What animal, despite having the same number of vertebrae, has a neck longer than the average human, has spot patterns as unique between individuals as our fingerprints, and despite their gentle appearance, can kill lions with a karate-style kick!?
A tower of Reticulated giraffes (G. reticulata) Image credit: Bird Explorers via iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC)
Some might say this is quite the… tall order for my very first Featured Creature profile! (Hold the applause!)
One of my earliest memories regarding these unique icons of the African savanna was when I was around five years old. My parents and I were visiting the Southwick Zoo in Mendon, Massachusetts, when we came upon the giraffe enclosure. One of these quiet, lanky creatures lowered its head across the fence bordering the enclosure, and licked my dad on the face with its looooong, black tongue! Once the laughter had died down, a flood of questions rushed into my head:
Why DOES the giraffe have such a long neck?
How do they sleep at night?
And what’s the deal with those black tongues?
A Tall-Walking, Awkwardly-Galloping African Animal
Their scattered range in sub-Saharan Africa extends from Chad in the north to South Africa in the south, and from Niger in the west to Somalia in the east. Within this range, giraffes typically live in savannahs and open woodlands, where their food sources include leaves, fruits, and flowers of woody plants. Giraffes primarily consume material of the acacia species, which they browse at heights most other ground-based herbivores can’t reach. Fully-grown giraffes stand at 14-19 feet (4.3-5.7 m) tall, with males taller than females. The average weight is 2,628 pounds (1,192 kg) for an adult male, while an adult female weighs on average 1,825 pounds (828 kg).
A giraffe’s front legs tend to be longer than the hind legs, and males have proportionally longer front legs than females. This trait gives them better support when swinging their necks during fights over females.
Giraffes have only two gaits: walking and galloping. When galloping, the hind legs move around the front legs before the latter move forward. The movements of the head and neck provide balance and control momentum while galloping. Despite their size, and their arguably cumbersome gallop, giraffes can reach a sprint speed of up to 37 miles per hour (60 km/h), and can sustain 31 miles per hour (50 km/h) for up to 1.2 miles (2 km).
Herd of giraffes running in Tanzania, Africa
When it’s not eating or galavanting across the savanna, a giraffe rests by lying with its body on top of its folded legs. When you’re 18 feet tall, some things are easier said than done. To lie down is something of a tedious balancing act. The giraffe first kneels on its front legs, then lowers the rest of its body. To get back up, it first gets on its front knees and positions its backside on top of its hind legs. Then, it pulls the backside upwards, and the front legs stand straight up again. At each stage, the individual swings its head for balance. To drink water from a low source such as a waterhole, a giraffe will either spread its front legs or bend its knees. Studies involving captive giraffes found they sleep intermittently up to 4.6 hours per day, and needing as little as 30 minutes a day in the wild. The studies also recorded that giraffes usually sleep lying down; however, “standing sleeps” have been recorded, particularly in older individuals.
Cameleopard
The term “cameleopard” is an archaic English portmanteau for the giraffe, which derives from “camel” and “leopard”, referring to its camel-like shape and leopard-like coloration. Giraffes are not closely related to either camels or leopards. Rather, they are just one of two members of the family Giraffidae, the other being the okapi. Giraffes are the tallest ruminants (cud-chewers) and are in the order Artiodactyla, or “even-toed ungulates”.
A giraffe’s coat contains cream or white-colored hair, covered in dark blotches or patches which can be brown, chestnut, orange, or nearly black. Scientists theorize the coat pattern serves as camouflage within the light and shade patterns of the savannah woodlands. And just like our fingerprints, every giraffe has a unique coat pattern!
The tongue is black and about 18 inches (45 cm) long, able to grasp foliage and delicately pick off leaves. Biologists thinks that the tongue’s coloration protects it against sunburn, given the large amount of time it spends in the fresh air, poking and prodding for something to eat. Acacia giraffes are known for having thorny branches, and the giraffe has a flexible, hairy upper lip to protect against the sharp prickles.
Both genders have prominent horn-like structures called ossicones, which can reach 5.3 inches (13.5 cm), and are used in male-to-male combat. These ossicones offer a reliable way to age and sex a giraffe: the ossicones of females and young are thin and display tufts of hair on top, whereas those of adult males tend to be bald and knobbed on top.
An elderly adult male Masai giraffe at the Franklin Park Zoo, Boston, Massachusetts Image credit: Sienna Weinstein
There is still some debate over just why the giraffe evolved such a long neck. The possible theories include the “necks-for-sex” hypothesis, in which evolution of long necks was driven by competition among males, who duke it out in “necking” battles over females, versus the high nutritional needs for (pregnant and lactating) females. A 2024 study by Pennsylvania State University found that both were essentially acceptable! Check out the graphic below for a good visualization.
A graphic summarizing the evolution of the giraffe’s body based on gender needs Image credit: Penn State University, CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0
A Flagship AND Keystone Species
Alongside other noteworthy African savanna species, such as elephants and rhinoceroses, giraffes are considered a flagship species, well-known organisms that represent ecosystems, used to raise awareness and support for conservation, and helping to protect the habitats in which they’re found. As one of the many creatures that generate public interest and support for various conservation efforts in habitats around the world, giraffes have a significant role.
Giraffes, like elephants and rhinos, are also classified as a keystone species–one that plays a crucial role in maintaining the health and diversity of their native ecosystems, as their actions significantly impact the environment and other species. What is it that giraffes do that impacts their local ecosystems and environment? By browsing vegetation high up in the trees, they open up areas around the bases of trees to promote the growth of other plants, creating microhabitats for other species. In addition, through their dung and urine, they help distribute nutrients throughout their habitat. Some acacia seedlings don’t even sprout and grow until they’ve passed through a giraffe’s digestive system! By protecting giraffes, we also contribute to protecting other plant and animal species of the African savanna and open woodlands!
The Life We Share
The woodlands and grasslands where giraffes live are shaped in part by those long necks and unique feeding habits. As they browse high in the canopy, they open up space for other plants and animals to thrive. These ecosystems aren’t something we built, they’re something we’re lucky to witness. And if we have a role to play, maybe it’s simply to make sure our presence doesn’t undo the work that nature is already doing so well.
Sienna Weinstein is a wildlife photographer, zoologist, and lifelong advocate for the conservation of wildlife across the globe. She earned her B.S. in Zoology from the University of Vermont, followed by a M.S. degree in Environmental Studies with a concentration in Conservation Biology from Antioch University New England. While earning her Bachelor’s degree, Sienna participated in a study abroad program in South Africa and Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), taking part in fieldwork involving species abundance and diversity in the southern African ecosystem. She is also an official member of the Upsilon Tau chapter of the Beta Beta Beta National Biological Honor Society.
Deciding at the end of her academic career that she wanted to grow her natural creativity and hobby of photography into something more, Sienna dedicated herself to the field of wildlife conservation communication as a means to promote the conservation of wildlife. Her photography has been credited by organizations including The Nature Conservancy, Zoo New England, and the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. She was also an invited reviewer of an elephant ethology lesson plan for Picture Perfect STEM Lessons (May 2017) by NSTA Press. Along with writing for Bio4Climate, she is also a volunteer writer for the New England Primate Conservancy. In her free time, she enjoys playing video games, watching wildlife documentaries, photographing nature and wildlife, and posting her work on her LinkedIn profile. She hopes to create a more professional portfolio in the near future.
What is the second most consumed insect group in the world (by humans) that can build nests with heights up to 9 meters (29.5 feet) and has a symbiotic relationship with fungi?
Macrotermes carbonarius (Image Credit: Soh Kam Yung via iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC))
As a featured creature writer for Bio4Climate, I try to read through as many of our published pieces as possible, even those that pre-date my tenure. It’s a tall order, there are so many! Hidden alongside the grand humpback whale, the impressionable Pando, and the beautiful luna moth, I found Fred Jennings’ piece on the zombie ant fungus: an unpleasant looking insect-pathogenic fungus that attaches to ants’ exoskeletons and takes over their bodies from the inside out. It was a little grotesque, a little unsettling, and completely and utterly fascinating.
I’ve been wanting to write about a creature that doesn’t usually make the highlight reel…something easy to overlook, but essential in its own way. My hope is to inspire curiosity (and appreciation) for the parts of nature that don’t always fit our ideas of beauty.
More Than Just Pests
When I think of termites I think about how people, especially homeowners, consider them pests. One of the first links that pops up in an online search for the word termites is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s guide for how to identify and control them. But just as it’s unfair to call sloths lazy simply because they move slowly, it’s unfair to define termites only by their “pest” status. They weren’t ever “pests” until we made them so.
Macrotermes vitrialatus (Image Credit: Craig Peter via iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC))
Macrotermes are fungus-growing termites that reside in tropical regions of Africa and Asia. These insects are larger than other common termites, the largest of all 330 species being the Macrotermes bellicosus, with queens reaching over four inches in length! Most of these bugs are dark brown, with some exceptions like the Macrotermes carbonarius, which are entirely black, and the Macrotermes gilvus, which have orange/red-brown heads.
Termites are a valuable part of many ecosystems. Like fungi, bacteria, and detritivores like millipedes, they decompose dead plant material, modifying the physical and chemical distribution of the soil. Creatures like termites restore soil that’s been degraded and play a key role in cellulose recycling, breaking down plants, wood, and paper into smaller molecules other organisms can use, and returning nutrients to the ecosystem. But, these termites are pretty special for a reason other than their role as ecosystem engineers.
Teamwork Makes the Colony Work
Macrotermes thrive thanks to teamwork, and a symbiotic partnership with a fungus that shares their life cycle. It’s remarkable that these termites (just like other creature populations) cooperate so well in such large numbers. Macrotermes colonies have a highly organized social system in which each insect has a role that makes life efficient and successful: workers gather food and build and maintain the nest/mound, soldiers use their strong jaws to protect the colony from predators like ants, and the queen and king reproduce. This social complexity is mirrored by the colony’s architecture.
Macrotermes carbonarius (Image Credit: Dirk Mezger via iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC))
Termite mounds aren’t just shelters, they’re marvels of natural engineering. Built with purpose, these architectural feats regulate temperature and humidity to create the ideal environment for the termite’s fungal partner, Termitomyces, to grow. After foraging for wood or dead plant material, Macrotermes workers masticate and deposit it in chambers inside their nest, producing the perfect substrate for fungus to grow into a comb. Macrotermes cultivate these fungus gardens and feed on them while the fungus degrades plant material, resulting in a continuous supply of food for the termites. To stimulate the right conditions for Termitomyces to grow, macrotermes build their nests with air ducts and ventilation systems. As the fungus produces heat in the nest, workers can open or block individual tunnels that lead to the surface to regulate temperature and humidity. These structures are built to various heights, with some only one foot tall while exceptional ones can rise more than 30 feet.
Tall Macrotermes bellicosus nest (Image Credit: Gabriel Leite via iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC))Macrotermes termite mound (Image Credit: Craig Peter via iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC)
Macrotermes and Humans
Macrotermes termites are an important edible insect widely consumed throughout Africa, along with their fungus gardens. People use the bugs, mushrooms, and termite soil in medicinal practices. The soil can be used as fertilizer or as building material to make bricks and plaster houses. These insects are also used as bait and feed for livestock. Alongside these uses, macrotermes termites have a role in superstitious beliefs, their nests serving as burying places associated with the spiritual world.
Outside their habitat in urban environments, most macrotermes are unable to survive, so they aren’t considered pests like other termites because they don’t cause as much damage to wood structures like homes and buildings. In contrast, macrotermes can pose threats to agriculture by directly consuming crops, roots, and stems of plants. But, like nearly every other creature in the natural world, these bugs don’t live without some challenges of their own.
The largest threat to termites is changes in land use; particularly transitions to organized orchards and more intensified agricultural practices. As ecosystem engineers that contribute directly to the nutrient makeup of the soil in their ecosystem, the changes in land use can have damaging effects on the landscape and organisms throughout the food cycle.
Macrotermes carbonarius (Image Credit: budak via iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC))
Nature deserves to be seen in its full complexity, not just through the lens of what we find beautiful, helpful, scary, or annoying. When we only celebrate the vibrant colors, graceful shapes, or soothing sounds, we risk overlooking the strange, the hidden, and the essential.
Abigail Gipson is an environmental advocate with a bachelor’s degree in humanitarian studies from Fordham University. Working to protect the natural world and its inhabitants, Abigail is specifically interested in environmental protection, ecosystem-based adaptation, and the intersection of climate change with human rights and animal welfare. She loves autumn, reading, and gardening.
What species sang part of a Mozart concerto and got its own musical tribute in return?
European Starling (Image Credit: Наталия via iNaturalist)
During my studies in urban governance, we took a course on complex systems thinking. I’ll spare you the technical details, but we learned that starling bird flocks were commonly used in the discipline to illustrate how complex systems work and emerge. The core idea was that complex systems are made up of many interacting components that, together, give rise to large-scale, coordinated behavior.
Years later, after I’d moved to the southern end of Rotterdam, I was hanging out in my living room, looked out the window, and there it was: a gigantic flock of starlings swirling through the sky. It was one of the most breathtaking natural events I’ve ever had the privilege of witnessing. And honestly, in a city like this, it might be one of the only natural events you can witness from the comfort of your living room or backyard.
Since then, I’ve spent countless hours watching these flocks from my rooftop during the months when they migrate through the city. As mesmerizing as it is to see them dancing in the sky, it’s even more incredible to watch them land. Just behind my house is a community garden with a few tall trees. The starlings will form a massive swarm around a tree, circling it with this eerie coordination. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, one bird dives into the branches — and within seconds, hundreds follow. The sound that follows is something else entirely: the collective chirping of all those birds packed into one tree fills the whole neighborhood. It’s chaotic, but in the most beautiful way.
More Than a Blur in the Sky: A Closer Look at the Starling
I was often confused about what exactly a starling bird was. Their song was always striking to me, but I noticed something odd: two very different-looking birds seemed to be making the same kind of sounds. At first, I assumed it might be a gender difference. But after doing a little research, I learned something fascinating: starlings change their appearance with the seasons, adopting a specialized breeding plumage during the mating season.
In the fall and winter, starlings appear dark with cream-colored speckles scattered across their bodies. But in spring and summer, when males enter breeding season, they undergo a striking transformation. Their feathers turn glossy and iridescent, shimmering with greens and purples, especially along their nape, breast, back, and wings.
Many birds change their plumage to attract a mate. Ducks are a classic example you might already be familiar with. But what makes starlings unique is how they transition. Unlike most birds, which molt (shed and replace their feathers) before breeding season, starlings don’t actually molt at all. Instead, they lose their spots through abrasion. The speckles we see in winter are just the cream-colored tips of their feathers. As the season progresses, these tips gradually wear off from contact and movement, revealing darker, melanin-rich parts of the feathers underneath. Melanin makes those parts more resistant to wear, so while the pale tips disappear, richer tones remain, just in time for mating season.
Interestingly, adult females don’t become as glossy or glittering as their male counterparts. They tend to retain more of their pale speckles, giving them a lighter, spottier appearance that makes them relatively easy to distinguish.
Adult male (bottom) and female (top) starlings. Image Credit: Franck Curk via iNaturalistStarling sporting its non breeding plumage Image Credit: cccrll via iNaturalist
Nesting: Homes, Herbs, and the Hunt for a Male
With breeding plumage in place, unpaired males seek out suitable nesting sites and begin building nests to attract females. To impress, they decorate their bachelor pads with flowers, greenery, and even herbs. It’s theorized that the quantity and quality of these ornaments play a role in courtship, helping males stand out in a competitive mating environment. Interestingly, once a female chooses a mate, she typically disassembles the decorations he so carefully arranged.
Turns out, birds might also be into a bit of aromatherapy — when they add herbs to their nests, they seem to chill out and parent better. The cozy, scented setup is linked to more positive vibes during egg-sitting duty.
Another curious aspect of their nesting behavior is how females lay their eggs. A typical clutch consists of 4 to 6 eggs per year, but if the first egg is removed — by a predator, researcher, or accident — the female will sometimes continue laying more eggs in an effort to compensate and make the clutch “whole” again.
If the home decor isn’t enough to impress a mate, ambitious bachelors have another trick up their wings: their song. These birds are among nature’s finest impressionists.
European starlings have a rich and varied vocal repertoire — clicks, whistles, rattles, snarls — and an extraordinary talent for mimicry. They can imitate other birds, animals, and even human-made sounds like car alarms.
This video highlights the incredible variety of sounds starlings are capable of producing.
This song plays a key role in courtship. Males sing to mark territory, attract mates, and signal their fitness. Often, these songs are performed near a decorated nest, combining sound, sight, and scent into a single courtship display. Research suggests females may prefer males with larger song repertoires, which could indicate intelligence, health, or age.
This vocal ability has long captivated humans. Mozart famously owned a pet starling that could sing part of one of his piano concertos. Urban legend holds that his piece A Musical Joke was inspired by the bird’s playful, unpredictable style, a feathered composer in his own right.Here’s a link to A Musical Joke if you’re curious, you decide!
Black Suns and Bird Ballets: The Science Behind Starling Flocks
As captivating as a single starling may be — with its shimmering feathers and complex song — their true magic emerges in numbers. When thousands gather, they move with a grace and synchronicity that seems almost unreal.
A murmuration of starlings at Gretna. (Image Credit: Walter Baxter via WikiCommons)
Starling flocks, called murmurations, are most often seen in winter when the birds gather to roost in huge numbers. Just after sunset, they form breathtaking patterns in the sky before settling for the night.
These movements are often likened to a kind of dance or aerial ballet. When the flocks grow large enough, they can even appear to obliterate the setting sun, a phenomenon so striking it inspired the Danish term “sort sol,” or “black sun.”
These spectacular displays aren’t just for show — these murmurations help protect against predators by confusing and overwhelming their vision, making it difficult to single out any specific target. They also aid in communication and guide birds to communal roosts, especially during colder months
But how do these birds move with such perfect synchronicity? It almost looks choreographed, but it’s not like the birds wake up early and go to synchronized flight practice to drill until everyone hits their marks. What’s actually happening is that starling flocks are showing off a rare and fascinating phenomenon called scale-free correlation. Sounds complicated, sure, but it’s actually pretty simple.
