealed another surprise: The molecules didn’t seem to be falling apart the way conventional wisdom said they should.

To solve this mystery, Dichtel and Trang shared their data with collaborators Houk and Tianjin University student Yuli Li, who was working in Houk’s group remotely from China during the pandemic. The researchers had expected the PFAS molecules would disintegrate one carbon atom at a time, but Li and Houk ran computer simulations that showed two or three carbon molecules peeled off the molecules simultaneously, just as Dichtel and Tang had observed experimentally.

The simulations also showed the only byproducts should be fluoride — often added to drinking water to prevent tooth decay — carbon dioxide and formic acid, which is not harmful. Dichtel and Trang confirmed these predicted byproducts in further experiments.

“This proved to be a very complex set of calculations that challenged the most modern quantum mechanical methods and fastest computers available to us,” Houk said. “Quantum mechanics is the mathematical method that simulates all of chemistry, but only in the last decade have we been able to take on large mechanistic problems like this, evaluating all the possibilities and determining which one can happen at the observed rate.”

Li, Houk said, has mastered these computational methods, and he worked long distance with Trang to solve the fundamental but practically significant problem.

The current work degraded 10 types of perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (PFCAs) and perfluoroalkyl ether carboxylic acids (PFECAs), including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). The researchers believe their method will work for most PFAS that contain carboxylic acids and hope it will help identify weak spots in other classes of PFAS. They hope these encouraging results will lead to further research that tests methods for eradicating the thousands of other types of PFAS.

This is good news. As with plastic pollution, having the means to destroy these chemicals is not a substitute for cutting off the source of the pollution, but every bit of cleanup that we know is possible reinforces the fact that we can make things better. Our vast collective knowledge really does mean that we can change what we do and how we do it. I also like that the ingredients required are ones that should be accessible to any nation on Earth, so it won’t require expensive, high-tech facilities. This seems like something that pretty much any water treatment plant in the world could set up, for a pretty reasonable cost. Just a couple weeks ago, it was looking like we were gonna be stuck with PFAS in our food, water, and bodies. It may be that you and I, dear reader, will never be rid of the stuff, but we’re very close to having the means to stop the buildup, even if we can’t yet force corporations to stop making it. I want to end with a quote from near the beginning of the press release, because I find the potential scalability of this reaction very encouraging:

In a paper published today in the journal Science, the researchers show that in water heated to just 176 to 248 degrees Fahrenheit, common, inexpensive solvents and reagents severed molecular bonds in PFAS that are among the strongest known and initiated a chemical reaction that “gradually nibbled away at the molecule” until it was gone, said UCLA distinguished research professor and co-corresponding author Kendall Houk.

The simple technology, the comparatively low temperatures and the lack of harmful byproducts mean there is no limit to how much water can be processed at once, Houk added. The technology could eventually make it easier for water treatment plants to remove PFAS from drinking water.

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Video: America’s coming Weimar moment

Does the title have your attention? Does it fill you with a feeling of dread?

It should.

Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of conflicting narratives about how the Nazis came to power, but at this point I think the biggest obstacle to understanding history might be the way we’re taught history through the lens of so-called Great Men. Everyone wants to focus on Hitler. I think it’s no accident that this perspective on history came about in viciously hierarchical societies like the ones that brought us the world as it exists today.

I think this is a bad approach to history because as we are currently seeing with the fascist Republican Party, while “charismatic” leaders are a key component, they are also eminently replicable. This is why the notion that getting rid of Trump will “cure” the GOP is little more than a childish fantasy. Trump is not the cause, he is the current vehicle. The party base loves him passionately, and will defend anything he does, but if he leaves the picture, they’ll happily transfer that worship to whoever wins the next dick-swinging contest. Trump’s continued power in the GOP is not required for the United States to become a fascist regime. The oligarchs will happily find a new vehicle if he can’t go the distance. I also think they honestly would be fine with Trump dying in prison (though I doubt that’ll happen), because it’ll be such a useful propaganda tool for them.

So it’s useful to look at the larger system, and in this case, the judiciary. Hopefully by now you are already alarmed about the U.S. Supreme Court, and their naked abuse of power, but I’m here to make clear that you’re probably not alarmed enough. Well, I’m here to encourage you to listen to the Iron Dice podcast, and learn about how conservative politicians and judges sabotaged the aspiring democracy of Weimar Germany, and brought the Nazis to power:

Tegan Tuesday: Danish commitment to Ukrainian city is a reminder to keep looking forward to a better future

It has been almost six months since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th. Buckets of ink have been spilled about this war, with most of the discussion centering around bad news. One of the hardest hit cities was the southern coastal city Mykolaiv. As the NYT described the situation:

Few places in Ukraine have experienced the kind of sustained barrage of Russian fire as this city on the southern coast. Since the war began nearly five and a half months ago, there have been barely two dozen days free of violence.

