Cultivating the Wild is a video that focuses on six Southerners committed to reclaiming the nature of the South through art, science, and culture. Their inspiration is William Bartram, 18th century naturalist and America’s first environmentalist. From 1773 to 1777, a plant-collecting trip took Bartram from the Carolina coast west to the Mississippi. Far more than a botanical catalog, Bartram’s 1791 book Travels provides a captivating window into the past and continues to fire the imagination of readers over 200 years later. Despite the passage of time, Bartram’s words speak to current issues of critical importance. The film responds to an America hungry to re-connect with the natural world around us, an America increasingly focused on sustaining this planet we call home. Often called “the South’s Thoreau,” Bartram’s reverence for all aspects of nature lies at the heart of these modern environmental movements and in the people we meet in “Cultivating the Wild.”

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Please join us for an upcoming webinar on: “What Does a Changing Climate Mean for Georgia’s Ecosystems?” on Wednesday, November 18th, 2020, from 11:00 am – 12:30 pm EST.

To register, visit this link.

The Georgia Climate Project is a statewide network launched by the University of Georgia, Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology to help Georgia reduce risks and maximize opportunities related to a changing climate. This webinar is part of an ongoing monthly series discussing climate change impacts across a variety of themes in Georgia. Next month, the topic will be climate change and Georgia’s water resources.
 

Here are this weeks FINE Things:

Duck-billed platypus fluoresces under UV light: A NYTimes piece here. If you can’t get access to the NYT article, you can find better pictures in the original open access paper here.

Harvesting Cranberries and producing juice.

 “Monarch butterflies-an iconic flagship species for grassland ecosystems and pollinator conservation– are widespread, yet both the eastern North American and western United States populations have declined by approximately 80 percent since 2010.

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This first item is my pick of the week: The tragedy of swearing parrots.

I’m guessing that many of you have encountered news items in which the word “CRISPER” appeared. In fact, earlier this year a Nobel prize was awarded to two of the discoverers of CRISPER. You might not know what CRISPER is or why its significant, but I’ve found the answer for you: an understandable explanation of what CRISPER is, how it works and what it’s used for.

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1  Why Borneo’s trees are the loftiest on Earth
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02911-3
You might enjoy reading the original research paper, in particular, the abstract and Introduction. 

2  Satellites could soon map every tree on Earth
An analysis of satellite images has pinpointed individual tree canopies over a large area of West Africa. The data suggest that it will soon be possible, with certain limitations, to map the location and size of every tree worldwide.

3  Leading scientists say we should rewild to mitigate the climate crisis.

4  Fossil footprints record a fascinating story behind the longest known prehistoric journey.

5  Grapefruit, the weirdest fruit in the world?

6  Digging into the mystery of why covid19 is running amok in some places  and not others.

7  Most of us, at one time or another, have attempted to make sourdough bread.
This entertaining virtual discussion looks into what is going on in the sourdough starter. It is fascinating and will encourage you in your attempts to produce sourdough. It was created by Knowable Magazine and Annual Reviews and was available live last week. Now the non-interactive video is available! I highly recommend this one!
Watch The Science of Sourdough for free here.

8  How can trees be so tall? And where do they get the matter to grow?

9  Dying birds and the fires: scientists work to unravel a great mystery

10  Down on the farm that harvests metal from plants. Hyper-accumulating plants thrive in metallic soil that kills other vegetation, and botanists are testing the potential of phytomining.

1 The real estate economy in Florida is beginning to react to the implications of Climate Change and the numbers show it. And it’s not just those with beach front property that will bear the cost. Communities of color will be displaced by gentrification, not the sea.

2 The Arctic is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world. A geoengineering solution is to use strategically placed glass beads to slow the rate of melting.  

3 Blue carbon: the climate change solution you’ve probably never heard of.

4 Remember the Saharan dust that appeared in our skies earlier this summer? Read how it can influence health all the way in Florida.