It means that the birds’ movements are coordinated no matter where you look in the flock — whether you’re watching birds that are right next to each other or birds that are far apart. The changes ripple through the entire group almost instantly.
What’s even more amazing is that there’s no leader. Unlike geese, which follow a clear leader in formation, starling flocks are totally decentralized. Each bird watches and responds to just its 7 closest neighbors — that’s it. But because every bird is doing this at the same time, the entire flock ends up moving as one super-organism.
It’s like a message passing through the flock: when one bird moves, its neighbors adjust, and their neighbors adjust, and so on. This chain reaction spreads through the whole group — and that’s what we mean by scale-free correlation: coordination that works across any size or distance, without a central controller.
See the coordinated movement of thousands of starlings in this short video of a murmuration in action:
Watching them gather in those immense, swirling formations from my rooftop — the very phenomenon that first sparked my interest years earlier — brought everything full circle. What once was an abstract example in a systems theory class had become a living, breathing presence in my everyday life.
And what’s perhaps most astonishing of all is that this beauty isn’t just instinct — it’s adaptation in action.
Global Spread and Genetic Genius
Few avian species have been as globally successful as the European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris). Today, starlings can be found thriving on every continent except Antarctica — a remarkable feat for a bird species that, in many places, didn’t even exist 150 years ago.
North America’s starlings trace back to a strange little story: in the 1890s, a group of Shakespeare fans released about 100 birds in Central Park, hoping to populate the continent with every bird mentioned in his plays. Most of their efforts fizzled — but the starlings didn’t. They took off, quite literally, and today their descendants are spread far and wide across the U.S., Canada, and even into the Caribbean and Central America.
Elsewhere, starlings were introduced intentionally for pest control, such as in Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand, where they were thought to help manage insect populations in agricultural settings.
But what is it about this species that has allowed it to become so incredibly widespread?
Part of what makes starlings so successful is how adaptive they are. They’re just as comfortable in cities as they are in farmland, nesting in everything from building vents to backyard trees. As long as there’s something to eat, bugs, grains, scraps, they’ll make it work.
They’re also smart; starlings have big brains for their size and it shows. They can solve problems, learn from each other, and figure out new ways to find food when times get tough. And they’re almost never alone. Whether foraging, roosting, or migrating, they move as a group, watching, listening, adapting together. It’s part of what makes them so good at surviving in unfamiliar places.
Starlings also exhibit what’s known as environmental niche flexibility, meaning they can adjust their physical or behavioral traits in response to a wide range of environmental conditions. It enables them to inhabit ecosystems ranging from humid woodlands to dry grasslands with relative ease.
What’s more, they’re not just surviving across these ecosystems, they’re evolving. In just over the course of a century, starlings in North America have started adapting to their new homes. Arizona birds are showing signs of handling heat and dryness, while their cousins up in the Pacific Northwest are built for cool and damp. It’s a rare, real-time glimpse of evolution in motion.
But this incredible adaptability also brings starlings into conflict with human systems, particularly in agricultural landscapes, where their success reveals deeper tensions between wildlife and the ways we use the land.
Starling bird in flight. (Image Credit: Radu L via iNaturalist)
Fields of Conflict: Starlings and Agriculture
The more I learned about starlings, the more I realized their story is tangled up in ours, especially in how we farm. These birds didn’t set out to invade feedlots and barns. They ended up there because the open meadows they once thrived in are disappearing.
Starlings evolved to forage in grasslands, digging through the soil for grubs and larvae. But as fields are replaced by monocultures filled with pesticides, they’ve had to adapt — and fast. Livestock farms offered what the land no longer did: bugs in the soil, water to drink, and plenty of places to nest. It’s not that they prefer our barns. It’s just that there’s nowhere else to go.
The irony is that what farmers often see as nuisance behavior is really just resilience in action, starlings making do in a landscape that’s no longer built for them.
For these farmers, starlings can be a real headache. They sneak into barns, eat livestock feed, and leave behind messes that can damage equipment and pose health risks. And they’re clever, most scare tactics only work for a little while before the birds figure them out. Remember those big brains? So while their presence speaks to larger ecological loss, the day-to-day impact is very real for people trying to make a living off the land.
Despite their reputation as a nuisance in agriculture, starlings are actually experiencing serious population declines — not only in their native range but also in parts of their introduced range, including the UK and North America.
This is often overlooked in public discourse. In the UK, for instance, starlings are now a protected species, due to sharp population drops attributed largely to the loss of high-quality foraging habitats and changes in land use.
Interestingly, their decline has not led to a rebound in the native species they’re often accused of displacing — suggesting that habitat loss, not species competition, may be the deeper issue.
It’s easy to label starlings as pests — especially in an industrial system where every loss counts. But that framing often misses the bigger picture. Their presence on farms isn’t just about opportunism; it’s about what’s missing from the land. If pastures were healthier and ecosystems more intact, maybe starlings wouldn’t need to forage in feed troughs or nest in sheds.
If agriculture were managed more sustainably, with more permanent pasture and diversified cropping systems, it’s likely that starlings would rely less on feed troughs and barns. In this light, controlling starling populations without addressing the root causes of their shifting behavior may be shortsighted.
Conservation in their native range should focus on restoring pasture ecosystems and rebuilding invertebrate populations. In their invasive range, managing their numbers in sensitive areas is important — but must go hand-in-hand with reconsidering how intensive farming practices shape the ecological playing field.
Each season, I look up from the same rooftop, and the starlings are there — not thriving, not vanishing, just enduring in the spaces we’ve left behind. Their presence doesn’t signal ecological balance, nor does it mark collapse. Instead, it speaks to something quieter: the capacity of life to persist in the margins, to find rhythm in disruption, and to adapt — however imperfectly — to a world in flux. In them, I see the echoes of our choices and the quiet, complicated resilience of the wild.
Lakhena Park holds degrees in Public Policy and Human Rights Law but has recently shifted her focus toward sustainability, ecosystem restoration, and regenerative agriculture. Passionate about reshaping food systems, she explores how agroecology and land management practices can restore biodiversity, improve soil health, and build resilient communities. She is currently preparing to pursue a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) to deepen her understanding of regenerative practices. Fun fact: Pigs are her favorite farm animal—smart, playful, and excellent at turning soil, they embody everything she loves about regenerative farming.
I’m smaller than dust, yet ancient and wise, I thrive in the harshest of lows and highest of highs. No mate, no death, no fear of the cold, I borrow new genes when my own get too old.
Our world follows certain rules. Or at least, that’s what I was taught growing up. Falling objects accelerate at 9.8 meters per second squared in a vacuum. Warm air rises. Diagonally cut sandwiches just taste better. Living things, too, evolve a certain way, survive a certain way, die a certain way.
Or so I thought, anyway.
I was not taught that there are some creatures out there that cheat death, that rewrite their own DNA and survive in conditions that should render said survival impossible. At a moment when humans are trying to hack biology in an effort to live younger, longer, there are creatures out there that have been doing it for millions of years.
Meet the rotifer.
You’ve probably never seen one, but they’re everywhere: in puddles, moss, soil, and freshwater lakes. They look like something from Pandora, spinning through water with wheel-like cilia. Hardly larger than a speck of dust, they don’t roar, they don’t tower over landscapes, and they’re not exactly at the top of any food chain as I know them. But they’ve outlived entire species, survived mass extinctions, and continue to defy the rules of biology we thought we knew.
While rotifers may be practically invisible to our eyes, their impact is not. They play a fundamental role in freshwater ecosystems, drifting through aquatic environments and feeding on algae, bacteria, and other organic debris. Remember my little quip earlier about food chains? Well, it’s sort of a half-truth. They feed on algae, bacteria, and bits of organic debris—basically whatever’s floating around at the microbial level. In doing so, they turn microscopic life into something usable for everything else. They’re one of the first stops in the food web, sustaining creatures far bigger than themselves. Take them out, and the whole darn thing starts to wobble.
Life is full of exceptions, and even the smallest creatures can upend our understanding of what survival, and life itself, really means.
Rule #1: It Takes Two to Tango
A fundamental principle of biology I thought I understood is that species need genetic diversity to evolve and survive. Sexual reproduction is nature’s way of mixing genes, creating stronger offspring that are better adapted to changing environments. Without this reshuffling of DNA, plant and animal species alike face genetic stagnation and, over time, possibly extinction.
Rotifers see it differently.
For tens of millions of years, the bdelloid class of rotifer has lived without sex. They reproduce by cloning themselves over and over, spawning genetically identical offspring generation after generation.
By my logic, this should have led to their extinction long ago. They should have faced great difficulty adapting to changing environments, vulnerable to disease, and trapped in a state of evolutionary stasis. Instead, they’ve flourished.
But how?
By stealing DNA from other organisms. Instead of relying on traditional sexual reproduction, bdelloid rotifers are actually able to absorb genetic material from bacteria, fungi, and even some plants. This process, known as horizontal gene transfer, allows them to patch together their own genes with foreign DNA, essentially hijacking useful traits from unrelated life forms.
It’s a complicated process that, to be honest, I don’t fully understand. But that’s okay, because neither do the scientists studying this stuff. Here’s what they think is happening.
When a bdelloid rotifer dries out (usually in a harsh environment), its DNA begins to crumble and break apart into pieces. When it rehydrates, something strange happens: its cell walls become more permeable, just enough to let in snippets of DNA floating nearby, bits from bacteria, fungi, even plants. Once inside, the rotifer’s cellular machinery picks them up and patches them into its own fragmented genome. It’s like a genetic repair job using whatever foraged parts are lying around. Instead of mixing genes through sex, bdelloids build their genetic diversity by borrowing from the world around them. It’s a little messy, a little miraculous, but it works.
Rotifers can get nutrients from algae they can’t eat directly. A parasitic fungus infects algae and releases spores, which the rotifers can eat, allowing energy to pass from the algae to the rotifer through the fungus. Image Credit: Virginia Sánchez Barranco, et al. 2020
Rule #2: Death and Taxes
I remember my parents quipping throughout my childhood that there are only two sure things in this life, death and taxes. But while I can’t speak for their fiduciary responsibilities, rotifers have been able to generally cheat the former.
When an organism is deprived of water, it usually dies. Cells shrivel, biological processes shut down, and life ends.
When conditions turn hostile for rotifers, when droughts dry up their ponds, when ice encases them, when the world around them becomes unlivable, rotifers don’t really die. They shut down, entering a sort of paused or stalled state, called cryptobiosis. Their bodies lose nearly all water content, their metabolism grinds to a halt, and for all practical purposes, they are lifeless husks of a microorganism. But give them a single drop of water, and they wake up, pretty much just as they were before.
Some rotifers can survive in this suspended animation for decades. Others have gone far longer. In one of the most staggering discoveries, scientists revived a 24,000-year-old rotifer from Siberian permafrost, and it immediately resumed life, eating, cloning itself, and otherwise carrying on as if it had just taken a nap. I’m not too well-versed on Marvel films, but I’m 99% sure this was basically the plot of a Captain America movie.
Most creatures don’t get a second chance at life, and this individual superpower bodes well for the species as a whole. Limited though it may be, fossil evidence suggests they’ve been around for tens of millions of years, enduring planetary shifts, ice ages, and environmental catastrophes that wiped out far larger and more powerful creatures. I think it’s safe to say they’re well positioned for another few dozen million years, come what may.
Rotifers challenge what I thought I knew about survival itself. They don’t evolve the way they should, they don’t die when they should, and they have little regard for the biological limits we assume all creatures must adhere to.
Despite their microscopic size, rotifers keep ecosystems running, breaking down organic material, cycling nutrients, and supporting food webs that stretch far beyond their little dominion.
Science is full of rules. They help us understand how the world works. But rotifers are proof that rules aren’t always as rigid as we think. They remind me that life’s possibilities are bigger, weirder, and more resilient than we might imagine.
BrendanKelly began his career teaching conservation education programs at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium. He is interested in how the intersection of informal education, mass communications and marketing can be retooled to drive relatable, accessible climate action. While he loves all ecosystems equally, he is admittedly partial to those in the alpine.
What creature grows backwards and can swallow a tree whole?
The strangler fig!
A strangler fig in Mossman Gorge, Queensland. (Image by author).
A Fig Grows in Manhattan
I recently wrapped a fig tree for the winter. Nestled in the back of a community garden, in the heart of New York City, I was one of many who flocked not for its fruit but for its barren limbs. An Italian cultivar, and therefore unfit to withstand east coast winters, this fig depends on a bundle of insulation to survive the season. The tree grows in Elizabeth Street Garden, a space that serves the community in innumerable ways, including as a source of ecological awareness.
Wrapping the fig was no small task. With frozen fingers we tied twigs together with twine, like bows on presents. Strangers held branches for one another to fasten, and together we contained the fig’s unwieldy body into clusters. Neighbors exchanged introductions and experienced volunteers advised the novice, including me. Though I’d spent countless hours in the garden, this was my first fig wrapping. My arms trembled as the tree resisted each bind. Guiding the branches together without snapping them was a delicate balance. But caring for our fig felt good and I like to think that after several springs in the sunlight it understood our efforts. Eventually, we wrapped each cluster with burlap, stuffed them with straw and tied them off again. In the end, the tree resembled a different creature entirely.
Elizabeth Street Garden, New York, NY. (Image by author)
Growing Down
Two springs earlier, I was wrapped up with another fig. I was in Australia for a semester, studying at the University of Melbourne, and had traveled with friends to the northeast coast of Queensland to see the Great Barrier Reef. It was there that I fell in love with the oldest tropical rainforest in the world, the Daintree Rainforest.
The fig I found there was monumental. Its roots spread across the forest floor like a junkyard of mangled metal beams that seemed to never end. They climbed and twisted their way around an older tree, reaching over the canopy where they encased it entirely.
Detail, strangler fig encases support tree. Al Kordesch, iNaturalist, CC0A strangler fig in Mossman Gorge, Queensland. (Image by author).
The strangler fig begins its life at the top of the forest, often from a seed dropped by a bird into the notch of another tree. From there it absorbs an abundance of light inaccessible to the forest’s understory and sends its roots crawling down its support tree in search of fertile ground. Quickly then, the strangler fig grows, fueled by an unstoppable combination of sunlight, moisture, and nutrients from the soil. Sometimes, in this process, the fig consumes and strangles its support tree to death, hence its name. Other times, the fig can actually act as a brace or shield, protecting the support tree from storms and other damage. Even as they may overtake one tree, strangler figs also give new life to the forest.
As many as one million figs can come from a single tree. It is these figs that attract the animals who disperse both their seeds and the seeds of thousands of other plant species. With more than 750 species of Ficus feeding more than 1,200 distinct species of birds and mammals, the fig is a keystone resource of the tropical rainforest —the ecological community depends upon its presence and without it, the habitat’s biodiversity is at risk.
Fig-Wasp Pollination
Like the strangler fig, its pollination story is also one of sacrifice. Each fig species is uniquely pollinated by one, or in some cases a few, corresponding species of wasp. While figs are commonly thought of as fruit, they are technically capsules of many tiny flowers turned inward, also known as a syconium. This is where their pollination begins. The life of a female fig wasp essentially starts when she exits the fig from which she was born to reproduce inside of another. Each Ficus species depends upon one or two unique species of wasps, and she must find a fig of both the right species and perfect stage of development. Upon finding the perfect fig, the female wasp enters through a tiny hole at the top of the syconium, losing her wings and antennae in the process. She will not need them again, on a one way journey to lay her eggs and die. The male wasps make a similar sacrifice. The first to hatch, they are wingless, only intended to mate with the females and chew out an exit before dying. The females, loaded with eggs and pollen, emerge from the fig and continue the cycle.
The life cycle of the fig wasp. (U.S. Forest Service, Illustration by Simon van Noort, Iziko Museum of Cape Town)
The mutualistic relationship between the fig and its wasp is critical to its role as a keystone resource. As each wasp must reproduce additional fig species in the forest at different stages of development, there remains a constant supply of figs for the rainforest.
However, climate change threatens these wasps and their figs. Studies have shown that in higher temperatures, fig wasps live shorter lives which makes it more difficult for them to travel the long distances needed to reach the trees they pollinate. One study found that the suboptimal temperatures even shifted the competitive balance to favor non-pollinating wasps rather than the typically dominant pollinators.
Another critical threat to figs across the globe is deforestation, in its destruction of habitat and exacerbation of climate change. In Australia, this threat looms large. Is it the only developed nation listed in a 2021 World Wildlife Fund study on deforestation hotspots, with Queensland as the epicenter of forest loss. Further, a study published earlier this year in Conservation Biology concluded that in failing to comply with environmental law, Australia has fallen short on international deforestation commitments. Fortunately, the strangler figs I fell in love with in the Daintree are protected as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988 and Indigenous Protected Area in 2013.
The view flying into Cairns, Queensland. (Image by author)Four Mile Beach in Port Douglas, Queensland. (Image by author)
Stewards of the Rainforest
The Daintree Rainforest has been home to the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people for more than 50,000 years. Aboriginal Australians with a deep cultural and spiritual connection to the land, the Eastern Kuku Yalanji have been fighting to reclaim their ancestral territory since European colonization in the 18th century. Only in 2021 did the Australian government formally return more than 160,000 hectares to the land’s original custodians. The Queensland government and the Eastern Kuku Yalanji now jointly manage the Daintree, Ngalba Bulal, Kalkajaka, and Hope Islands parks with the intention for the Eastern Kuku Yalanji to eventually be the sole stewards.
Rooted in an understanding of the land as kin, the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people are collaborating with environmental charities like Rainforest Rescue and Climate Force to repair what’s been lost, reforesting hundreds of acres and creating a wildlife corridor between the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef. The corridor aims to regenerate a portion of the rainforest that was cleared in the 1950s for agriculture.
Upon returning to Cairns from the rainforest, we set sail and marveled at the Great Barrier Reef. My memories of the Daintree’s deep greens mingled with the underwater rainbow of the reef. At the Cairns Art Gallery the next day, a solo exhibition of artist Maharlina Gorospe-Lockie’s work, Once Was, visualized this amalgamation of colors in my mind. Gorospe-Lockie’s imagined tropical coastal landscapes draw from her work on coastal zone management in the Philippines and challenge viewers to consider the changes in our natural environment.