The attacks have destroyed about 1,200 homes and apartment buildings, according to the city’s mayor, Oleksandr Senkevych. Since the war began, he said, 132 residents have been killed and more than 619 injured in Russian attacks.

Daily, I see updates on social media about the extensive shelling and the destruction of the city, and it’s been heartbreaking to see. Cue my actual surprise to see that the Danish government will be sponsoring (and paying for) the reconstruction of Mykolaiv. The Ukrainian city mayor has spoken with Danish officials, stating that Ukraine looks North for inspiration, and they want to make a “new Copenhagen” on the Black Sea. This is a two stage process: while Ukrainians want to build a modern, green city, there needs to be a city to build! The primary issue that Denmark will work on (while the war lasts) is water. Mykolaiv residents are without potable water. The primary pipeline for water access was bombed and the alternative water supply is not purified. The Danish government will install 100 water purification systems throughout the city in an attempt to ease this burden from the Ukrainians. Further support for Ukraine in general will also come from Denmark, including support for their EU bid, Danish petroleum products and agricultural supplies.

This isn’t just a whim of the Danish — this is one of the early steps in fulfilling the Ukrainian Recovery Plan, U-24 as discussed in Lugano July 4-5 of this year. The conference organizers had already scheduled talks regarding the modernization of Ukraine prior to the the outbreak of war, but the invasion changed the focus of the talks to recovery. In order to afford the massive effort to rebuild, Ukraine is reaching out to many different individual countries and requesting ‘sponsorship’ for specific regions or cities. The original presentation of the Ukrainian Recovery and Development Plan offered a potential division into twelve areas and sponsors that included Ireland supporting the Rivne region, the US and Turkey tackling Kharkiv’s destruction, and Sweden and the Netherlands rebuilding the Kherson region. The proposed plan was enthusiastically greeted, and the Lugano Declaration, published July 6, 2022, indicate that the plan for recovery will move forward, although no official sponsorship will occur just yet. Just a little over a month later, and Denmark is the first country to begin working with Ukraine.

Projects like this are political as much as they are humanitarian, and it’s worth remembering that. As with discussion of joining NATO, this is part of much larger geopolitical contests. It would not shock me to learn that Ukraine requesting European investment is a pointed reminder that Ukraine is a part of Europe, and therefor merits support from the rest of the continent. That said, it seems clear that projecting power and influence by building up other countries is much better than doing so with war. The situation is still on-going, but I hope that this is one step of many such cooperative moves in the near-future.

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Fun direct action against corporate energy waste

It’s been said before that the French have a lot to teach U.S.ians about protesting. For all folks back home love to claim that the United States is “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, to quote our obnoxious national anthem, it seems to take a lot more for people to take to the streets. What’s more, those few who do directly fight back when the police attack tend to be condemned as a radical minority that “goes too far”.

For contrast, here’s French firefighters responding to police attempts to put down their fight for better treatment:

Now, we’ve got another bit of direct action that’s available to anyone with the requisite athletic ability, and doesn’t even require fighting police.

Have you ever walked through a city at night, and noticed lots of business signs are still lit up, even though the businesses are closed?

Have you ever thought about how much electricity is wasted, and carbon dioxide emitted, just to keep those lights on?

Does it feel like the status quo has us begging our overlords to let us save ourselves, while being forced to watch them keep screwing us over because they can’t be bothered to act like decent human beings?

Well, a group of French activists are once again showing us the way, in an action that is not only direct and effective, but I would say is also rather hard to argue is doing any harm that would merit a societal reprimand.

They’re unplugging or switching off those signs.

Honestly, I only see one downside – it seems like this might save money for the businesses in question, and they’ve already demonstrated that they don’t deserve to have that money. This is right up there with wheatpasting or tearing down fascist propaganda (always use your keys, they sometimes hide razors behind their posters) as a method of direct action that’s within reach of most people.

Being able to do parkour obviously makes this sort of thing easier and faster (speed is important if you’re doing something and you don’t want to have unpleasant conversations), but it seems like careful use of a long stick or slower climbing could work just as well.

As I keep saying, the people in charge, at every level, very clearly don’t see climate change as an emergency. They don’t seem to feel any urgency about it at all, except perhaps for some concern over how they’ll keep the rabble in line as climate change starts killing us off.

Businesses and governments have been chiding us for years for not turning our lights off enough, and I think it’s past time to turn that advice back on them.

