Plant trees!

I think this article hits the nail on the head: Stop Building a Spaceship to Mars and Just Plant Some Damn Trees. Basically, if you want a machine that will suck carbon dioxide out of air and lock it up so it doesn’t contribute to climate change, we’ve already got one. It’s called a tree. They’re cheap and easy and they build themselves, and further, they look good. There’s no NIMBY phenomenon here!

All we have to do is plant a heck of a lot of trees, and they can sequester 200 gigatonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere. All this is from a paper in Science that calculated about how much land area is available for planting trees, and suggests that we should work fast to use that area.

The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, we found that there is room for an extra 0.9 billion hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. We estimate that if we cannot deviate from the current trajectory, the global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. Our results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.

There’s a catch, though. A lot of this land is owned and/or inefficiently used. The authors try to take that into account.

In total, 4.4 billion ha of canopy cover can be supported on land under existing climate conditions. This value is 1.6 billion ha more than the 2.8 billion ha existing on land today. Of course, much of the land that could potentially support trees across the globe is currently used for human development and agriculture, which are necessary for supporting an ever-growing human population. On the basis of both the European Space Agency’s global land cover model and on Fritz and colleagues cropland layer, we estimate that 0.9 billion hectares are found outside cropland and urban regions and may represent regions for potential restoration. More than 50% of the tree restoration potential can be found in only six countries (in million hectares: Russia, +151; United States, +103; Canada, +78.4; Australia, +58; Brazil, +49.7; and China, +40.2), stressing the important responsibility of some of the world’s leading economies.

Great! Let’s plant trees on the over 100 million hectares available in the US! Except…here’s land use in this country.

Wow. Look at all the land used for raising cows, and for feeding cows. Do you think the cattlemen’s association will let us shut down their wasteful use of the land? There’s profit in cows! Not so much in setting aside land for trees. There’s also the little problem of convincing consumers that going vegetarian would help cool down the planet. It’s unlikely that we can do what’s good for us; Brazil right now is making a dedicated effort to burn down their forests.

Don’t let the capitalists stop you, though. Do you have a space where you can plant a tree? Do it! Cut back on the meat-eating. When you eat fewer cows, it’s like kicking Ammon Bundy in the balls, dries up the profit motive for setting aside vast tracts of treeless land to feed herds of selfish cattle who are eating your salads. Maybe you can’t go full-on vegan yet, but that’s fine — cut back to eating meat once a week, you’re making a difference.

One other thing: I’ve already seen people complaining about the title of the Mother Jones article. Why can’t we do both? We can plant trees and explore Mars, but I think it’s a dig at the billionaires who are aspiring to escape Earth’s problems and build imaginary colonies on Mars. That’s not going to work, and it’s an excuse to shirk responsibilities to this planet.

Bastin JF, Finegold Y, Garcia C, Mollicone D, Rezende M, Routh D, Zohner CM, Crowther TW (2019) The global tree restoration potential. Science 365(6448):76-79.

Science, why you gotta do me like this?

“It would be cool to map the appearance of a pigment pattern,” I said. “Just photograph spider abdomens over development,” I said. “It’ll be easy,” I said. “Just do it!” I said.

So I took these Steatoda triangulosa embryos that emerged from their egg sac yesterday, and I sat down at my microscope and configured my camera to a useful and consistent setting (with a little tinkering, I found I could get decent photos at f/4, 1/80th of a second, ISO 3200 (!), at 64x on my Wild dissecting scope), lined up the containers with the spiderlings next to me, and thought I’d just march through and snap photos of the dorsal surface of the abdomen. Then I’d repeat this procedure every couple of days, and at the end of it all I’d have photographic series of pigmentation changes over time in a developing set of spiders. Simple! Except…reality intrudes.

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Steatoda triangulosa!

I said I was going to tend to my shiny newborn Steatoda triangulosa today. It didn’t take as long as I expected. Here’s the vial of my freshly emerged spiderlings; the egg sac is the foamy looking bubble at the bottom, attached to the yellow plug on the vial, and the little dots are the babies.

There were only nine spiderlings from that egg sac. It was a bit of a surprise, since when a Parasteatoda egg sac pops, I easily get over a hundred spiderlings. It makes me wonder how well S. triangulosa does in the wild — I can tell you from our summer survey that they were the rarest of the false widows we found, with even S. borealis far more numerous, and they were a distant second to Parasteatoda. Now I’m curious about what niche they fill in the local spider ecosystem.

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Chemistry and triangulosa

Work is heating up as it always does in the first few weeks of classes. Today and Friday I’m blitzing through a basic chemistry review in cell biology, because…biology is all chemistry. A very narrow and specific domain of chemistry, sure, but if you don’t understand how electrons flow you’re getting nowhere in cell biology. Yesterday was spent re-reading a lot of introductory chemistry stuff to remind me of how this all works, today I lay it all out for the students, who might be bored, but still a bunch of them will mess up on the easy chemistry questions in the first exam.

It always shocks incoming students who think biology is all frog dissections and memorizing organs. Nope, all chemistry, and in order to get the chemistry, you need to know the math. So all you high school kids thinking it would be neat to major in biology and play with spiders, buckle down and learn your basic algebra and pre-calc, at the least, and work through chemistry and physics.

Then I have some lab stuff to do. Today I’m going to focus on our Steatoda triangulosa. We’ve got a few young second generation juveniles coming up that I need to sort into larger quarters, and another egg sac that is full of baby spiders. The cool thing about S. triangulosa, besides the pretty pigment patterns, is that their egg sacs are fluffy, loosely woven silk and are semi-transparent, so you can see the eggs right through them, and right now I peek in and it’s a mass of writhing spider legs, so they’re about to emerge, I’m sure. The less cool thing about them is that they seem to be slower to develop, and for at least the one mama I’ve got in the lab, lay a smaller number of eggs. I might have to go hunt down some more adults so I have a larger sample before the frost hits.

Anyway, I’ll take pictures! I think I’ll post a purely S. triangulosa article later today.

But first, chemistry! That’s my day sorted.

Bee-killer

It begins with the screaming of the bee. We looked down into a flower patch, and there was an innocent honeybee, snared in a spiderweb, twirling maniacally and buzzing frantically as it struggled to get free. Mary told me to free it…I said “No,” callously.

I followed the lines of the web, a rather tattered orb at this point, and found what I was looking for — the claws of the predator, peeking out from under a leaf.

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Walking with spiders

I went for a walk in lovely downtown Morris today, and was rather disappointed. Tegenaria has taken over! Where earlier this summer I would have found the delicate, airy cobwebs of my favorite false black widows, there was nothing but these thick, dense sheets of webbing leading to tunnels of silk with these massive spiders lurking within.

OK, fine, they’re still spiders…but they’re far more shy than Parasteatoda. I’d gently and slowly ease my camera lens towards them, but long before the spiders were in focus they’d dart deeper into the tunnel. It was frustrating. I started seeing the utility of this probe lens.

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Spider Friday

One of the benefits of my job is that I get to work with young men and women all day, except when I’m not, when I’m puttering about with spiders (we will pretend committee meetings do not happen). So this morning I had my coffee and then toddled off to the lab to tend to my little friends.

Here’s my breeding colony.

They’re the ones with special privileges. They get the big roomy 5.7L sterilite containers, with one female per cage and connubial visitations. There are also racks in a pair of incubators with about 50 more spiders living in 3cm diameter tubes; they seem content, as long as food keeps getting delivered. So some of the spiders get to live in a suite at the Hilton, others are in the capsule hotel.

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