Maharlina Gorospe-Lockie, Everything Will Be Fine #1 2023 From the solo exhibition Once Was at the Cairns Art Gallery. (photo by author).
On the final day wrapping our fig in New York, I lean on a ladder above the canopy of our community garden and in the understory of the urban jungle. Visitors filter in and out, often stopping to ask what we’re up to. Some offer condolences for the garden and our beloved fig, at risk of eviction in February. We share stories of the burlap tree and look forward to the day we unwrap its branches.
The parallel lives of these figs cross paths only in my mind, and now yours. Perhaps also in the fig on your plate or the tree soon to be planted around the corner.
Jane Olsen is a writer committed to climate justice. Born and raised in New York City, she is driven to make cities more livable, green and just. She is also passionate about the power of storytelling to evoke change and build community. This fuels her love for writing, as does a desire to convey and inspire biophilia. Jane earned her BA in English with a Creative Writing concentration and a minor in Government and Legal Studies from Bowdoin College.
The first time I saw the vibrant blossoms of the ‘ōhi’a lehua tree, I was walking on a dirt path in Kauai’s Waimea Canyon State Park, gaping down at the most colorful red and green gorges I had ever seen. Needing a breather from the steep visual plunge, I looked up from the canyon and noticed bright red flowers on the side of the path. As I got closer and could see the plant more clearly, the first thought that popped into my head was how similar the flowers looked to those fiber optic light toys I had played with as a kid. (If you don’t know what fiber optic light toys look like, look them up. You’ll see exactly what I mean.)
After my trip to Waimea Canyon, I saw ‘ōhi’a lehua everywhere. When I drove along the coast between the beach and the sloping mountains, when I hiked the volcanic craters of Haleakala, and when I visited parks and gardens across the islands that protect native plants and animals. ‘Ōhi’a lehua is the most common native tree in Hawaii, so seeing its fiery red, orange, or yellow blossoms every day felt so very ordinary. But ‘ōhi’a lehua is far from ordinary.
Let Me Introduce You to My New Friend, ‘Ōhia Lehua
Endemic to the six largest islands of Hawaii, ‘ōhi’a lehua is the dominant tree species in native forests, present in approximately 80% of the total area of these ecosystems and covering close to one million acres of land across the state. Depending on where exactly it grows, its size can vary widely, from a small shrub to a large tree. Found only in the Hawaiian archipelago, ‘ōhi’a lehua grows at elevations from sea level to higher than 9000 feet, and in a variety of habitats like shrublands, mesic forests (forests that receive a moderate amount of moisture throughout the year), and more wet, or hydric, forests.
You can easily identify the ‘ōhi’a lehua blossoms by their mass of stamens – the part of the flower that produces pollen – which are slender stalks with pollen-bearing anthers on the end. It’s what made me think the ‘ōhi’a lehua looked exactly like those fiber optic light toys. These powder puff-like flowers are most often brilliant shades of red and orange, but yellow, pink, and sometimes even white ones can be found.
‘Ōhi’a lehua grows slowly, reaching up to 20-25 meters (66-82 feet) in certain conditions.
With a little help from the wind, the seeds of ‘ōhi’a lehua travel from the tree and settle in cracks in the ground of young lava rock. It is, in every sense, a true pioneer plant. As one of the earliest plants to colonize and grow in fresh lava fields, ‘ōhi’a lehua stabilizes the soil and makes it more habitable for other species.
Even though ‘ōhi’a lehua can blanket Hawaii’s native forests, this flowering tree also grows alone, as you can see in the photograph below. Plants like ‘ōhi’a lehua fill me with happiness because they are able to grow in the most harsh, barren, and disrupted places, and they make it possible for other species to do the same. Plants like ‘ōhi’a lehua fill me with surety that even though sometimes poorly treated, the natural world will continue to be strong. Plants like ‘ōhi’a lehua make me believe in the resilience of nature.
Biodiversity forms the web of life we depend on for so many things – food, water, medicine, a stable climate, and more. But this connection between human beings and natural life is not always clear, understood, or appreciated. But there is a concept in Hawaiian culture called aloha ‘āina, or love of the land, which teaches that if you take care of the land, it will take care of you. The ‘ōhi’a lehua in particular takes care of the Hawaiian people in a pretty special way.
One of the most important characteristics of this flowering evergreen tree is that it’s a keystone species, protecting the Hawaiian watershed and conserving a great amount of water. The way I see it, ‘Ōhi’a lehua is an essential glue that holds Hawaii’s native ecosystems together. The leaves of ‘ōhi’a lehua are excellent at catching fog, mist, and rain, replenishing the islands’ aquifers and providing drinking and irrigation water for Hawaiian communities. ‘Ōhi’a lehua’s ability to retain water, particularly after storms, not only makes that water accessible for other plants, but it helps mitigate erosion and flooding. The tree provides food and shelter for native insects, rare native tree snails (kāhuli), and native and endangered birds like the Hawaiian honeycreepers (‘i’iwi, ‘apapane, and ‘ākepa). ‘Ōhi’a lehua trunks protect native seedlings and act as nurse logs, providing new plants with nutrients and a growing environment.
‘I’iwi, the Scarlet Hawaiian Honeycreeper, perched on an ‘ohi’a tree (Image Credit: Nick Volpe)
The Myth of ‘Ōhi’a Lehua
‘Ōhi’a lehua may have a disproportionately large effect on Hawaii’s ecosystems as a keystone species, but its presence as a meaningful part of Hawaiian culture could be even larger. There are many versions of mo’olelo (story) about the origin of the ‘ōhi’a lehua tree, but the most common one is about young lovers named Ōhi’a and Lehua. Pele, the goddess of the volcano, changed herself into a human woman and tried to entice ‘Ōhi’a. When he denied her, Pele became enraged and transformed ‘Ōhi’a into a tree. When Lehua found out, she was so heartbroken that she prayed to the gods to somehow help her reunite with him. Answering her prayers, the gods transformed Lehua into a flower and placed her on the ‘ōhi’a tree’s limbs. To this day, it’s believed that whenever a lehua flower is picked, the skies will open up and rain will fall, because the lovers have been separated.
‘Ōhi’a Lehua as a Cultural Symbol
In Hawaiian culture, the ‘ōhi’a lehua is a symbol of love, resilience, and ecological harmony. The transformation of Ohia and Lehua into tree and flower represents the inseparable bond between two people who love each other, and between the tree and its flowers. The term pua lehua, or lehua flowers, is often used to describe people who express the same grace, strength, and resilience of the ‘ōhi’a lehua. Pilina, a Hawaiian word that means “connection” or “relationship,” is an important value in Hawaiian culture because it is a critical way for people to connect with and understand the world around them. The ‘ōhi’a lehua tree is a symbol of pilina, and embodies this relationship between the Hawaiian landscape and its people.
Hula dancers performing at the Merrie Monarch Festival Thomas Tunsch (CC BY-SA )
The ‘ōhi’a lehua is also incredibly important to hula. Hula is the narrative dance of the Hawaiian Islands, and it is an embodiment of one’s surroundings. Dancers use fluid and graceful movements to manifest what they see around them and tell stories about the plants, animals, elements, and stars. ‘Ōhi’a lehua trees and forests are considered sacred to both Pele, the goddess of the volcano as you may recall, and Laka, goddess of hula. To enhance their storytelling and evoke the gods, dancers traditionally wear lehua blossoms or buds in lei, headbands, and around their wrists and ankles.
The Dependability of ‘Ōhi’a Lehua
‘Ōhi’a lehua has long been a part of daily life. Historically, the hardwood of the tree was used for kapa (cloth) beaters, papa ku’i ‘ai (poi pounding boards), dancing sticks and ki’i (statues), weapons, canoes, and in the construction of houses and temples. Today, the tree’s wood is used for flooring, furniture, fencing, decoration, carving, and firewood. ‘Ōhi’a lehua blossoms decorate altars for cultural ceremonies and practices. Flowers, buds, seeds, and leaves form the base of medicinal teas that can stimulate appetite and treat childbirth pain.
Threats to ‘Ōhi’a Lehua
As a native tree, ‘ōhi’a lehua competes with invasive species for moisture, nutrients, light, and space. Plants like the strawberry guava plant (Psidium cattleyanum) grow in dense thickets and block the growth of ‘ōhi’a seedlings. The invasive fountain grass (Pennisetum setaceum) can dominate barren lava flows, making it difficult for ‘ōhi’a to compete. ‘Ōhi’a lehua is also threatened by non-native animals. Hooved animals like pigs, cattle, goats, and deer disturb the soil, eat sensitive native plants, and trample the roots of ‘ōhi’a lehua trees.
The most dangerous threat to ‘ōhi’a lehua is a virulent fungus called Ceratocystis fimbriate, which attacks the tree’s sapwood, preventing it from uptaking water and nutrients, and killing the tree within weeks. It’s been given the name Rapid Ohia Death (ROD) because of how quickly it suffocates the tree, turning the leaves yellow and brown and the sapwood black with fungus. Infections spread through a wound in the bark, which can be caused by animals trampling roots, lawn mowing, or even pruning, and can be present in the tree for up to a year before showing symptoms. ROD is spread by an invasive species of wood boring Ambrosia beetle that infests the tree and feeds off the fungus. When colonizing trees, the beetle produces a sawdust-like substance made of excrement and wood particles called frass, which can contain living fungal spores that get carried in wind currents and spread by sticking to animals and human clothes, tools, and vehicles.
Since its discovery in 2014, ROD has killed more than one million ‘ōhi’a lehua trees across 270,000 acres of land, making it a significant threat to biodiversity and cultural heritage. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies ‘ōhi’a lehua’s conservation status as vulnerable, and has recorded a decline in mature trees since 2020. Because ROD can spread long distances, it has the potential to wipe out ‘ōhi’a lehua across the entire state. If ‘ōhi’a lehua disappears, it will lead to a collapse of the Hawaiian watershed and radically change the ecosystem.
How the Hawaiian People Care for ‘Ōhi’a Lehua
Scientists, researchers, and native Hawaiians are working together to ensure the long-term health and resilience of ‘ōhi’a and Hawaii’s native forests by mitigating the spread of Rapid Ohia Death. Hawaii’s Forest Service monitors the land to track the spread of ROD and mortality of trees, has developed sanitation and wound-sealing treatments, and collaborates with hunters and game managers to reduce disease transmission. Scientists rigorously test ‘ōhi’a trees to understand the disease cycle, find out how it can be broken, and to identify trees resistant to the infection that could be used in potential reforestation efforts.
To prevent the spread, Hawaii has announced quarantine restrictions, travel alerts, and sanitation rules. If you are shipping vehicles between islands, you should clean the entire understory with strong soap to remove all mud and dirt from the tires and wheel wells. People who go into ‘ōhi’a forests are advised to avoid breaking branches or moving wood around, to clean their shoes and clothes, and to decontaminate any tools used with alcohol or bleach to kill the fungus. Even hula practitioners are forgoing the use of ‘ōhi’a lehua.
Mālama the ‘āina is a phrase that means to care for and honor the land. ‘Ōhi’a lehua is a wonderful representation of the interconnection between people and nature and I hope learning about this beautiful tree has encouraged you to appreciate the relationship we have with the Earth and what the natural world does for us.
Remember, if you take care of the land, it will take care of you.
Abigail
Abigail Gipson is an environmental advocate with a bachelor’s degree in humanitarian studies from Fordham University. Working to protect the natural world and its inhabitants, Abigail is specifically interested in environmental protection, ecosystem-based adaptation, and the intersection of climate change with human rights and animal welfare. She loves autumn, reading, and gardening.
What Mediterranean tree is uniquely equipped to withstand wildfires with armor-like bark and high, out of reach, branches?
The stone pine!
The stone pine in Casa de Campo, Madrid. (image by author)
In his 1913-1927 novel, In Search of Lost Time, French writer Marcel Proust described the power of a soft, buttery madeleine cookie dipped in tea to transport the story’s narrator back to his childhood, unlocking a flood of vivid memories, emotions, and senses. Since then, the term “Proustian memory” has come to describe the sights, smells, sounds, or tastes that bring us back to a particular place in time, one that reminds each of us that we are home.
This is how my partner talks about the stone pine (Pinus pinea) in Spain. Raised in Madrid, she moved to the U.S. when she was twenty-three. For the next decade she’d go long stretches without returning home (blame grad school, work, a global pandemic, and high airfare).
But on those occasions where she was able to return home for a visit, before that first sip of cafe con leche, it was the stone pines flickering past the taxi cab window that brought her back to the youth she’d spent running beneath them, and told her soul that she was home.
There are few markers more reliable than the stone pine to remind you that you are in the Mediterranean. Its branchless trunk rises 25-30 meters from the dry ground. Deep grooves run up the thick, rugged bark in shades of rust and ash-gray. It is bare all the way up to a rounded crown that seems to hover above the landscape. Branches bearing clusters of slender needles splay out horizontally and cast large soft shadows on the ground, giving the tree its nickname, the parasol (umbrella) pine. Its high canopy offers nesting sites and vantage points for many birds of the Med, like Eurasian Jays and Red Kites.
The stone pine’s unique silhouette foreshadows its individuality among its relatives in the genus Pinus.
stone pine bark detail. (Photo by dmcd25)(CC-BY-NC via iNaturalist)
The Parasol Pine
It is a resilient tree with few natural predators. High branches keep its cones away from most ground-dwelling herbivores, and that hardy bark helps shield against both prying insects and wildfire, perhaps its most common threat in the Mediterranean. The clustering of branches high above the brush also helps it withstand fire events more successfully than other species in the area. That said—it’s important to understand that pests (like the pine tortoise scale) and runaway fires do remain serious threats, even if the stone pine is better prepared to meet them.
The tree also stands apart from other species of pine in its lack of hybridization—that is, its failure to crossbreed with other pine species, despite existing in close proximity. It does not demonstrate a tendency to interbreed with its neighbors like Pinus halepensis (Aleppo pine) or Pinus pinaster (maritime pine), and that is unusual among pines. It’s really just out here doing its own thing.
This pattern of genetic isolation is a product of circumstances. The stone pine’s pollination window doesn’t often line up with other species and, even when they do, the tree’s genetic makeup has remained distinct enough (while others have hybridized) that fertilization is increasingly improbable.
And unlike other pine species, stone pine seeds are not effectively dispersed by the wind, perhaps contributing to this isolation. Instead, they rely on the few animals that can reach them, particularly birds, to shake them free and drop them elsewhere.
I hope we’ve established that the stone pine is one tough, rugged cookie, designed from the root up to thrive in a variety of ecosystems around the Mediterranean. But what’s going on below the surface?
To really understand any tree, you’ve got to look down. When we talk about “siliceous” soils, we’re talking about soils that are made up mostly of silica—essentially a mineral of silicon and oxygen that comes from rocks like quartz and sandstone. These soils are characteristically sandy and drain water quickly, but offer fewer nutrients—making them less fertile and more inhospitable for many trees. They also tend to be more acidic.
On the other half of the pH scale (which measures the acidity of acids on one end, and alkalinity of bases on the other) are what are known as “calcareous” soils—that is, soils rich in calcium carbonate from sources like limestone or chalk, but light on most other important nutrients.
Both of these types of soil are found along the rocky Mediterranean. And while its preference is for the former, more siliceous soils, the stone pine does well in both. In fact, it’s this ability to thrive in these rocky soils that earned the tree its name, the stone pine. Of course, the tree’s deep roots alone are not always enough to survive in these nutrient-deficient soils. Like other pines around the world, Pinus pinea benefits from ectomycorrhizas, the symbiotic relationship between the tree and fungi in the ground that help facilitate nutrient exchange in soils where they are harder to come by. It’s a fascinating relationship that certainly deserves its own essay, but it is important to understand the critical role Ectomycorrhizal fungi (EMF) play in maintaining thriving forest ecosystems. They form mutually beneficial relationships with trees, where the fungi exchange those coveted soil nutrients for carbon compounds produced by the trees during photosynthesis. This natural partnership supports nutrient cycling and enhances tree health and growth, allowing pines just like the stone to survive under more challenging soil conditions.
Explore visualizations of how Ectomycorrhizal fungi support forest growth.
In the course of human events
We know quite a bit more about where the stone pine is, rather than where it’s from. Pinpointing its native range has proven difficult because the tree has been harvested, traded, and replanted by human since prehistory—first for their edible pine nut seeds, then by later civilizations like the Romans for their ornamental status. Even today, it is common throughout the region to find a street or garden lined with the distinctive tree.
Today, pine nuts from the stone pine remain big business, and their cultivation has been seen as an alternative crop in regions where the arid soil would make other agricultural endeavors too difficult.
Pine nuts served on a dish of roasted peppers. Via Pexels.
I’ve realized there is more to learn about the stone pine than I could ever hope to fit on a page. In my naivety or ignorance, I did not expect that. Its deceptively simple silhouette belies a complex story of resilience, symbiosis, and ancient history and, for at least one Spaniard, a reminder that she’s home.
Brendan began his career teaching conservation education programs at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium. He is interested in how the intersection of informal education, mass communications and marketing can be retooled to drive relatable, accessible climate action. While he loves all ecosystems equally, he is admittedly partial to those in the alpine.
What bog-builder can hold 15-20 times its dry weight in water? Sphagnum moss!
by David McNicholas
The distinctive brown color of Sphagnum beothuk forming a large hummock on a raised bog. (Photo courtesy David McNicholas)
As an ecologist working on Ireland’s peatland restoration, I’ve seen firsthand the profound transformation of re-wetting former industrial peatlands, and its capacity to enhance biodiversity and carbon storage. Working as a member of the Bord na Móna Ecology Team with funding provided by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility as part of Ireland’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan, I’ve have seen more than 60 peatland sites undergo this incredible transformation. Following extensive ecological, hydrological and engineering studies to create the optimal conditions for Sphagnum moss establishment, it is exciting to now move towards the active planting of Sphagnum moss back onto these peatlands. This will accelerate the establishment of Sphagnum-rich bog vegetation that will have greater biodiversity and climate benefits at scale.