 

Video: A future beyond capitalism? Socialism explained.

In the most general sense, the various forms of socialism, to paraphrase Richard Wolff, are united by the belief that we can do better than capitalism. There are a lot of different visions for how that might work, ranging from the various efforts we’ve seen in the past, to today’s plans for a better future. That diversity of thought also means there’s a great deal of disagreement, and people who a liberal or conservative might lump together could well be offended by the association.

I have my own opinions, which shift as I learn more and gain new perspectives. The thing I’m really pinning my hopes on is the idea that we can come up with far better ideas than I can. It’s no coincidence that the most useful parts of my direct action post are the work of other people. In a very real way, humanity has a collective consciousness that is capable of far greater feats of philosophy and discovery than any of the so-called Great Men of history.

All of this is to say that when I present a vision of “socialism”, or of ways in which the world could be better, I’m not declaring that to be the best option, or even the one that I personally prefer. It’s more about having ideas in circulation, so that we can think about them, and how to improve upon them. Anyway, here’s a video I think is neat:

Welcome to The Age of Endless Recovery! Climate change is now a permanent drag on economic growth.

Some time back, I started thinking of the era we’ve entered as The Age of Endless Recovery. The basic concept is more or less what it sounds like – the severity and frequency of climate disasters is going to keep increasing, which means that we’re going to keep falling increasingly far behind in terms of recovery. Even if the same place isn’t hit every year, enough places around the world are being hit that just dealing with climate disasters is already imposing a sort of tax on everything we do. It’s not currently the primary cause of economic deprivation around the world – that’s still the profit-obsessed system that’s driving climate change – but it is making everything more difficult, even for those of us who are not directly recovering from a disaster.

The idea first occurred to me well over a decade ago (I’m sure I probably got the idea from someone else, but I have no idea who), but it wasn’t until the last three or four years that I felt pretty certain that we had entered that stage of global warming. I think to most people who’ve been paying attention, this isn’t exactly a radical suggestion, but for any who might think I’m exaggerating, well, now there’s research to back me up on this.

The study found that economies are sensitive to persistent temperature shocks over at least a 10-year time frame. It also found that climate change impacts economic growth in about 22% percent of the countries analyzed.

“Our results suggest that many countries are likely experiencing persistent temperature effects,” said lead author Bernardo Bastien-Olvera, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis. “This contradicts models that calculate metrics like the social cost of carbon, which mostly assume temporary temperature impacts on GDP. Our research adds to the evidence suggesting that impacts are far more uncertain and potentially larger than previously thought.”

Previous research examined the question by estimating the delayed effect of temperature on GDP in subsequent years, but the results were inconclusive. With this study, UC Davis scientists and co-authors from the European Institute on Economics and the Environment in Italy used a novel method to isolate the persistent temperature effects on the economy by analyzing lower modes of oscillation of the climate system.

For example, El Niño Southern Oscillation, is a three to seven-year temperature fluctuation in the Pacific Ocean that affects temperature and rainfall in many parts of the world.

“By looking at the GDP effects of these types of lower-frequency oscillations, we’re able to distinguish whether countries are experiencing temporary or persistent and cumulative effects,” Bastien-Olvera said.

This is what climate scientists and activists have been trying to avoid for decades. Now, in addition to the enormous task of changing our society to stop destroying our environment, we also have the additional burden of constantly rebuilding and recovering from ever-more-frequent disasters.

The upside is that we can respond to this proactively. As with so many other problems these days, we knew this was coming, and that means that we also know how to start getting out of this trap our “leaders” have led us into. This will sound obvious to some, and drastic to others, but if we want to get ahead of this problem, we should invest in relocating people. We should build housing in areas that are likely to be able to support more people (in the United States, that would probably be places like the Northeast, and over to the Great Lakes region. Nowhere is climate-proof, but we should be moving to areas that are going to have an abundance of fresh water, to avoid drought to whatever degree we can.

But we do need to move people. Ideally, cities like Miami won’t just be evacuated, but we’ll also dismantle them, to re-use the materials, and to reduce the amount of pollution that would come from just leaving the city to crumble into the rising seas. It would be a huge, costly endeavor. It would also be far cheaper to invest those resources to do it now, than to just “let the market decide” through countless lives being destroyed. As I keep saying, the world into which most of us were born is gone. That world has ended, or if you prefer, it’s in the process of ending. It a very real way, we are living through an apocalypse – a period of ending, and of revelation – and it may be that there’s nothing we can do to prevent that.

What we can do is lay the groundwork for a better world on the other side, and hopefully in doing that, we can find ways to make this era, well, less apocalyptic.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!