Posts Tagged ‘Linnaeus’
“Am I as admirable as that ant?”*…
There are lots of ants on earth. And, as Anna Turns explains, they play a big role as ecosystem engineers– as well as providing insights on everything from the climate to aging…
To most of us, they are small, uninteresting and sometimes annoying, but 2022 revealed just how ubiquitous ants are and how indispensable they are to the planet. Scientists revealed in September that there are an estimated 20 quadrillion (or 20 million billion) ants globally – that’s 2.5 million for every person on the planet.
More than 12,000 known species of ant live in all sorts of habitats, from the Arctic to the tropics and they represent one of the most diverse, abundant and specialist groups of animals on the planet. Leafcutter ants are fungus farmers, slave-making ants capture broods to increase their work force, while wood ants herd aphids to the juiciest parts of a plant to harvest their honeydew sap…
Experts agree that ants are ecosystem engineers because they play a crucial role in decomposing organic matter, recycling nutrients, improving soil health, removing pests and dispersing seeds. But, historically, ants haven’t attracted as much attention as crop pollinators, such as bees, which perhaps have more of an obvious economic value. That bias could soon change. Ants have been used as a biological pest control on citrus crops in China for centuries, and research published in August indicates that the pest control potential of some predatory ants could work better than some agricultural chemicals.
The wonders of ant biology throw up plenty of other possibilities for real-world applications. Queen ants that live more than 30 years – yet have the same genetic material as a short-lived worker ant – could teach us something about senescence. Nobody understands how queens store sperm for decades inside their bodies without any degradation, despite colonies living in different climates. Meanwhile, Schultheiss’ [Dr Patrick Schultheiss, of the University of Würzburg] research into ant navigation – how they find food and how they behave when they get lost – could help build mathematical models that instruct a robot searching for missing people.
Looking back at how ants evolved can shed light on a huge array of other plants and animals, too. Butterflies that rely on ants to tend to their caterpillars could disappear if those ants are wiped out, says Corrie Moreau, a professor at Cornell University: “Nature is this intricate woven tapestry and if you pull one thread, you’ll never know which is the critical thread that makes the whole thing fall apart.”…
“Insects and us: a mind-blowing 20 quadrillion ants and what they mean for the planet,” from @AnnaTurns in @guardian.
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As we get antsy, we might spare a thought for Swedish botanist Carl Linné, better known as Carolus Linnaeus, “the Father of Taxonomy,” died on this date in 1778. Historians suggest that the academically-challenged among us can take heart from his story: at the University of Lund, where he studied medicine, he was “less known for his knowledge of natural history than for his ignorance of everything else.” Still, he made is way from Lund to Uppsala, where he began his famous system of plant and animal classification– still in use today.
“In the end everything is connected”*…
A fungus known as a Dermocybe forms part of the underground wood wide web that stitches together California’s forests [source]
Research has shown that beneath every forest and wood there is a complex underground web of roots, fungi and bacteria helping to connect trees and plants to one another.
This subterranean social network, nearly 500 million years old, has become known as the “wood wide web.”
Now, an international study has produced the first global map of the “mycorrhizal fungi networks” dominating this secretive world…
Mycorrhizal ecologist Dr Merlin Sheldrake, said, “Plants’ relationships with mycorrhizal fungi underpin much of life on land. This study … provides key information about who lives where, and why. This dataset will help researchers scale up from the very small to the very large.”…
The underground network of microbes that connects trees—charted for first time: “Wood Wide Web: trees’ social networks are mapped.”
Read the Nature release that reports the research here.
* The Book of Chameleons
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As we contemplate connection, we might spare a thought for Anders (Andreas) Dahl; he died on this date in 1789. A botanist and student of Carl Linnaeus, he is the inspiration for, the namesake of, the dahlia flower.
Dahlia, the flower named after Anders Dahl [source]
“Simplicity is the final achievement”*…
Most innovations evolve over time, but when it comes to the index card, there has been little room for improvement. The idea of using “little paper slips of a standard size” has been around since Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus formally adopted it in 1767, but the index card has remained virtually unchanged for the past 250 years.
Linnaeus was inundated with information in his herculean task of classifying plants under the system of binomial nomenclature. While inspecting the Queen of Sweden’s butterfly collection in 1752, he had the idea to use small, uniform cards to catalog his findings.