Raised bog formation
Sphagnum moss species are key plants in the development and existence of bog habitats. Some species can hold 15 to 20 times their dry weight in absorbed water and tolerate very harsh conditions such as nutrient deficiency, high acidity and waterlogged environments. This ability of Sphagnum to hold water creates the quaky surface conditions that are characteristic of raised bogs in good condition. Bogs simply would not exist as we know them without Sphagnum.
Raised bogs begin to develop in wet shallow depressions, often shallow lakes. Over time, wetland vegetation such as reeds, rushes and other plants leave dead matter behind in the substrate. As the amount of dead vegetation accumulates, the layer of growing vegetation on top is eventually lifted above the influence of the local groundwater. At this point, this layer has become ombrotrophic (exclusively rain fed). The result, in wetter climates, is the development of a wet, nutrient poor and acidic environment in which Sphagnum species thrive. Sphagnum is known as an “ecosystem engineer”. This moss can change its environment, making it wetter and more acidic, suiting these mosses and creating perfect peat-forming raised bog. As the living plants grow upward, the Sphagnum tissue beneath the living surface of the bog is submerged beneath the weight of the growing layer above. This dead material does not completely decay in the anoxic, waterlogged conditions. Instead, it will become peat over time, while the living material will continue to grow, driving the formation of a raised bog dome.
Sphagnum cuspidatum occurring within a bog pool. This species occurs in pools and the wettest parts of peatlands. (Photo courtesy David McNicholas)
Sphagnum’s role in carbon sequestration
The growth habit of Sphagnum is directly responsible for the development of one of nature’s most efficient carbon traps. A metre squared of intact, good quality raised bog sequesters a small amount of carbon annually, but over time these peatlands can accumulate and store much more carbon than the same area of other ecosystems like tropical rainforest. As such, Sphagnum moss is very important to help tackle climate change by taking in carbon and by creating peat-forming conditions to secure this carbon in the ground within healthy peatlands.
The ability of Sphagnum to store water also plays an important role in regulating heavy rainfall events within a catchment. Healthy peatlands can store water in Sphagnum moss, then slowly release this water over time, thereby helping to mitigate potential downstream impacts associated with sudden heavy rainfall.
Sphagnum papillosum, with round leaved sundew growing on top. (Photo courtesy David McNicholas)
Sphagnum as an indicator species
Different Sphagnum species can be used as valuable indicators of peatland type and their overall condition. However, Sphagnum mosses are widely believed to be tricky to identify and so many ecologists simply aggregate them, classifying them as “Sphagnum species”. In doing so, ecologists are forfeiting valuable information on nutrient availability, hydrology and habitat condition that these species provide. Like any other plant group, there are generalist and specialist Sphagnum species. For example, Sphagnumrubellum can be found on nearly any bog habitat in Ireland. Small red cushions and hummocks can be found from relatively dry cutover bog to the wettest parts of an active raised bog.
Sphagnumbeothuk has a very characteristic chocolate brown colouring and is one of the prettiest raised bog species. While S. austinii has a range of colours, the large size of the individual capitulums (the top of the plant) and the relative compactness of the hummocks as a whole can be used to reliably identify the species. Both species generally inhabit the wetter parts of a bog and if abundant and healthy, can be used as an indicator of raised bogs in good condition. Sphagnum cuspidatum is one of the most aquatic species and is generally found in the acidic bog pools in the wettest parts of the bog. Interestingly, it can be found within the drainage ditches of industrially harvested bogs where no other Sphagnum species may be present. There are some Sphagnum mosses that are found in less acidic and more nutrient rich, fen conditions. To get to know Sphagnum species is to open a large encyclopaedia on the various natural history processes and conditions of our peatlands. However, don’t be put off getting to know the more readily identifiable species and build on this. Knowing just a few species can really add to the satisfaction of exploring our unique peatlands.
Moss growth (courtesy David McNicholas)
Use of Sphagnum moss in peatland restoration
Planting Sphagnum moss across re-wetted cutaway bog as a rehabilitation technique is a key objective of the Peatlands and People LIFE Integrated Project (IP). We’re on track to plant one million Sphagnum plugs across over 270 hectares of rehabilitated peatland by November 2024, with ambitious plans for further planting in 2025 and beyond.
Revegetating these areas provides new and more resilient habitat over the longer term. Sphagnum moss will recolonise these sites naturally in time; however, the work we’re doing aims to speed up this trajectory, and we’re establishing a network of peatland sites to develop best practices in restoration and rehabilitation. This involves the design of robust methodologies to monitor and analyse Sphagnum and carbon storage.
While monitoring is ongoing and we have a lot of research ahead of us, initial evaluations of the planted Sphagnum material is already showing positive survival and growth rates.
As I continue my work with Bord na Móna, we’re grateful for the support provided by the European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility as part of Ireland’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan, a key instrument at the heart of NextGenerationEU. The primary aim of this scheme is to optimize climate action benefits of rewetting the former industrial peat production areas by creating soggy peatland conditions that will allow compatible peatland habitats to redevelop.
David McNicholas is an Ecologist at Bord na Móna where he works with a multidisciplinary team to deliver an ambitious peatland restoration programme, post-industrial peat production. As a member of the Bord na Móna Ecology Team, David is involved in rehabilitation planning and implementation, while also planning and undertaking monitoring and protected species surveys.
I was back on my run through Madrid’s Casa de Campo, the 4,257 acre public park and preserve where I found Feature Creature inspiration in the form of a sickly hare a few weeks ago. After spending several minutes observing the hare, I continued as my run opened into a large clearing. A cinematic scene rolled out before me, as a red kite (milvus milvus), one of the hare’s natural predators, dropped out of an umbrella pine and flew off before me.
Maybe it was just my own naivety, but it was a special moment for me. You see, I’d run the park many times before, but rarely looked any further than the trail in front of me. Instead, this time I tried to pay attention to the web of life around me, and how each strand of it, living or not, connected with the others around it.
Take that red kite. It is an animal that works in service of its environment with a body and design that, in turn, work in near perfect service of it.
Nature’s cleanup crew
The red kite’s nesting range stretches in a broad band from the southern corner of Portugal, up through the Iberian Peninsula, central France, and Germany, before reaching the Baltic states. Smaller populations are also found in Mediterranean islands, coastal Italy, and the British Isles, where reintroduction campaigns in the 1980’s successfully revived its numbers.
They prefer to nest at the edge of woodlands, enabling quick and easy access to the open sky and landscape, not unlike how I look for an apartment within walking distance to the metro, or how a commuter in the suburbs might prefer to live a short drive from a highway or major thoroughfare on ramp. But wherever the red kite calls home, it has an important job to do.
The red kite is, first and foremost, a scavenger. Its diet consists primarily of carrion—dead animals, often livestock and game. By feeding on these carcasses, the red kite acts as a natural janitor and ultimately helps recycle nutrients back into the soil and surrounding environment.
When a scavenger like the red kite feasts on a dead animal, it kickstarts nature’s process for removing a carcass from (or to!) the environment. In feeding, they speed up the process of decomposition by physically breaking down the body and handing off a more manageable scene to smaller organisms like insects, bacteria, and fungi.
These insects and microbes release nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon into the soil as they break down the red kite’s leftovers. These nutrients enrich the soil, promoting plant growth, supporting other forms of life in the ecosystem, and maintaining essential geosystems.
It’s humbling. What seems brutal or grotesque—feasting on dead animals—is really an elegant solution from nature to each life’s inevitable end.
Plasticity
While foraged carrion can make up the majority of the red kite’s diet (upwards of 75%), it is also an agile and capable hunter of hares, birds, rodents, and lizards, respectably quick prey in their own right. A deeply forked tail acts like a rudder, providing precision flight control when on the hunt.
Red kite displaying its distinctive forked tail Stephen Noulta (CC via Pexels)
This remarkable agility serves another purpose: communication. The red kite pairs a variety of unique vocalizations with striking physical displays, especially during courtship. And man, on that front does it deliver. It’s as if, in a bid to outdo the more visually aesthetic displays of other birds like parrots and peacocks, the red kite said, “alright, I see your colorful feathers and raise you tandem, spiraling corkscrew dives.” It’s worth taking a few seconds to watch.
Red kites locked in a dive
This is all to say that the red kite is well-equipped to meet the demands of its environment, whether foraging or hunting. They have been observed changing their foraging behavior and diet based on food availability and changing environmental conditions. While this level of flexibility, or plasticity, is found among other raptors, what makes the red kite stand out in this regard is its success adapting to both rural and increasingly urbanized environments.
A connected, complicated story
It’s difficult to tell the story of the red kite without understanding the species’ relationship with us, with humans.
A natural & social scavenger, the red kite’s role in our story goes back almost as long as we’ve been hunting, practicing agriculture, and leaving waste in the streets. Our complex relationship spans centuries and reflects our evolving attitudes toward wildlife, shifting dynamics of human environments, and the species’ own plasticity. In the middle ages, the red kite was a common sight in European cities, and especially London, where it acted as a natural street cleaner, scavenging for scraps and waste in the then-squalid streets. In fact, it was protected by law, and harming one was a punishable offense, as its presence was crucial to maintaining urban sanitation.
Attitudes began to shift however as human settlements expanded and agricultural practices intensified. The birds came to be seen as vermin, threatening livestock and hunting game populations. This, combined with a broader adoption of poison to control other animals like foxes, led to a dramatic decline in red kite populations. By the turn of the 20th century, the red kite had been pushed to near extinction in many parts of Europe. As few as a handful of pairs were believed to have survived in remote parts of Wales.
But as part of larger, global conservation trends, red kite reintroduction programs took off in the 1980’s, particularly in the UK. These efforts were successful, with Royal Society for the Protection of Birds operations director Jeff Knott declaring that it “might be the biggest species success story in UK conservation history.”
As I’ve come to understand it, this recovery is not so much the end of a story, but the beginning of a new, equally complicated chapter in Europe’s story with the red kite. Bird populations have rebounded, and are now learning how to live in a densely populated, 21st century world. Ever the survivors, red kites are adapting to modern urban and semi-urban environments. In southern England, they’ve once again become a common sight, soaring over towns and cities as they did hundreds of years ago, and foraging for food in suburban gardens.
Red kites soar above Barton-le-clay, UK bitsandbugs (CC via iNaturalist)
Raised on a steady diet of Planet Earth, Animal Planet, and Nat Geo, I think it was easy to see “nature” as a separate thing we’re siloed off from in our built environments, something wonderful and to be safeguarded in a separate place, something we can enter and exit at our leisure. It’s evident even in the way we collectively discuss it. We talk about “being out in nature,” “escaping to the outdoors,” “getting away from it all.”
And sometimes it takes a bird like the red kite to remind you that nature doesn’t exist separately from us. The red kite doesn’t necessarily see the Iberian savannah as any more or less wild than a British village. Where there is any life, there is an ecosystem.
Running to catch the next creature, Brendan
BrendanKelly began his career teaching conservation education programs at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium. He is interested in how the intersection of informal education, mass communications and marketing can be retooled to drive relatable, accessible climate action. While he loves all ecosystems equally, he is admittedly partial to those in the alpine.
What seemingly cute, small creature is, in fact, a terrifying killer that drills a hole into their prey, liquifies it, and then sucks it out like a smoothie?
Have you ever noticed those shells at the beach with perfectly round holes in them? I’ve always wondered how they end up like that. I thought, “surely it is not a coincidence that jewelry-ready shells are left in the sand for a craft-lover like me.” Amazingly, the neat holes are the work of the moon snail.
Take a look at holes made by the moon snail; maybe you’ve seen them before too.
The Small Snowplows of the Ocean
The moon snail is a predatory sea snail from the Naticidae family, named for the half-moon shaped opening on the underside of its globular shell. They are smooth and shiny and come in a variety of colors and patterns depending on the species: white, gray, brown, blue, or orange, with different spiral bands or waves. The size of moon snails also varies by species, ranging from as small as a marble to as large as a baseball. To traverse the ocean floor, moon snails use a big, fleshy foot to burrow through the sand. They pump water into the foot’s hollow sinuses to expand it in front of and over the shell, making it easier to travel along the ocean floor, like a snowplow. (Or should we call it a sand plow?)
Northern Moonsnail, Euspira heros (Image Credit: Cassidy Best via iNaturalist)Lewis’s Moon Snail, Neverita lewisii (Image Credit: BrewBooks, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Moon snails live in various saltwater habitats along the coast of North America. A diversity of species can be found along both the Atlantic Coast between Canada down to North Carolina, and the Pacific Coast from British Columbia down to Baja California, Mexico. They live on silty, sandy substrates at a variety of depths depending on the species, from the intertidal zone and shallow waters below the tidemark to muddy bottoms off the coast 500 meters deep (about 1640 feet, which is greater than the height of the Empire State Building!). You might find a moon snail during a full moon, when the tide is higher and more seashells wash up on shore, plowing through the sand looking for its next meal.
Northern Moonsnail, Euspira heros (Image Credit: Ian Manning via iNaturalist)
When a moon snail fills its muscular foot with water, it can almost cover its entire shell!
Lewis’s Moon Snail, Neverita lewisii (Image Credit: Ed Bierman via Wikimedia Commons)
The moon snail is part of a taxonomic class called Gastropoda, which describes a group of animals that includes snails, slugs, and nudibranchs. The word gastropod comes from Greek and translates to “stomach foot.” The moon snail is a part of this belly-crawler club because it has a foot that runs along the underside of its belly that it uses to get around!
What’s on the menu? Clam chowder!
What does the moon snail eat? These ocean invertebrates prey primarily on other mollusks that share their habitat, like clams and mussels. They use chemoreception (a process by which organisms respond to chemical stimuli in their environment) to locate a mollusk and envelop it in their inflated foot, dragging it farther into the sand.
Nearly all gastropods have a radula (think of a tongue with a lot of tiny, sharp teeth) that they use to consume smaller pieces of food or scrape algae off rocks. Moon snails are different. After their prey is captured, moon snails use their radula to grind away at a spot on their prey’s shell. With the help of enzymes and acids secreted from glands on the bottom of their foot, they drill completely through the shell of their victim at a rate of half a millimeter per day. Once the drilling is complete, moon snails inject digestive fluids into the mollusk, liquefying its innards, and slurp up the chowder inside with their tubular proboscis. The entire process takes about four to five days. Vicious, right? And what is even more brutal is that sometimes, moon snails are cannibalistic!
What role does the moon snail play in its environment?
Phytoplankton and algae form the foundation of the marine food web, providing food and energy to the entire ecosystem of sea creatures. Organisms that fall prey to moon snails, like clams and mussels, consume this microscopic algae, as well as other bacteria and plant detritus. The moon snail is a vital link in this interconnected food chain because not only is it important prey for predators like crabs, lobsters, and shorebirds, but it also provides these organisms with energy and key nutrients. Through decomposition, moon snails’ feces, dead bodies, and shells become nutrients for producers like phytoplankton and algae.
Unfortunately, many things can harm moon snails and their habitats. Meteorological events like hurricanes can cause fluctuations in the species’ abundance. During heatwaves, when record high temperatures combine with extreme low tides like the one in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, moon snails can become extended from their shells, leading to desiccation and death.
The Earth’s temperature has risen at a rate of approximately 0.2°C per decade since 1982, making 2023 the warmest year since global records began in 1850. If yearly greenhouse gas emissions continue to rapidly increase, the global temperature will be at least 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and possibly as much as 10.2 degrees warmer by 2100. This continuous increase in temperature puts not just moon snails but humans and the Earth’s biodiversity at large at risk, not only because of more frequent heat waves, but because oceans are becoming more acidic as the water absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As reporter Hari Sreenivasan explained in the PBS NewsHour report, Acidifying Waters Corrode Northwest Shellfish, ocean acidification affects shellfish a lot like how osteoporosis causes bones to become brittle in humans. The increasing acidity in the ocean reduces the amount of carbonate in the seawater, making it more difficult for moon snails and other shellfish to build and maintain strong calcium carbonate shells.
Colorful Moon Snail, Naticarius canrena (Image Credit: Joe Tomoleoni via iNaturalist)
Human activities also threaten marine creatures like moon snails. Shoreline hardening, aquaculture operations, and water management disturbs the food web and drives species towards extinction. Building structures on the shore to protect against erosion, storm surge, and sea level rise; projects such as geoduck farming; and creating dams and other water diversions disrupts animal communities and results in considerable habitat change. Fortunately, there are environmentally friendly alternatives, like living shorelines. These use plants and other natural features like rocks and shells to stabilize sediments, absorb wave energy, and protect against erosion.
What can you do to protect these clam-chowing sand plows and the biodiversity of the marine sediment?
One thing you can do to help moon snails is protect their egg casings. In the summer, more moon snails emerge in the shallow, intertidal habitats because it’s time for them to breed. To lay eggs, the female moon snail covers her entire foot in a thick layer of sand that she cements together with mucus. After laying tiny eggs on top, she sandwiches them between another layer of sand and detaches herself from the firm, gelatinous egg mass and leaves them to hatch in a few weeks. These collar-shaped egg casings can sometimes look like pieces of plastic or trash, so make sure you don’t pick them up and throw them away!
Moon snails can be found washed up on dry parts of the beach as well as in submerged parts of sand flats during low tide. If you pick up a moon snail, remember to put it back in the water so it doesn’t dry out in the sun.
The biodiversity in the marine sediment rivals even coral reefs and tropical rainforests. The organisms that live in this part of the ocean and the services they provide are essential for life on Earth. They cycle nutrients, break down pollutants, filter water, and feed commercial species like cod and scallop that humans eat all the time. Historical fishing activities, bottom trawling, habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, food web modification, and invasive species threaten biodiversity, functions, and services of marine sedimentary habitats. While there are many unknowns and ongoing threats to ocean life, that also means there are more opportunities for research and discovery that can inform effective ocean conservation policies. Supporting these policies that protect oceans and marine life is a way to protect moon snails too.