5 ‘Hyper urban’ coyote genomes are evolving apart from their city and rural cousins

6 Why the hidden world of fungi is essential to life on Earth — Merlin Sheldrake

7 Atlantic magazine article: The Molecular Biologist Who Exposed the Soviet Union

8 Mending Coastal Marshes; Recycled plastic bottles get a new life as artificial islands.

9 Just for fun: The South Pointing Spoon 

10 Barking up the right tree.

11 Can plants actually take care of their offspring?

12 The Lord Howe screw pine is a self-watering island giant.

13 The Amazon Rain Forest is near the tipping point of switching to a savannah.

14 Warning: Don’t Touch this hairy-looking caterpillar.

15 The value of Squirrels and Chipmunks in our Garden

1  Brainiacs, not birdbrains: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

2  Nature Milestones in Vaccines An interactive history of vaccine development. Vaccines have saved more lives than any other medical innovation, says Nature.

3  First Fossil Feather Ever Found Belonged to This Dinosaur

4  White-throated Sparrows in the SF Bay area changed their songs during the pandemic shutdown.

5  When people stay quarantined animals are free to roam.

6  In this video Dr. Scarlet Howard tells how she showed that honey bees could do simple arithmetic — addition and subtraction

7  Lee Finley recommends this NYT Magazine article: When Invasive Species Become the Meal.  If you don’t have a subscription to the Times you may not be able to read it — they allow non-subscribers a few articles per month.

8  Global data shows that 40% of world’s plant and fungal species are at risk of extinction. 

9  Thursday, Oct. 15, 12 Noon, ET: Webinar on the Science of Sourdough. Details here. You’ll need to register; If you can’t see the live session, it will be available later to those who registered. 

That’s it for this week.

 
1  Starlings were not only introduced to the United States, but also to South Africa and Australia. In each of these areas their numbers rapidly increased. Did they evolve in their new habitats? Are they genetically different from their ancestral populations? Read the answers here. 

2  Did Guano Make The Inca The World’s First Conservationists?

3  Fall has officially begun and now is the time when streams renew their food supply.

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We have another multi-part story by Tim Homan.

The big news this week is that our poet laureate, Bob Ambrose, will be presenting poems from his work, “First Genesis, a Modern Telling.” The reading will be on Word of Mouth, Cincinnati, via Zoom. Here are the details: 

1  Poetry Readings for Word of Mouth, Cincinnati (via Zoom)
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Zoom room opens at 6:00
Poetry readings begin at 7:00
Featured reader – Bob Ambrose: “First Genesis, A Modern Telling”
    (~7:15 to 7:40, after the first set of open readings).
Zoom link.
 

Fungal items:

2  I’d like to recommend an entertaining and informative book about fungi: Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake. If the Nature Rambler book group were still meeting, I would suggest it. It’s well written, accessible and wide ranging. Here’s a link to the author’s website where you will find lots of short “blurbs” from various sources.

3  A leather-like material made from fungal mycelia. Can it replace real leather?

4  An article from the New York Times Magazine about
people’s relationship with mushrooms, real and imaginary, filtered
through the imagination of artists. My reaction was “WTF is this about?” Your reaction may vary.

Not a fungus items:

5  Don’t miss this video! It’s about Slime molds, organisms that were formerly thought to be fungi, but now are recognized as a kind of unicellular protozoan (now called protist). Being unicellular they lack a brains and nerves but can actually learn! It’s a Nova program and is available streaming from PBS and you can get it on your computer directly from PBS. Nova:
Secret Mind of Slime.

6  A movie, My Octopus Teacher, about an intimate relationship that develops between an octopus and a human is available on Netflix. Wonderful undersea photography.

7  All hummingbirds engage in torpor overnight, lowering their body temperature. But how low can they go?

Climate change:

8  What will the climate be like where you live in 40 years? A county by county projection for the entire USA, plus interactive graphics show the national picture. Hint: the Dakotas are looking good.

9  Sea level change will displace millions of Americans. Where will they go and what effect will it have on our country?Migration of people displaced by rising sea levels.
How climate change will reshape America.

Miscellaneous FINE Things: 

10  What caused a large die-off of birds in New Mexico:

11  Scientists use seaweed to travel back in time.

12  Amazing lichen diversity discovered in Alaska:

13  Honey bees forage for pollen and nectar over a 5 mile radius of their hive. Native bees don’t range nearly as far. Could honey bees impact native bees? (15 min. video)

14  A profile of the Red Cedar tree in BC, the people and the future.

15 A caterpillar that mimics a snake when threatened.

16  An imaging technique that dramatically shows how endangered a species is.“The
more pixelated the image, the closer it is to extinction,” the artist
explains.