By the time he started using the system on a regular basis, his method had evolved to very much resemble index cards of today: 3×5 inches on card stock only slightly more substantial than everyday paper, with notes written across the card horizontally. Linnaeus’ innovation would eventually give birth to the Dewey Decimal System and other ambitious attempts to systematically categorize human knowledge—but it also had a dark side.
As Daniela Blei writes in the Atlantic, “From nature’s variety came an abiding preoccupation with the differences between people. As soon as anthropologists applied Linnaeus’s taxonomical system to humans, the category of race, together with the ideology of racism, was born.”…
From Vladimir Nabokov’s use of index cards to write his novels (and to do his interviews) to less expected uses, explore the lore at “Index Cards.”
See also “How the Humble Index Card Foresaw the Internet.”
* Frederic Chopin
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As we file ’em away, we might recall that it was on this date in 1795 that the French government announced a prize of 12,000 francs for a method of preserving food and transporting it to its armies. Napoleon, who famously understood that an army travels on its stomach, had offered the award.
Nicolas Appert, who worked 14 years to perfect a method of storing food in sterilized glass containers, won the prize in 1810. Interestingly, that same year (1810), Appert’s friend and agent, Peter Durand, took the invention to the other side. He switched the medium from glass to metal and presented it to Napoleon’s enemies, the British– scoring a patent (No. 3372) from King George for the preservation of food in metal (and glass and pottery) containers… the tin can.
One of Appert’s/Durand’s first cans
“If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill”*…
As we consider revising our New Year’s resolutions…
The term wellness was popularized in the late 1950s by Dr. Halbert L. Dunn, the so-called father of the movement. Writing in the Canadian Journal of Public Health in 1959, Dunn defined “high-level wellness,” the organizing principle behind his work, as “a condition of change in which the individual moves forward, climbing toward a higher potential of functioning.” Dunn drew a distinction between good health—the absence of illness, or the passive state of homeostasis—and wellness as an active, ongoing pursuit. While good health is objective, dictated by the cold, hard truths of modern medicine, Dunn’s wellness is subjective, based on perception and “the uniqueness of the individual.” Dunn’s ideas have gained a steady following, approaching near-ubiquity in the 21st century—in 2015, the global wellness industry was valued at $3.7 trillion.
But without the emergence of Europe’s middle classes, without the wealth and leisure afforded by the Industrial Revolution, today’s wellness culture wouldn’t exist…
The full– and fascinating– story at “The False Promises of Wellness Culture.”
* Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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As we reconsider that cleanse, we might spare a thought for Swedish botanist Carl Linné, better known as Carolus Linnaeus, “the Father of Taxonomy,” born this date in 1707. Historians suggest that the academically-challenged among us can take heart from his story: at the University of Lund, where he studied medicine, he was “less known for his knowledge of natural history than for his ignorance of everything else.” Still, he made is way from Lund to Uppsala, where he began his famous system of plant and animal classification– still in use today.
“‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go till you come to the end; then stop'”*…
Index cards are mostly obsolete nowadays. We use them to create flash cards, write recipes, and occasionally fold them up into cool paper airplanes. But their original purpose was nothing less than organizing and classifying every known animal, plant, and mineral in the world. Later, they formed the backbone of the library system, allowing us to index vast sums of information and inadvertently creating many of the underlying ideas that allowed the Internet to flourish…
How Carl Linnaeus, the author of Systema Naturae and father of modern taxonomy, created index cards… and how they enabled libraries as we know them, and in the process, laid the groundwork for the Web: “How the Humble Index Card Foresaw the Internet.”
* Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
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As we do ’em up Dewey style, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that the handwritten script of the first half of the original draft of Huckleberry Finn, which included Twain’s own handwritten corrections, was recovered. Missing for over a hundred years, it was found by a 62-year old librarian in Los Angeles, who discovered it as sorted through her grandfather’s papers sent to her from upstate New York. Her grandfather, james Gluck, a Buffalo lawyer and collector of rare books and manuscripts, to whom Twain sent the manuscript in 1887, had requested the manuscript for the town’s library, now called the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library (where the second half of the manuscript has been all along).
Gluck apparently took the first half from the library, intending to have it bound, but failed to return it. He died the following year; and the manuscript, which had no library markings, was turned over to his widow by the executors of the estate. She eventually moved to California to be near her daughter, taking the trunk containing the manuscript went with her. It was finally opened by her granddaughter, Barbara Testa.
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