In ecology, there is a principle that suggests that each ecological niche is occupied by a distinct organism uniquely suited to it. This means organisms exist everywhere, and they have evolved to exist in these places in specific ways. The moon snail’s unique characteristics – notably the way it uses its radula to drill into its prey – shows us that in almost any niche, the organism which occupies it has similarly adapted to optimize its place in that habitat. I’m curious to learn what other unique traits organisms have evolved to adapt to their unique niche.
Off to shell-ebrate the beauty of our oceans and their creatures,
Abigail
Abigail Gipson is an environmental advocate with a bachelor’s degree in humanitarian studies from Fordham University. Working to protect the natural world and its inhabitants, Abigail is specifically interested in environmental protection, ecosystem-based adaptation, and the intersection of climate change with human rights and animal welfare. She loves autumn, reading, and gardening.
What creature steals photosynthesis, can go a year without eating, and blurs the animal-plant boundary?
The Eastern Emerald Elysia (Elysia chlorotica)!
Image Credit: Patrick J. Krugg
“It’s a leaf,” my friend said when I showed her the photograph.
“Look closely. It’s not a leaf,” I replied.
“What is it then? Some insect camouflaged as a leaf?” she asked, still staring at the photo.
“It’s a slug. A sea slug. It starts as an animal and then… becomes plant-like. It steals chloroplasts. It can photosynthesize,” I almost yelled in excitement.
“What do you mean, it steals chloroplasts? Is there some symbiotic relationship with bacteria that allows it to photosynthesize?” my friend asked—she’s a nature nerd.
“No, not at all,” I said, feeling overwhelmed. “I don’t quite understand how it works yet. I am not sure anyone truly does.”
It had only been a few hours since I learned about the Eastern Emerald Elysia (Elysia chlorotica). Since then, I haven’t been able to stop sharing this incredible discovery with anyone who crosses my path—whether they’re interested or not—I’ll share anyway.
Days later, as I write, I contemplate my friend’s first instinct. In nature, if you’re not a plant and want to photosynthesize, you usually rely on symbiosis. The first thing that comes to mind are corals. Corals host tiny algae called zooxanthellae within their tissues. The algae photosynthesize, providing the coral with food and energy in exchange for protection and access to sunlight.
But I became curious — What other species in nature photosynthesize through symbiosis?
I learned that some sea anemones, sponges, giant clams, hydras and, surprisingly, yellow-spotted salamanders—the only known vertebrate that photosynthesizes—also rely on similar symbiotic relationships, though that’s a story for another time.
And … lichens, too.
In his book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, biologist and author Merlin Sheldrake describes lichens as “places where an organism unravels into an ecosystem, and where an ecosystem congeals into an organism. They flicker between ‘wholes’ and ‘collections of parts’. Shuttling between the two perspectives is a confusing experience.”
Indeed, it is a confusing experience. There’s this consistent thread of life forms rejecting the categories we impose on them. Lichens blur the lines between fungi and plants, comprising fungi, algae, and bacteria—organisms from three kingdoms of life, each with a specific ecological role crucial to the whole—a miniature ecosystem.
But the Eastern Emerald Elysia (Elysia chlorotica) once more challenges categorization, blurring the lines between the animal and plant world.
Where does the animal stop and the plant begin?
Upon a closer look, Elysia chlorotica proves to be more than ordinary. Transformation in color from brown-reddish to green upon stealing chloroplasts from the Vaucheria litorea algae. The transformation occurs in about 48 hours. Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons 1, 2, 3)
Elysia Chlorotica’s Way of Being: Living In Between Worlds
I am learning that Elysia chlorotica can be found very close to where I live on the eastern coast of the United States. My friend noted several sightings of them on iNaturalist in states like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In fact, the highest concentration of Elysia Chloratica is on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
Their preferred habitat is shallow tidal marshes and pools with water less than 1.5 feet deep.
They are shy, flat, and between 1 and 2 inches long.
And although they belong to the clade Sacoglossans, they are often mistaken for Nudibranchs. What differentiates the two is their diet. Nudibranchs are carnivorous, while the Sacoglossans are herbivores.
Sacoglossans are also known as sap-sucking slugs due to their feeding behavior. Elysia chlorotica feeds exclusively on the yellow-green macroalga Vaucheria litorea, the two living in close proximity.
Selected quote from the video: “It then lives on the food made by these chloroplasts. It is a fascinating story of endosymbiosis.”
The term “feeding” might be a bit misleading. Elysia chlorotica does eat the algae, yet it uses its radula, a specialized set of piercing teeth, to puncture it and suck out all of its contents – “kinda” like a straw. In the process of feeding, it begins to digest everything else, except it leaves the chloroplasts intact – the tiny organelles responsible for photosynthesis in plants.
The undigested chloroplasts become incorporated into the slug’s digestive tract, visible on its back as a branching pattern that resembles the venation found on a leaf or the structure of our lungs. This process is known as kleptoplasty, derived from the Greek word “klepto,” meaning thief. As chloroplasts accumulate, the slug’s color changes from reddish-brown to green due to the chlorophyll in about 48 hours.
When I read this, I engage in a thought exercise—I imagine I am eating a salad. The salad is composed of cucumbers, sesame seeds, and dill (my favorite!) with a bit of olive oil, vinegar, and salt. In the process of eating, I digest everything except the dill, which I leave intact within me. Once the dill gets to my digestive tract, within a matter of 48 hours, I start turning green and gain the ability to photosynthesize—to eat light, to fix CO2, and emit oxygen in return.
Of course, this is impossible (or doesn’t yet happen) for humans and animals. Repurposing chloroplasts into one’s physiology, even without digesting them, is a feat that is far from straightforward. It involves complex genes, proteins, and mechanisms—thousands of them—ensuring that this process functions correctly. There’s a precise interaction, akin to a lock-and-key mechanism, that makes this extraordinary adaptation possible. It is more of a dialogue, an evolutionary dialogue—an activation.
What is even more extraordinary is that Elysia chlorotica can maintain functioning chloroplasts for its entire life cycle, approximately 12 months. It only needs to eat once. Normally, chloroplasts need a lot of support from the plant’s own genes to keep functioning. When they are inside an animal cell, they are far from their original plant environment. And one cannot ignore the immune system, which upon sensing a foreign body, should initiate an attack.
This intrigues scientists. For example, there are many other species that are kleptoplasts, including a few other Sacoglossans sea slugs. I learned that some ciliatesand foraminiferans are, too. And there’s a marine flatworm that can steal chloroplasts from diatoms.
However, none of them can maintain intact chloroplasts as long as Elysia chlorotica.
At first you might have been surprised by just how it incorporates plant-like processes into an animal body. But then the question transforms into how it maintains these processes. Maintenance, it seems, is still a mystery. And for what?
For a more in-depth exploration of Elysia chlorotica, watch this video and refer to its description for scientific papers and additional readings.
Yet What is This Chloroplast Maintenance For? Does It Need Photosynthesis to Survive?
From the video above that does an excellent job summarizing various scientific discoveries and Ed Yong’s article “Solar-Powered Slugs Are Not Solar-Powered,” I was able to understand the development of a mental model and the nature of scientific inquiry through experimentation and challenging assumptions surrounding the sea slug.
Initially: It was believed that Elysia chlorotica stole chloroplasts and relied entirely on photosynthesis for survival.
Then: It was found that sunlight isn’t crucial for its survival—starvation, light or darkness–it doesn’t matter.
Finally: Research on other species of sea slugs Elysia timida and Plakobranchus ocellatus showed that while these slugs convert CO2 into sugars in the presence of light, they don’t need photosynthesis to survive. They concluded that chloroplasts might act as a food reserve, hoarded for future needs.
However: The mystery remains of how chloroplasts perform photosynthesis in an animal body. The hypothesis that chloroplasts function due to gene theft was disproven. Chloroplasts need thousands of genes, mostly from the host cell’s nucleus, but that is left behind during chloroplast theft. Nobody truly understands how the chloroplasts continue to function under these conditions.
I’m left confused, moving from thinking photosynthesis was essential to realizing it’s not required for survival, yet chloroplasts still perform photosynthesis.
If you also feel confused, please know, this uncertainty and surrendering to the unknown is crucial when studying and learning from the natural world. Questions like ‘why they need photosynthesis at all’ and ‘how it happens’ remain unanswered.
Due to the difficulty of raising Elysia chlorotica in the lab, and the need to carefully limit their collection to protect wild populations, research on them is highly challenging. Climate change and habitat fragmentation make this task even more difficult.
I look forward to following the progress of this research and am grateful to the scientists who continue to push boundaries and deepen our understanding of these remarkable creatures. This is one more example of why it is so important to protect and restore the Earth’s ecosystems.
The Genesis of Symbiosis. The Origin of The Chloroplast. The Becoming of the Earth.
Researching Elysia chlorotica took me on an entirely different path. I have always been interested in the origin of things, how something emerges, and the question of what is the origin of the chloroplasts intuitively unfolded.
It led me to Symbiogenesis. Symbiogenesis, as defined by Lynn Margulis, is the theory that new organisms and complex features evolve through symbiotic relationships, where one organism engulfs and integrates another.
In a moment of serendipity, I was surprised to see in one of the scenes in the documentary that the Elysia chlorotica was on the cover of the book titled “Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution” by Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyanksy. One of its editors is Lynn Margulis.
Photograph I took of a projected scene from the documentary Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis Rocked the Boat and Started a Scientific Revolution.
I never considered the genesis of symbiosis before–its connection with the genesis of life on Earth as we know it and with the biogeochemical cycles, fundamental processes that make our planet habitable.
This serendipitous moment, coupled with my learning process of Elysia chlorotica feels like some sort of beginning for me–a new understanding of how to perceive the becoming of the Earth.
Lynn Margulis, through her Serial Endosymbiotic Theory (SET), proposed that chloroplasts and mitochondria were originally free-living bacteria that entered into symbiotic relationships.
I am becoming aware that these primordial organelles have been integral to life’s evolution, part of a biological legacy that has shaped the Earth’s emergence of life for billions of years. And it all started with bacteria!
Elysia chlorotica, with its ability to steal chloroplasts, has reminded me that when studying the natural world, there is always something that doesn’t quite fit into our predetermined categories of knowledge and that life inevitably discovers a way to persist through new configurations of interacting and being.
We now understand that classifying nature goes beyond just physical appearances. There are hidden processes at play—molecular, genetic, and biogeochemical—that allow us to trace the origins of life and understand it in ways that extend beyond mere morphology. Nature, ultimately, defies rules—this seems to be the only rule. The once-ordered tree of life gives way to fluid boundaries and intricate entanglements. This emerging complexity reflects the true essence of life: dynamic, interconnected, ever-evolving, filled with irregular rhythms.
And now, I have a new category, a new lens through which to perceive nature: “Animals That Can Photosynthesize.” (hear Lynn Margulis talk about this topic in the first 10 minutes of the podcast).
Left: Chloroplasts. Photo Credit: Kristian Peters-Fabelfroh (CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons) Right: Project Apollo Archive (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)
Without chloroplasts, there would be no plants, sea slugs, and oxygen-rich Earth. And without cyanobacteria—the believed progenitors of chloroplasts—much of the life we know of today, and perhaps countless other forms yet to be discovered, would not exist.
I hope you can look beyond the form of living systems and envision how life emerged through symbiosis.
Picture this emergence on various scales, from the microscopic chloroplast to the scale of an entire planet.
With gratitude, yet green with chloroplast envy,
Alexandra
Alexandra Ionescu is an Ecological Artist and Certified Biomimicry Professional. She currently works at Bio4Climate as the Associate Director of Regenerative Projects, focusing on the Miyawaki Forest Program. Her aim is to inspire learning from and about diverse non-human intelligences, cultivating propensities for ecosystem regeneration through co-existence, collaboration and by making the invisible visible. She hopes to motivate others to ask “How can humans give back to the web of life?” by raising awareness of biodiversity and natural cycles to challenge human-centric infrastructures. In her spare time, Alexandra is part of the Below and Above Collective, an interdisciplinary group that combines art with ecological functionality to construct floating wetlands and is a 2024 Curatorial Fellow with Creature Conserve where she organized a webinar and “Read/Reflect/Create” club centered on beavers.
The Cork Oak is a unique tree species whose bark is an ancient renewable and biodynamic material that supports a valuable Portuguese industry. Portugal produces 50% of the world’s cork, thanks to the abundance of the native Cork Oak that covers 8% of the country’s total land area and makes up 28% of its forests.
The harvested cork is made into the wine stoppers we all know, but cork is also used to create flooring, furniture, a variety of household items, and has even broken into the fashion industry in the form of clothing and accessories. Across Portugal, (where the Cork Oak is the National Tree), you’ll find locals sporting cork backpacks, wallets, sandals, and belts, to name a few.
On a recent trip to the Douro Valley in northeastern Portugal, I was inspired by the locality of the wine-making process, exemplified by the roadside Cork Oaks whose harvested bark was used to plug the bottles of Portuguese wine made with grapes grown on the same hills.
The material is gaining more international recognition as a highly renewable and biodegradable resource that can replace traditional, more carbon intensive materials like wood, plastic, leather, and cotton in a wide variety of settings.
The Cork Oak, or Quercus Suber, is an evergreen oak species native to the Mediterranean region, most commonly in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. A lover of full sun, mild winters, and well-drained soil, the Cork Oak grows to a height of 40-70 feet. Its rounded crown consists of ovular, four-inch leaves that are dark green and leathery on top with a fuzzy, gray underside. The tree is characterized by its recognizable, fissured bark.
Cork Oaks are environmental stalwarts, working hard to prevent erosion and increasing the moisture level in the soil. These services are crucial: Cork Oaks are on the front lines as desertification creeps northward in Africa. These Mediterranean Forests are home to surprisingly biodiverse ecosystems with nearly 135 plant species per kilometer, including other oaks and wild olive trees. These forests shelter a wide variety of animal species and are final strongholds for crucially endangered species like the Iberian Lynx and Imperial Eagle. Their acorns serve as food for native birds and rodents, their yellow flowers feed pollinators, and their unique ability to regenerate their bark makes them a valuable resource for humans.
What sets Cork Oaks apart is their thick, fissured bark with the rare capacity to regenerate every 9-12 years. Its harvest is a heavily regulated process in Portugal that takes place between May and August each year. Laws allow the harvest of a single tree only once every nine years starting at age 25. The process leaves the tree standing, and allows time for the bark to regenerate completely between harvests. Large swaths of the outer bark is cut and peeled off by hand, exposing the tree’s striking, reddish-brown trunk. The last number of the harvest year is then marked on the tree in white paint, as seen below with a tree in the Douro Valley whose bark was harvested in 2023. This tree will be ready for another harvest in 2032, nine years later. With a lifespan of around 200 years, a single cork oak can be harvested up to 15 times!
Photo by Morgan Moscinski (Douro Valley, Portugal)
Once the cork has been aged slightly, pressurized, and boiled (a six-month process), it becomes the lightweight and elastic material we find in our wine bottles. Naturally impervious to liquid while allowing a little air movement over time (this helps wine mature), the Ancient Greeks were the first to use cork as a bottle stopper over 2,000 years ago! It remains the preferred closure solution of contemporary winemakers.
With immense environmental and economic value, the Cork Oak is a unique species working hard to keep the deserts at bay and the wine drinkers happy. A protected species in Portugal since the 13th century, the ancient practice of cork bark harvesting is more important than ever. The tree is not harmed by this process; it actually helps it become a larger carbon sink. The photosynthesis required to regrow its bark results in additional carbon dioxide drawn down from the atmosphere after each harvest. This fascinating process is a rare win-win in the search for biodynamic and sustainable materials. How will we use it next?
So, the next time you celebrate a special occasion, share a bottle with friends, or enjoy a glass of Douro Valley Moscatel after dinner (something I recommend), take a moment to think about the wonderful uniqueness of the material at play. And don’t forget to compost those corks at the end of the night!
Off I pop! Ryan
Ryan Pagois is a climate advocate and systems thinker serving as an Associate Director at Built Environment Plus, helping to drive sustainable building solutions in MA. He is passionate about urban ecology, carbon balance, and rewilding cities. He is excited to pursue a Masters of Ecological Design at the Conway School starting this fall, to explore how low-impact urban development can be our greatest climate solution and community resilience tool. He grew up in Minnesota and studied environmental policy and international relations at Boston University.
Blue whales are the largest creature to ever grace this Earth. They can grow to around 100 ft (33 meters), which is more than twice the size of a T-Rex dinosaur! Newborn calves are around the same size as an adult African elephant – about 23 ft (7 meters). To get more of an idea of how huge these animals are, picture this: a blue whale’s heart is the size of a car, and their blood vessels are so wide a person can swim through them!
Despite their large size, blue whales eat tiny organisms. Their favorite food is krill, small shrimp-like creatures. They can eat up to 40 million of these every day. They do so by opening their mouths really wide, and after getting a mouthful, they’ll close their mouths and force out the swallowed water with their tongue, while trapping the krill behind their baleen plates – this method is known as filter feeding.
Blue whales live in every ocean except the Arctic. They usually travel alone or in small groups of up to four, but when there are plenty of krill to go around, more than 60 of these mega-creatures will gather around and feast.
Blue whales can communicate across 1,000 miles (over 1600 km)! Their calls are loud and deep, reaching up to 188 decibels – so loud that it would be too painful for human ears to bear. Scientists believe that these calls produce sonar – helping the whales navigate through dark ocean depths.
Climate Regulator
All that krill has to go somewhere, meaning out the other end. Whale poop helps maintain the health of oceans by fertilizing microscopic plankton. Plankton is the bedrock of all sea life, as it feeds the smallest of critters, and these critters then feed larger creatures (and on goes the food chain). Plankton include algae and cyanobacteria that get their energy through photosynthesis, and they are abundant throughout Earth’s oceans. These microorganisms contribute to carbon storage by promoting the cycling of carbon in the ocean, rather than its emission in the form of carbon dioxide. Without whales, we wouldn’t have as much plankton, and without plankton, the food cycle would collapse, and more gas would rise to the atmosphere. Therefore, whale poop acts as a climate stabilizer.
Learn more about this whale-based nutrient cycle here:
Size doesn’t equal protection
Unfortunately, the sheer size of blue whales isn’t enough to prevent them from harm. Blue whales were heavily hunted until last century, and although a global ban was imposed in 1966, they are still considered endangered.
Today, blue whales must navigate large and cumbersome fishing gear. When they get entangled, the gear attached to them can cause severe injury. Dragging all that gear adds a lot of weight, so this also zaps their energy sources. Since blue whales communicate through calls intended to travel long distances, increased ocean noise either from ships or underwater military tests can also disrupt their natural behaviors.
Another threat blue whales face are vessel strikes. They can swim up to 20 miles an hour, but only for short bursts. Usually, blue whales travel at a steady pace of 5 miles per hour. This means that they aren’t fast enough to dodge incoming vessels, and these collisions can lead to injuries or even death for the whales. In areas where traffic is high, such as ports and shipping lanes, this threat becomes even more prominent.
To protect blue whales, and our oceans, we can implement sustainable fishing practices that use marine mammal-friendly gear. We can also reduce man-made noise, and utilize precautionary measures when venturing out to sea. That way we avoid vessel strikes and have a higher chance of witnessing the largest creature to ever grace our planet.
For creatures big, bigger, and biggest, Tania
Tania graduated from Tufts University with a Master of Science in Animals and Public Policy. Her academic research projects focused on wildlife conservation efforts, and the impacts that human activities have on wild habitats. As a writer and activist, Tania emphasizes the connections between planet, human, and animal health. She is a co-founder of the podcast Closing the Gap, and works on outreach and communications for Sustainable Harvest International. She loves hiking, snorkeling, and advocating for social justice.
Groundhogs are famous rodents who enjoy the spotlight in early February, when people in the US and Canada celebrate Groundhog Day. These critters also go by woodchuck, whistle-pig, wood-shock, whistler, marmot, thickwood badger, red monk, land beaver, weenusk, monax, and groundpig.
Beyond their supposed (and generally debunked) prowess at predicting seasonal changes, these cuddly creatures exhibit a fascinating blend of behaviors and ecological significance. Groundhogs belong to the squirrel family as one of the 14 species of marmots, which are also aptly known as ground squirrels. Indeed, groundhogs’ fifteen minutes of fame, and their lives outside of it, are shaped by their burrowing talent and how that ties into their seasonal habits.
A defining characteristic of groundhogs is their habit of hibernating through the winter months. They spend the warmer seasons gorging themselves on vegetation, accumulating ample fat reserves to sustain them through the winter slumber. During hibernation, their heart rate drops and their body temperature lowers, enabling them to conserve energy in their underground burrows.
Burrowing is a hallmark behavior of groundhogs, with complex, multi-chambered burrows extending up to a total of 65 feet in length. These subterranean dwellings serve as multi-functional spaces where groundhogs sleep, raise their offspring, and even excrete waste in specific, separate tunnels. Intriguingly, the burrows also provide refuge for other wildlife species, which helps support the overall biodiversity of their habitats. Much like the dens of the related prairie dog, these burrows can shelter other species in times of need, offering a place of refuge during fires or cold snaps, or simply a home base to hide out from the usual predators.
Cultural and Ecological Connections
Groundhog Day, celebrated on February 2nd each year, has captured the imagination of people across the United States and Canada. According to tradition, if a groundhog emerges from its burrow and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter, and if it doesn’t see its shadow (which happened this year), spring will come early. However, a study conducted in 2021 surveying years of predictions and seasonal records revealed that groundhogs’ predictions seem to be pure chance, with accuracy rates hovering around 50 percent.
Despite their failed reputation as predictors of seasonal changes, groundhogs excel in other aspects of survival. They are skilled foragers, feeding on a variety of vegetation, including leaves, flowers, and field crops. Their burrowing activities also play a crucial role in mixing and aerating the soil, a process which enhances nutrient absorption essential for plant growth.
While groundhogs are classified as species of least concern on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, they face challenges in areas where they are overly abundant. Considered pests by some due to their burrowing activities, groundhogs occasionally come into conflict with humans, particularly farmers who may experience damage to gardens and crops.
Groundhogs are integral components of their ecosystems, providing shelter for various wildlife species and contributing to soil health through their burrowing activities. While adults are known to defend themselves fiercely against predators using their powerful claws and teeth, young groundhogs are more vulnerable to predation, particularly from birds of prey like hawks and other raptors.
Check out this short and sweet video from the Missouri Department of Conservation on Groundhogs:
Let us honor Groundhog Day as a reminder to be attentive to the organisms and ecosystems around us. The more we learn from one another, the better we can participate in the complex web of life in which we all play a role.
Burrowing away now,
Maya
Maya Dutta is an environmental advocate and ecosystem restorer working to spread understanding on the key role of biodiversity in shaping the climate and the water, carbon, nutrient and energy cycles we rely on. She is passionate about climate change adaptation and mitigation and the ways that community-led ecosystem restoration can fight global climate change while improving the livelihood and equity of human communities. Having grown up in New York City and lived in cities all her life, Maya is interested in creating more natural infrastructure, biodiversity, and access to nature and ecological connection in urban areas.
What Nat King Cole, Mel Torme’ and Bing Crosby Were Singing About
According to legend, songwriter Robert Wells, trying to stay cool during the hot summer of 1945, put to paper his favorite parts of winter, eventually turning those thoughts into “The Christmas Song.” First on his list – “chestnuts roasting on an open fire.”
Now maybe, if you are like me, you find that a curious choice. Were chestnuts really that important to the Christmas experience? Before yuletide carols and Jack Frost? Before turkeys and mistletoe and tiny tots who can’t sleep because “SantaSantaSanta?” Why, when penning his favorite parts of winter, did his first thought turn to chestnuts?
Which brings us to the Columbian Exchange.
What is the Columbian Exchange?
The Columbian Exchange, for those who don’t know, refers to the massive transfer of plants, animals, germs, ideas, people, and more that occurred in the wake of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. While a detailed analysis of all the impacts of the Columbian Exchange is far beyond the scope of this piece, from a strictly biological standpoint, it began a fierce evolutionary battle as previously unseen species entered new territory for the first time.
One of the most notable victims of this exchange turned out to be the American Chestnut Tree.
For more than 2,000 years, the American Chestnut dominated the mountains and forests of the Eastern United States, allowing adventurous squirrels to travel, according to legend, from Georgia to New England without ever touching the ground or another species of tree. Each year it provided much of the diet for many species, including black bears, deer, turkeys, the (now extinct) passenger pigeon and more.
The chestnuts, which grew three at a time inside the velvety lining of a spiny burr, contained more nutrients than other trees in the East, making them especially valuable to Indigenous peoples who relied on them as a food source and used them in traditional medicines. Europeans would later use the nuts as feed for their animals, or forage to use them for food or trade. In addition, since the trees grew faster than oak and were highly resistant to decay, the lumber was highly-prized for construction—to this day American chestnut, reclaimed from older buildings, is sometimes used to create furniture.
Harvesting an American chestnut at TACF’s Meadowview Research FarmsOpen bur of an American chestnut Young green burs at Meadowview Research FarmsWild American chestnut seedling in NY
The chestnuts were, in fact, such a staple that, in the late fall and early winter after the trees had delivered their harvest, city streets would be lined with carts roasting the nuts for sale. They are reported to be richer and sweeter than other varieties of chestnut and were a much sought-after wintertime treat. Today, roasted chestnuts are typically imported, and either European or Chinese chestnuts are used and, if our great-grandparents are to be believed, those species are just not as good. In addition, the loss of the American Chestnut deprived the United States of an important export.
So, What Happened?
After Columbus arrived, a fella by the name of Thomas Jefferson danced into his Virginia home-sweet-home with some European chestnuts to plant at Monticello. Somebody else imported Chinese chestnuts and, before too long, ink disease had practically eliminated the American chestnut in the southern portion of its range.
Then, in 1876, Japanese chestnuts were introduced into the United States in upstate New York and, a few decades later, a blight was discovered at the Bronx Zoo (then known as New York Zoological Park) that, by 1906, had killed 98% of the American chestnuts in the borough. Since Asian chestnuts, and to a lesser extent European chestnuts, had evolved alongside the blight, they were able to survive. But the American Chestnut tree (and its cousin the Allegheny Chinquapin) could not. Over the coming decades the airborne fungus, which could spread 50 miles in a year and kill an infected American Chestnut within ten years, had rendered the American Chestnut functionally extinct.
Canker and blightBlight on young chestnut trees.
What Does That Mean, “Functionally” Extinct?
While the American Chestnut may be “functionally” extinct, that is not the same as being extinct. The root systems of the trees in many cases have survived, as the blight only kills the above-ground portion, and the below-ground components remain. Every so often a new shoot will sprout from the roots not killed when the main tree stem died. These shoots are only able to grow for a few years before they are infected with the blight, and they never reach a point of bearing fruit and reproducing, but they do grow. For that reason, the tree is classified as “functionally” extinct, but not extinct. In addition, isolated pockets of the species have been found, or planted, west of the trees’ historical range where the blight has not yet reached.
A Tufted Titmouse sits on the limb of an American chestnut
Red-spotted purple butterfly on an American hybridGray Tree Frog in Chestnut Tree
Will I Ever Get to Eat a Roasted American Chestnut?
While you probably won’t get to have the full roasted chestnuts experience as Robert Wells once did, there is hope for this species and hope that maybe your grandchildren will enjoy them as your great-grandparents once did. Programs at several universities such as the University of Tennessee and the State University of New York along with the USDA, US Forest Service and some non-profits like the American Chestnut Foundation are actively working to bring the species back by either cross pollinating blight-resistant specimens or combining them with more resistant species. You can learn more about these efforts toward resilient chestnuts by exploring the sources below.
Ho ho ho,
Mike
Mike Conway is a part-time freelance writer who lives with his wife, kids, and dog Smudge (pictured) in Northern Virginia.
Sometimes, when walking alone in the high grasslands of the Western United States, you may feel as if you are being watched.
My first encounter with prairie dogs in the wild occurred as I stood in an empty prairie just outside of Badlands National Park in South Dakota. As I meandered along, minding my own business, dozens of furry creatures with beady little eyes appeared, propped themselves up on their hind legs, and began to follow my every step. Prairie dogs are adorable, it is true, but when you see a dozen spread out, standing upright, watching you intently, it can be a bit disconcerting.
They were, however, no threat, and weren’t eyeballing me just to judge me. A prairie dog standing on his hind legs – “periscoping” as it is known – is simply keeping watch for predators. And their distinctive bark? It may sound like “yip,” but it is actually a sophisticated language developed over thousands of years that is still not fully understood by scientists.
Prairie dog barks convey everything about a predator’s size, speed, and location. According to a study at the University of Northern Arizona led by Con Slobodchikoff, Ph.D (see video linked below) pitch, speed, and timbre were all altered in a consistent manner corresponding to the species of predator and the characteristics of each. Certain “yips” could even be interpreted to represent nouns (the threat is “human”), verbs (the “human” is moving toward us), and adjectives (the “human” is wearing an ugly yellow shirt). So now that I think about it, I guess they were judging me, and I am not sure how I feel about that. But still, those are some impressive squirrels.
Wait, did you say squirrels?
Yes.
Squirrels. From the Sciuridae family. Prairie dogs are marmots (or ground squirrels) that bark like a dog, prompting Lewis and Clark to label them “barking squirrels,” which may lack points for creativity but is at least more accurate than calling them “dogs.” Prairie dogs, in fact, have no connection to dogs whatsoever.
There are five major species of prairie dog, who all live in North America at elevations between 2,000 and 10,000 feet. The Black-Tailed prairie dog covers the largest territory, filling an extensive region from Montana to Texas. Gunnison’s prairie dogs occupy the southwest near the Four Corners region. White-Tailed prairie dogs reside in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. Mexican and Utah prairie dogs belong to Mexico and Utah, respectively, and both are considered endangered.
As you may have observed, prairie dogs live in areas prone to harsh extremes of weather. To protect themselves, they dig extensive burrow networks with multiple entrances, designed to create ventilation, route flood water into empty chambers deep underground, and keep watch for predators. Their burrows connect underground, organized into sections called “coteries,” each of which contains a single-family unit responsible for the maintenance and protection of their area. Multiple coteries become “towns” of startling size and complexity. According to the National Park Service, the largest prairie dog town on record covered 25,000 square miles, bigger than the state of West Virginia!
Over the years, however, the prairie dog’s range has shrunk, scientists estimate, by as much as 99%, largely because of agriculture. Farmers and ranchers tend to regard prairie dogs as a nuisance, as they sometimes eat crops (they are mostly herbivores) and their holes create a hazard for livestock. They will bulldoze their towns or conduct contest kills to remove them, which has had devastating impacts.
Experts consider prairie dogs to be a keystone species. Their loss affects hundreds of other species who rely on them for food or use their burrows for shelter. They are instrumental in recharging groundwater, regulating soil erosion, and maintaining the soil’s level of production. Prairie dog decline, in fact, eventually leads to desertification of grassland environments.
So, an impressive AND important squirrel?
Yes, and the restoration of prairie dog habitats could be a crucial step in mitigating the effects of climate change.
If you’ve caught prairie dog fever, dive deeper into the resources below. And to learn more about Prairie Dog language, check out this fascinating video:
Hoping one day to converse with my personal prairie dog army,
Mike
Mike Conway is a part-time freelance writer who lives with his wife, kids, and dog Smudge (pictured) in Northern Virginia.
With over 1,600 species of bamboo worldwide, this subfamily (Bambusidae) has a great deal of diversity, and well-earned acclaim. These plants are actually the largest grasses, or members of the family Poaceae.
This talented family boasts a remarkable diversity, with bamboo species native to every continent besides Antarctica and Europe. People and cultures across the world have come to prize bamboo for its amazing growth rates, its extraordinary flexibility and strength, and its ecological contributions to clean air, soil, and water. Whether as a symbol of luck and fortune, a provider of adaptable materials, or an ecosystem restoration MVP, bamboo reminds us of nature’s incredible ability to captivate and nurture.
The word “bamboo” is thought to originate in the Malay word “mambu.” During the late 16th century, the Dutch adopted the term and coined their own version, “bamboes,” which eventually became the “bamboo” we know and love today.
One great grower
Bamboo holds the crown for being the fastest-growing plant on Earth. Some species can achieve astonishing growth rates of up to 90 centimeters (35 inches) in just 24 hours. While giant sea kelp (actually an algae) can surpass bamboo’s growth rates in ideal conditions, the rapid growth of bamboo remains unparalleled among vegetation and land-based photosynthesizers.
Another of bamboo’s most notable qualities is its ability to be harvested without uprooting the plant. This feature allows for comparatively sustainable manufacturing processes, as bamboo regenerates quickly from its robust root system and does not require its rhizomes to be replanted.
Over centuries, people have found uses for bamboo in various industries, such as construction, furniture, textiles, and paper, and in the present day many are looking to bamboo for greener alternatives to traditional materials. You might see this trend taking off in the latest utensils, toothbrushes, or toilet papers hitting the market, but experiments using these plants are no new fad.
One of the most famous examples of bamboo taking a central stage in innovation came in 1880, when Thomas Edison used carbonized bamboo fiber to conduct electrical current through a lightbulb. After testing a wide variety of materials, he found the bamboo fiber to perform the best, lasting 1,200 hours as the conductor.
Bamboo harvested at Murshidabad, India (Photo by Biswarup Ganguly, CC by 3.0)
Bamboo is particularly renowned for its unique combination of flexibility and strength. This exceptional quality has made it a popular choice in construction. Notably, in Sichuan, China, a thousand-year-old bridge made of bamboo stands as a testament to the plant’s durability. The bridge is still in use today with ongoing maintenance, showcasing the long-lasting potential of bamboo.
People have naturally turned to bamboo for some of our most fundamental activities, like creating shelter, harvesting firewood, making clothing and home goods, and of course, eating. Bamboo shoots are featured in dishes across Asia, while its sap, seeds, leaves, and even the hollow stalks can be used in cooking or fermentation processes. Bamboo textiles offer durability, hypoallergenic properties, natural cooling, and moisture-wicking capabilities, making them ideal for bedding and clothing. Bamboo has also been used to create paper, writing implements, musical instruments, weapons, fishing and aquaculture equipment, baskets, firecrackers, medicine, and more. Truly, what can’t this plant do?
Bamboo trays used in mussel farming in Abucay, Bataan, Philippines (Photo by Ramon F. Velasquez, CC by 3.0)
An asset to the ecosystem
While humans have found many ways to work with harvested bamboo, I think these amazing grasses are most impressive as living organisms in their environment. Bamboo plays a vital ecological role in its surroundings, working to regulate intact ecosystems and repair degraded ones.
Bamboo’s extensive root system helps control soil erosion, preventing the loss of vital topsoil and providing stability to sloped areas and river systems. Some bamboo species are able to stabilize and hold in place up to six cubic meters of soil with their long roots. Additionally, bamboo can be extremely effective at absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. In particular, “clumping” types of bamboo that grow thickly in dense clusters can filter air up to 30% more effectively than other plants.
Park signage in New Delhi featuring good filtering plants, including bamboo (Photo by Maya Dutta)
Bamboo thrives in diverse environments, from tropical to high-altitude regions. It demonstrates exceptional resilience, withstanding extreme cold below -20°C (-4°F) in the Andes and Himalayas and heat up to 50°C (122°F). Notably, bamboo groves were the only plant life to survive the atomic bombings in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, and were among the first to resprout after the devastation.
Some species of bamboo are able to survive and thrive even in areas of high pollution, making them an extremely important ally in remediation efforts to remove heavy metals or other toxic substances from soil or wastewater. As a result of these advantages, many people have introduced bamboo species outside of their native areas. In doing so, it is essential to be aware of the potential for displacing vegetation important to local wildlife.
Some bamboo that clusters densely can easily crowd out competition, while other bamboo species can produce allelopathic compounds (natural herbicides) that prevent other plants from growing. In any interventions we make, especially for the good of our environments, a comprehensive systems approach is key. Understanding the elements of an ecosystem and the dynamics that make it function, as well as what outcomes you want to bring about, can help prevent single-minded solutions and unintended consequences that harm biodiversity and ecosystem function in the long run.
Bamboo under Spring Rain by Xia Chang (Image from Wikimedia Commons)
Strength in symbolism
Given its history of cultivation that dates back around 6000 years, it is unsurprising that Bamboo holds deep symbolic significance in cultures around the world. In China, it represents various values, including fairness, beauty, virtue, and strength. Its tall, upright growth is associated with integrity and the ability to adapt to challenging circumstances. In India, bamboo is considered a symbol of friendship and enlightenment, embodying qualities of unity and harmony.
One myth with several variants around Asia tells us that humanity emerged from a bamboo stem. If that is the case, then we are coming back to our roots. Let us embrace all this might mean for us — flexibility, fairness, adaptability, strength, and, of course, our interdependence with the biodiverse wonders of this world.
Rooted in admiration,
Maya
Maya Dutta is an environmental advocate and ecosystem restorer working to spread understanding on the key role of biodiversity in shaping the climate and the water, carbon, nutrient and energy cycles we rely on. She is passionate about climate change adaptation and mitigation and the ways that community-led ecosystem restoration can fight global climate change while improving the livelihood and equity of human communities. Having grown up in New York City and lived in cities all her life, Maya is interested in creating more natural infrastructure, biodiversity, and access to nature and ecological connection in urban areas.
You’ve never heard of Pando? Neither had I, till Paula Phipps here at Bio4Climate suggested it as a Featured Creature!
Pando is a 108-acre forest of quaking aspens in Utah, thousands of years old, in which all of the trees are genetically identical! These trees are all branches on a shared root system that is thousands of years old, so the whole forest is one single organism!
Known as the “Trembling Giant,” Pando is more than just your average arbor. It’s so unique it has a name. In a sense, Pando “redefines trees,” says Lance Oditt, who directs the nonprofit Friends of Pando (you will see his name on some of the photos in this piece). Pando also has symbolic significance to many people. Former First Lady of California Maria Shriver puts it this way: “Pando means I belong to you, you belong to me, we belong to each other.”
Aerial outline of Pando, with Fish Lake in the foreground. Lance Oditt/Friends of Pando (Wikimedia Commons)
Pando (Latin for “I spread”) is a single clonal organism, i.e., it is one unified plant representing one individual male quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides). This living organism was identified as a single creature because its parts possess identical genes with a unitary massively-interconnected underground root system. This plant is located in the Fremont River Ranger District of the Fishlake National Forest in south-central Utah, United States, around 1 mile (1.6 km) southwest of Fish Lake. Pando occupies 108 acres (43.6 ha) and is estimated to weigh collectively 6,000 tonnes (6,000,000 kg), making it the heaviest known organism on earth.
Its age has been estimated at between 10,000 and 80,000 years, since there is no way to assess it with any precision due to the irrelevance of branch core samples to the age of the whole creature. Its size, weight, and prehistoric age have given it worldwide fame. These trees not only cover 108 acres of national forestland, but weigh a shocking six million kilograms (13 million pounds). This makes Pando the most massive genetically distinct organism. However, the title for the largest organism goes to “the humongous fungus,” a network of dark honey fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) in Oregon that covers an amazing 2,200 acres. I had no idea such single living organisms could exist! I was instantaneously intrigued, and wanted to learn more about this curious entity.
Deer eating Pando shoots. (Lance Oditt/Friends of Pando)
Pando is also in trouble, because older branches (since it is not composed of individual “trees” despite its appearance, but sprouts from one extensive root system) are not being replaced by young shoots to perpetuate the organism. The reason is difficult to determine, between issues of drought, human development, aging, excessive grazing by herbivores (cattle, elk and deer), and fire suppression (as fire benefits aspens). The forest is being studied, and fencing has been put up around most of the area to prevent browsing animals from entering the forest and eating up the young shoots sprouting from this unified root system. Scientists believe that both the ongoing management of this area and uncontrolled foraging by wild and domestic animals have had deeply adverse effects on Pando’s long-term resilience. Overgrazing by deer and elk has become one of the biggest worries. Wolves and cougars once kept the numbers in check of these herbivores, but their herds are now much larger because of the loss of such apex predators. These game species also tend to congregate around Pando as they have learned that they are not in any danger of being hunted in this protected woodland.
An Epic History
Despite its fame today, the Pando tree was not even identified until 1976. The clone was re-examined in 1992 and named Pando, recognized as a single asexual entity based on its morphological characteristics, and described as the world’s largest organism by weight. In 2006 the U.S. Postal Service honored the Pando Clone with a commemorative stamp as one of the “40 Wonders of America.”
Genetic sampling and analysis in 2008 increased the clone’s estimated size from 43.3 to 43.6 hectares. The first complete assessment of Pando’s status was conducted in 2018 with a new understanding of the importance of reducing herbivory by mule deer and elk to protect the future of Pando. These findings were also reinforced with further research in 2019. But Pando is constantly changing its shape and form, moving in any direction the sun and soil conditions create advantages. Any place a branch comes up is a new hub that can send the tree in a new direction. If you visit the tree and see new stems, you are witnessing the tree moving or “spreading” out in that direction.
Botanists Burton Barnes and Jerry Kemperman were the first to identify Pando as a single organism after examining aerial photographs and conducting land delineation (basically, tracking its borders). They revealed their groundbreaking discovery in a 1976 paper.
Today, perhaps the person who knows the most about Pando’s genetics is Karen Mock, a molecular ecologist at Utah State University in Logan. She and three other scientists ground the aspen’s leaves into a fine powder and then extracted DNA from the dried samples. “When we started our research, I was expecting that it wouldn’t be one single clone,” as is the case with other systems, Mock says. “I was wrong. Pando is a ginormous single clone.” They published their findings in a 2008 study. The group also confirmed that this quaking giant is male, creates pollen and constantly regenerates itself by sending new branches up from its root system in a process called “suckering.”
“The original seed started out about the same size as an aphid,” Mock says. “It’s tiny, and to think that it started this one little tree, its roots spreading and sending up suckers to become one vast single clone.” For context, Pando’s current size is about 10-11 times bigger than that!
Their research has forever changed the way that the scientific community approaches Pando and helped raise public awareness of this unique clone growing in southern Utah while providing it additional protection. For example, Friends of Pando has fixed numerous broken fences that were allowing deer access to the tree.
A wintry vista on Monroe Mountain gives us an idea of what the land the Pando Seed sat down in may have looked like (Lance Oditt/Friends of Pando)
Speculating about how Pando started, biologists have woven a rough image of its early origins. They describe Pando as a tree that transcends nearly every concept of trees and natural classifications we have today. Pando is simultaneously the heaviest tree, the largest tree by land mass, and the largest quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides). A masterpiece of botanical imagination, how Pando came to be is even more improbable than the challenge of classifying it. One possibility is that on one of the first warm spring days of the year, thousands of years after the last ice age, a single Aspen seed floating 9,000 feet in the sky came to rest on the southeastern edge of the Fishlake Basin, a land littered with massive volcanic boulders, split apart along an active fault line, carved by glaciers, littered with mineral rich glacial till and shaped by landslides and torrential snow melts that continue to this day.
But what would appear to be a wasteland to the untrained eye made for a perfect home for the Pando seed. This was a prime location along the steep side of a spreading fault zone that provides water drainage to the lake below and a barren landscape with rich soil laid down by glaciers. Therefore this was a place where the light-hungry Pando seed would face no competition for sunlight. Underground, a tumultuous geologic landscape favored Pando’s sideways moving roots system over other native trees that prefer to dig down.
If we were to see the first branch of Pando, we might think nothing of it, not knowing what was in store for this organism with the ability to grow up to 3 feet per year. Those first years, any number of disasters could have destroyed the tree altogether.
In fact, for Pando to exist at all, at least one disaster likely set the tree on a new course that created the tree we know today. As a male tree, Pando only produces pollen so, to advance itself over the land, Pando has to replicate itself by sending up new stems from its root, a process called suckering. Probably at some time during those first 150 years of Pando’s life, something disrupted the growth hormones underground and within its trunk, creating an imbalance so Pando began to sucker. Although there’s no way to tell what that force was, we do know that was the moment Pando started to self-propagate, to spread both across the land and toward us in time. And today, that one tree has become a lattice-work of roots and stems that a rough field estimate indicates would conceivably be able to stretch as far as 12,000 miles or about halfway around the world.
Opinions do seem to vary on different estimates of Pando’s real weight and age. One source said Pando’s collective weight was 13 million pounds, double the estimate stated above, with the root system of these aspens believed to have been born from a single seed at the end of the last major ice age (about 2.6 million years ago). As we cannot measure Pando’s true age, we are left with intelligent guesses. This reminds me of what I often jestfully say might be an academic’s ideal state of mind, to be “unencumbered by facts or information and thus free to theorize”!
While Pando is the largest known aspen clone, other large and old clones exist, so Pando is not totally unique. According to a 2000 OECD report, clonal groups of Populus tremuloides in eastern North America are very common, but generally less than 0.1 hectare in size, while in areas of Utah, groups as large as 80 hectares have been observed. The age of this species is difficult to establish with any precision. In the western United States, some argue that widespread seedling establishment has not occurred since the last glaciation, some 10,000 years ago, but some biologists think these western clones could be as much as 1 million years old.
Pando encompasses 108 acres, weighs nearly 6,000 metric tons, and has over 40,000 stems or trunks, which die individually and are replaced by new stems growing from its roots. The root system is estimated to be several thousand years old with habitat modeling suggesting a maximum age of 14,000 years, but others estimate it as much older than that. Individual aspen stems typically do not live beyond 100–130 years and mature areas within Pando are approaching this limit. Indeed, the worry is that there are so few younger stems surviving that the whole organism is being placed at risk. This is why the scientists are trying to restrict herbivore access to this protected area.
A 72 year aerial photo chronosequence showing forest cover change within the Pando aspenclone. Base images courtesy of USDA Aerial Photography Field Office, Salt Lake City, Utah
This ancient giant, however, has been shrinking since the 1960s or 70s. This timing is no coincidence. As human activity has grown in the western United States, so has our impact on the surrounding ecosystems. The biggest factor behind this shrinking is a lack of “new recruits.” The shoots that form from Pando’s ancient rootstock are not making it to maturity. Instead, they are being eaten while they are still small, soft, and nutritious. Mule deer are the main culprits. Cattle are also allowed to browse in this forest for brief intervals every year, and the combined herbivory has thwarted Pando’s efforts to keep up with old dying trees.
These changes have led to a thinning of the forest. One study used aerial imagery to identify these changes, showing that Pando isn’t regenerating in the way that it should. Researchers assessed 65 plots that had been subjected to varying degrees of human efforts to protect the grove: some plots had been surrounded by a fence, some had been fenced in and regulated through interventions like shrub removal and selective tree cutting, and some were untouched. The team tracked the number of living and dead trees, along with the number of new stems. Researchers also examined animal feces to determine how species that graze in Fishlake National Forest might be impacting Pando’s health.
The problem is that with enough loss of old trees, the grove will lose its ability to regenerate. A dense forest can feed its roots with fuel from photosynthesis, and is able to send up new shoots regularly. But as it loses leaves and their photosynthetic capability, it can start to shrink.
A map showing the extent of Pando as well as recent fencing installations to protect its growth Image courtesy of Paul Rogers and Darren McAvoy, St. George News
As part of this new study, the team analyzed aerial photographs of Pando taken over the past 72 years (see previous image above with photos from 1939 to 2011). These impressions drive home the grove’s dire state. In the late 1930s, the crowns of the trees were touching. But over the past 30 to 40 years, gaps begin to appear within the forest, indicating that new trees aren’t cropping up to replace the ones that have died. And that isn’t great news for the animals and plants that depend on the trees to survive, researcher Paul C. Rogers said in a statement.
Fortunately, all is not lost. There are ways that humans can intervene to give Pando the time it needs to get back on track, among them culling voracious deer and putting up better fencing to keep the animals away from saplings. As Rogers says, “It would be a shame to witness the significant reduction of this iconic forest when reversing this decline is realizable should we demonstrate the will to do so.”
Though it seems easy to blame these changes on deer, the real blame still lies with us humans. Throughout the 20th century, deer populations have been hugely impacted by humans. Human impacts on ecosystems are complex and far-reaching. A major problem is the lack of apex predators in the area; in the early 1900s, humans aggressively hunted animals like wolves, mountain lions and grizzly bears, which helped keep mule deer in check. And much of the fencing that was erected to protect Pando isn’t working: mule deer, it seems, are able to jump over the fences. So we need to monitor all ecosystems to understand how they respond to human activity if we are to minimize damage, and take steps to compensate for the imbalances we create.
The aspen clone is one of the largest living organisms on the planet. (Lance Oditt/Friends of Pando)
Though it is hotly contested by ranchers wanting to protect their cattle, wolf reintroduction is ongoing in the West. Hunting is also regulated by federal and state agencies, which artificially adjust deer populations. The effects of these changes are not always immediately apparent. Forest managers do their best to replicate historical levels and manage new threats.
However, we lack good historical data on herbivory in Pando or many other surrounding areas. Controlling herbivory with more hunting is one remedial option. Reduced cattle grazing in the grove has also been suggested by researchers.
Reproduction and Threats
As mentioned, the asexual reproductive process for this entity is not like that of a regular forest. An individual stem sends out lateral roots that, under the right conditions, send up other erect stems which look just like individual trees. The process is then repeated until a whole stand, of what appear to be individual trees, forms. These collections of multiple stems, called ramets, all together form one, single, genetic individual, usually termed a clone. Thus, although it looks like a woodland of individual trees, with striking white bark and small leaves that flutter in the slightest breeze, they are one entity all linked together underground by a single complex system of roots.
Lance Oditt demonstrates how to use a 360-degree camerafor the Pando Photographic Survey. As of July, Oditt and his team had taken around 7,300 photos (Credit: Tonia Lewis)
A healthy aspen grove can replace dying trees with young saplings. As dying trees clear the canopy, more sunlight makes it to the forest floor, where young shoots can take advantage of the opening to rapidly grow. This keeps the forest eternally young, cycling through trees of all ages, as new clonal stems start growing, but when grazing animals eat the tops off newly forming stems, they die. This is why large portions of Pando have seen very little new growth.
The exception is one area that was fenced off a few decades ago to remove dying trees. This area excluded elk and deer from browsing and thus has experienced a successful regeneration of new clonal stems, with dense growth referred to as the “bamboo garden.”
Some other amazing features of Pando rise from the way aspens grow and develop. In Canada, aspen have earned the nickname “asbestos forests” as they have two unique characteristics that make them more fire tolerant. Aspen store massive quantities of water, allowing them to thwart low and medium intensity fires by simply being less flammable. They also do not create large quantities of flammable volatile oils that can make their conifer cousins so fire prone. Second, their branches reach high rather than spreading densely at the base, allowing them to avoid catching flame from fires that move over the land below.
Living where the growing season is short and winters are harsh, Pando features another advantage over other trees. It contains chlorophyll in its bark which allows it to create energy without leaves during the dark, cold winter months. Although this process is nowhere near as efficient as the energy production of the leaves in summer, this small energy boost allows Pando to get a head start by surging into bloom once temperatures reach 54 degrees for more than 6 days each spring.
However, the older stems in Pando are affected by at least three diseases: sooty bark canker, leaf spot, and conk fungal disease. While plant diseases have thrived in aspen stands for millennia, it is unknown what their ongoing ecosystemic effects might be, given Pando’s lack of new growth and an ever-increasing list of other pressures on the clonal giant, including that of climate change. Pando arose after the last ice age, so has had the benefit of a largely stable climate ever since, but that stability may be changing enough to endanger Pando’s long-term survival.
A scientist can plug in the metadata of a particular tree within the clone and be taken directly to that tree without having to navigate the entire forest virtually. (Intermountain Forest Service, USDA Region 4 Photography (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
Insects such as bark beetles and disease such as root rot and cankers attack the overstory trees, weakening and killing them. A lack of regeneration combined with weakening and dying trees, in time, could result in a smaller clone or a complete die-off. So the Forest Service in cooperation with partner organizations are working together to study Pando and address these issues. Over the years, foresters have tested different methods to stimulate the roots to encourage new sprouting. Research plots have been set up in all treated areas to track Pando’s progress, as foresters learn from Pando and adapt to their evolving understanding.
With regard to our changing climate, Pando inhabits an alpine region surrounded by desert, meaning it is no stranger to warm temperatures or drought. But climate change threatens the size and lifespan of the tree, as well as the whole complex ecosystem that it hosts. Aspen stands in other locations have struggled with climate-related pressures, such as reduced water supply and heat spells, all of which make it harder for these trees to form new leaves, which lead to declines in photosynthetic coverage and the continued viability of this amazing organism.
With more competition for ever-dwindling water resources (the nearby Fish Lake is just out of reach of the tree’s root system), with summertime temperatures expected to continue to reach record highs, and with the threat of more intense wildfires, Pando will certainly have to struggle to adjust to these fast-changing conditions while maintaining its full extent and size.
Age Estimates for Pando
Due to the progressive replacement of stems and roots, the overall age of an aspen clone cannot be determined from tree rings. In Pando’s case, ages up to 1 million years have therefore been suggested. An age of 80,000 years is often given for Pando, but this claim has not been verified and is inconsistent with the Forest Service‘s post ice-age estimate. Glaciers have repeatedly formed on the Fish Lake Plateau over the past several hundred thousand years and the Fish Lake valley occupied by Pando was partially filled by ice as recently as the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. Consequently, ages greater than approximately 16,000 years require Pando to have survived at least the Pinedale glaciation, something that appears unlikely under current genetic estimates of Pando’s age and the likely variation in Pando’s local climate.
Its longevity and remoteness have enabled a whole ecosystem of 68 plant species and many animals to evolve and be supported under its shade. However, this entire ecosystem relies on the aspen remaining healthy and upright. Though Pando is protected by the US National Forest Service and is not in danger of being cut down, it is in danger of disappearing due to several other factors and concerns, as noted above.
Estimates of Pando’s age have also been affected by changes in our understanding of aspen clones in western North America. Earlier sources argued germination and successful establishment of aspen on new sites was rare in the last 10,000 years, implying that Pando’s root system was likely over 10,000 years old. More recent observations, however, have disproved that view, showing seedling establishment of new aspen clones as a regular occurrence, especially on sites exposed to wildfire.
More recent research has documented post-fire quaking aspen seedling establishment following the 1986 and 1988 fires in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, respectively, where seedlings were concentrated in kettles and other topographic depressions, seeps, springs, lake margins, and burnt-out riparian zones. A few seedlings were widely scattered throughout the burns. Seedlings surviving past one season occurred almost exclusively on severely burned surfaces. While these findings haven’t led to a conclusive settling of Pando’s age, they do leave us with much to marvel over in this species’ longevity and history.
“Geologic Map of Fishlake Basin in Utah. Inset, an illustration of a Graben shows forces that continue to shape the land today.” (Friends of Pando)
Pando’s Uncertain Future
Pando is resilient; it has already survived rapid environmental changes, especially when European settlers arrived in the area in the 19th century, and after the rise of many intrusive 20th-century recreational activities. It has survived through disease, wildfires, and too much grazing before. Pando also remains the world’s largest single organism enjoying close scientific documentation. Thus, in spite of all these concerns, there is reason for hopefulness as scientists are working to unlock the secrets to Pando’s resilience, while conservation groups and the US Forest Service are working diligently to protect this tree and its associated ecosystem. A new group called the Friends of Pando is also making this tree accessible to virtually everyone through a series of 360˚ video recordings.
If you were able to visit Pando in summertime, you would walk under a series of towering mature stems swaying and “quaking” in the gentle breeze, between some thick new growth in the “bamboo garden,” and even venturing into charming meadows that puncture portions of the otherwise-enclosed center. You would see all sorts of wildflowers and other plants under the dappled shade canopy, along with lots of pollinating insects, birds, foxes, beaver, and deer, all using some part of the rich ecosystem created by Pando. In the summer the green, fluttering leaves symbolize the relief from summer’s heat that you get coming to the basin. In autumn the oranges and yellows of the leaves as they change color give a hint of the fall spectacular that is the Fish Lake Basin. All this can give us a renewed appreciation of how all these plants, animals, and ecosystems are well worth defending. And with respect to Pando, we can work to protect all three.
But attempts to do so have had some surprising consequences that were quite unexpected. When land managers, recognizing the stress that Pando was under from herbivores, fenced off one part of the stand to protect it from browsing, they split the grove into three parts: an unfenced control zone, an area with a fence erected in 2013, and another area that was first fenced in 2014. The 2014 fence was built from older materials to save money. This fence quickly fell into disrepair, such that mule deer could easily get around it until it was repaired in 2019. As a result, though they did not design it this way, managers had effectively created three treatment zones: a control area, a browse-free zone, and an area that experienced some browsing between 2014 and 2019. Unfortunately, these good intentions confused Pando. In 2021, it appeared that Pando was fracturing into three separate forests. With only 16 percent of the fenced area effectively keeping out herbivores, and over half of Pando without fencing, a single organism was effectively cut into 3 separate parts and exposed to varying ecological pressures.
The diverging ecologies of the world’s largest living organism, an aspen stand called Pando. Credit: Infographic Lael Gilbert
Bottom of Form
As Rogers explained, “Barriers appear to be having unintended consequences, potentially sectioning Pando into divergent ecological zones rather than encouraging a single resilient forest.” So not only does the stubborn trend of limited stand replacement persist in Pando, but by applying three treatments to a single organism, we also encouraged it to fracture into three distinct entities. The stumble makes sense; it is hard to understand whether fencing will work unless we compare the treatment to a control group. But the strategy does show our failing to understand Pando as one entity. After all, we would not apply three treatments to a single human. These surprising outcomes fuel vital learning experiences for researchers.
Furthermore, it may be that fencing Pando is not a solution to its regeneration problems. While unfenced areas are rapidly dying off, fencing alone is encouraging single-aged regeneration in a forest that has sustained itself over the centuries by varying growth. While this may not seem critical, aspen and understory growth patterns at odds from the past are already occurring, said Rogers. In Utah and across the West, Pando is iconic, and something of a canary in the coal mine.
As a keystone species, aspen forests support high levels of biodiversity—from chickadees to thimbleberry. As aspen ecosystems flourish or diminish, myriad dependent species follow suit. Long-term failure for new recruitment in aspen systems may have cascading effects on hundreds of species dependent on them.
Additionally, there are aesthetic and philosophical problems with a fencing strategy, said Rogers. “I think that if we try to save the organism with fences alone, we’ll find ourselves trying to create something like a zoo in the wild,” said Rogers. “Although the fencing strategy is well-intentioned, we’ll ultimately need to address the underlying problems of too many browsing deer and cattle on this landscape.”
Pando’s Songs?
“Microphones attached to Pando”. Photo Credit: Jeff Rice
Lance Oditt, Executive Director of Friends of Pando, is always searching for better ways to get his head around a tree this enormous. And he started wondering: “What would happen if we asked a sound conservationist to record the tree? What could a geologist, for example, learn from that, or a wildlife biologist?” So, Oditt invited sound artist Jeff Rice to visit Pando and record the tree.
“I just dove in and started recording everything I could in any way that I could,” says Rice, after making his pilgrimage to the mighty aspen. Rice says his sound recordings aren’t just works of art. “They also are a record of the place in time, the species and the health of the environment,” he says. “You can use these recordings as a baseline as the environment changes.” The wonders of science and curiosity never cease, do they?
In mid-summer, the aspen’s leaves are pretty much at their largest. “And there’s just a really nice shimmering quality to Pando when you walk through it,” says Rice. “It’s like a presence when the wind blows.” So that’s what Rice wanted to capture first — the sound of those bright lime green leaves fluttering in the wind. He then attached little contact microphones to individual leaves and was treated to a unique sound in return. The leaves had “this percussive quality,” he says. “And I knew that all of these vibrating leaves would create a significant amount of vibration within the tree.” Rice then set out to capture that tree-wide vibration in the midst of a thunderstorm. “I was hunkered down and huddling, trying to stay out of the lightning. When those storms come through Pando, they’re pretty big. They’re pretty dramatic.” All that wind blowing through the innumerable leaves offered Rice a sonic opportunity to record the tree.
A hydrophone was placed in contact with the roots of a tree (or “stem”) in the Pando aspen forest in south-central Utah. The sound captures vibrations from beneath the tree that may be emanating from the root system or the soil. The recording was made during a July 2022 thunderstorm and represents perhaps millions of aspen leaves trembling in the wind. It was made by Jeff Rice as part of an artist residency with the non-profit group Friends of Pando. Rice gives special thanks to Lance Oditt for his help in identifying recording locations, including the mysterious “portal to Pando.”
“We found this incredible opening in one of the [stems] that I’ve dubbed the Pando portal,” he says. Into that portal, he lowered a mic until it was touching the massive tangle of roots below. “As soon as the wind would blow and the leaves would start to vibrate,” Rice says, “you would hear this amazing low rumble.” The vibrations, he says, were passing through Pando’s branches and trunks into the ground. “It’s almost like the whole Earth is vibrating,” says Rice. “It just emphasizes the power of all of these trembling leaves, the connectedness, I think, of this as a single organism.” Rice and Oditt presented these recordings at an Acoustical Society of America meeting in Chicago.
“Field Technicians Rebekah Adams and Etta Crowley take vegetation measurement under Pando, the world’s largest living organism. A recent evaluation of the massive aspen stand in south-central Utah found that Pando seems to be taking three disparate ecological paths based on how the different segments are managed.” Credit: Paul Rogers
“This is the song of this ecosystem, this tree,” says Oditt. “So now we know sound is another way we can understand the tree.” In fact, the recordings have given Oditt research ideas, like using sound to map Pando’s labyrinth of roots. But above all, they’re a sonic snapshot of this leviathan at this moment in time. “We have to keep in mind,” says Oditt, “that it’s been changing shape and form for like 9000 years. I call it the David Bowie problem. It’s constantly reinventing itself!” And now, we’ve turned up the volume to hear Pando as the baritone soloist it has always been.
Pando as Teacher and Metaphor
Pando is seen as an inspiring symbol of our connectedness, in many engaging statements found here. I put just a few of them below, to give you the idea of how various people have reacted to Pando and its potential significance.
From The Rev. Ed Bacon, Former Senior Rector, All Saints Church, Pasadena, and Board Member, Pando Populus:
“‘We are already one but we imagine that we are not.’ Thomas Merton said those words just before his accidental death. A few months earlier in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King in his last Sunday sermon notes that the ‘universe is constructed’ in an interdependent way: my destiny depends on yours. If there is one truth that will see us through whatever threats and chaos lie before us, it is that there will be no future without policies and attitudes based in the kind of Oneness we see in the one-tree Forest, Pando.”
FromJohn B. Cobb, Jr., Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Board Chair, Pando Populus:
“The one-tree forest we call Pando is a community. The health and well-being of every tree contributes to the whole of the root system and lives from it. But does it make sense today for Pando to be the symbol of what we aspire to in this country, when there are such intense political feelings and competing fears? Yes, it is in just such circumstances that seeking community is most important. If you are in any of the country’s opposing camps, you can begin by formulating the way people in other camps view the world and you. You do not have to agree. But if you understand why so many people feel so disturbed and even threatened by you and your values and beliefs, you have the beginning of community. Even that beginning might save us from the worst.”
From Paul Rogers, Chief Scientist for the Pando Aspen Clone and Director of the Western Aspen Alliance:
“In recent decades resource misuse – comorbid to a warming planet – have left a long-thriving colossus gasping for breath. In Pando, as in human societies, it is easy to forget vital relations between individuals and communities. Impulses are shared as mortality portends rebirth. Vast root networks maintain a single immense colony: e pluribus unum. Pando’s 47,000 stems with enumerable variation remain linked by DNA. Humans, though genetically distinct, are joined by need, desire, and innate dependence on Mother Earth. Pando’s paradox implores us to mutually foster communities and individuals. He is the trembling giant. She is the nurturing spring.”
From Devorah Brous, environmental consultant:
“To foster wholesale systems change, go to the roots. We gather in a sacred grove and branch out to feed shared roots – as descendants of colonizers and the colonized. We break bread as formerly enslaved peoples and enslavers, as immigrants, as indigenous peoples, as refugees. As ranchers and vegans. As scientists and spiritualists. As non-binary changemakers, and established clergy. As creatives, pioneers, and politicians. To study the known and unknown teachings of the trees – we sit still under a canopy of stark differences and harvest the nature of unity. We quest to feed and water a dying tree of life.”
* * * * *
I’ve written such a lengthy piece about Pando because it has so many fascinating and unusual characteristics. Who could ever imagine all the wondrous things that Nature creates? I think Her endless spontaneity in developing biodiverse life-forms is a truly intriguing phenomenon that motivates so many of our ‘Featured Creature’ essays. And exploring them is such an interesting process. We learn new aspects of Nature’s mysteries every time. Perhaps Pando has additional lessons for us as well!
So let us continue to root for this amazingly unified tree named Pando…
Fred
Fred is from Ipswich, MA, where he has spent most of his life. He is an ecological economist with a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Stanford, both in economics. Fred is also an avid conservationist and fly fisherman. He enjoys the outdoors, and has written about natural processes and about economic theory. He has 40 years of teaching and research experience, first in academics and then in economic litigation. He also enjoys his seasonal practice as a saltwater fly fishing guide in Ipswich, MA. Fred joined Biodiversity for a Livable Climate in 2016.
At Bio4Climate, we LOVE beavers. We’re borderline obsessed with them (or maybe not so borderline) because they do SO much for Earth’s ecosystems, natural cycles, and biodiversity. These furry, water-loving creatures are finally beginning to receive the recognition they deserve in mainstream media now that more people see how their existence and behaviors lead to numerous benefits for everyone’s climate resilience.
We are one of the many organizations advocating for their reintroduction across North America and some places in Europe. For this reason, when I spotted one on a hike during my time in Tennessee, I did what any Bio4Climate team member would do: jump in excitement, yell out “Oh my gosh it’s a BEAVER!” and take a picture that I’ll treasure forever.
Photo by Tania Roa
The rockin’ rodent
Beavers live in family groups of up to eight members. Offspring stay with their parents for up to two years, meanwhile helping with newborns, food gathering, and dam building. To create dams, beavers use their large teeth to cut down trees and lug over branches, rocks, and mud until they successfully slow down the flow of water. These dams include lodges that beavers use as bedrooms and to escape from predators. Dams are designed according to the water’s speed: in steady water, the dam is built straight across, and in rushing water the dam is built with a curve. These engineers build their dams in a way that makes them nearly indestructible against storms, fires, and floods.
Look at those bright orange teeth! The color is thanks to an iron-rich protective coating. Beaver teeth grow continuously, and require gnawing on trees for trimming.
Beaver dams are what make these rodents, the largest ones in North America, so special. When dams alter the flow of water, they create ponds that stretch out a river into a wide wetland. These ponds filter pollutants and store nutrients that then attract a variety of wildlife including fish seeking nurseries, amphibians looking for shelter, and mammals and birds searching for food and water sources.
The abundance of wildlife and the storage of necessary nutrients in beaver ponds classifies these places as biodiversity hotspots, meaning they are “biogeographic regions with significant levels of biodiversity that are threatened by human habitation” (Wikipedia). Beaver ponds also store sediment, and this helps recharge groundwater. Due to the sheer wetness of these ponds, and how deep the water filters into the soil, fires are often extinguished as soon as they reach a beaver pond. In this way, beavers are nature’s firefighters, of which we need many more in areas where extreme heat is increasing.
“There’s a beaver for that” — Ben Goldfarb
Wetland Creation
Biodiversity Support
Water Filtration
Erosion Control
Wildlife Habitat
Flood Management
Drought Resilience
Forest Fire Prevention
Carbon Sequestration
They’re Cool (pun intended)
Beavers are considered ‘ecosystem engineers’ because they actively shift the landscape by fluctuating the flow of water and the placement of plants and trees. Muskrats, minks, and river otters also find refuge in beaver lodges. When beavers take down trees, they create pockets of refuge for insects. Using their constructive talents, beavers significantly modify the region and, in turn, create much-needed habitat for many. Numerous creatures rely on beaver dams for survival, and the local ecosystem dramatically changes when a beaver family is exterminated; for these reasons, we also consider them ‘keystone species.’
Disliked dam builders
Despite the positive impact beavers have on biodiversity and ecosystems, we humans have viewed them as fur, pests, and perfume. By 1900, beavers went nearly extinct across Europe and North America. We hunted them for their fur in response to fashion trends, and trapped them for their anal musk glands, or castors, which produce castoreum, a secretion that beavers use to mark their homes and that humans use to make perfume. When beaver populations plummeted, so did the number of dams and ponds, meaning vast swaths of land were drastically altered during this time – and not for the better. To this day, we kill beavers when they wander into military bases or near urban areas since we see their dam-building behaviors as potentially damaging to man-made properties.
Thankfully, as more ‘Beaver Believers’ speak out against these practices and more authorities recognize the importance of beaver benefits, these rodents are beginning to return to their original homes. California recently passed a program specifically for beaver reintroduction efforts across the state. Washington, Utah, and Massachusetts are other states witnessing the return of beavers. People like Skip Lisle of Beaver Deceivers are designing culverts that prevent beaver dams from damaging infrastructure, but allow the beavers to create their biodiverse-filled ponds. These are just a few examples of the ways we can coexist with beavers, and in turn heal our communities.
There are places in North America where water sources are decreasing for all living things, and in other regions the amount of rainfall is increasing while the amount of snow is decreasing. These weather conditions are detrimental to all of our health, unless we welcome back beavers.
As the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss increase, storing water, preventing runoff and erosion, and protecting biodiverse hotspots become more important by the hour. By restoring local water cycles, beaver ponds provide a source of life. By spreading water channels and creating new ones, beaver dams prevent flooding and stave off wildfires. By encouraging the cycling and storage of nutrients, beaver ponds nurture soil health and that leads to carbon sequestration. We all have something to gain from beavers as long as we allow them to do what they do best: build those dams.
To learn more about beavers, watch the video below and the two in the ‘Sources’ section. We also highly recommend Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter for further reading.
The majestic whale shark is famed for being the largest fish in existence. With a length of up to 33 feet and weight up to 20 tons, they are not only the largest living fish, but thought to be the largest fish that ever lived on this planet. Though their name might suggest otherwise, whale sharks are not a type of whale at all, but instead a member of the shark family. It is their enormous size (akin to a school bus) that led them to be compared with whales.
Like their other shark relatives, these creatures are excellent swimmers and true masters of the deep. People are coming to recognize that all sharks, even carnivorous species that hunt marine mammals, fish, or other invertebrates, have been unfairly mischaracterized as threatening, and whale sharks are another species you need not be afraid of.
In fact, one of the most fascinating traits of the whale shark is its diet. Despite their own large size, whale sharks subsist on some of the smallest ocean inhabitants, plankton. Much like the enormous blue whale, whale sharks are a living example of one of the most interesting links in the food chain, where nutrients are cycled from microscopic life to macroscopic organisms.
They filter-feed by opening their mouths and letting plankton-rich waters pass through, as well as ingesting other small fish or unlucky invertebrates along the way. But even in this habit they are unique. Whale sharks use a technique called “cross-flow filtration,” in which particles do not actually catch on the filter (the way it works when we drain pasta through a strainer or breathe through an N95 mask). Instead, water is directed away through the gills while particles move towards the back of the mouth. A bolus (or a spinning ball of food) grows in size as more particles are concentrated, finally triggering a swallowing reflex in the throat. This avoids clogging any filters in the process and is a particularly efficient method of filter feeding.
Because they are so large, whale sharks need a lot of food to sustain themselves, and so they journey long distances in order to eat enough for their great big appetites. They can be observed throughout the world in warm tropical waters and tend to lead solitary lives. Where there is an abundance of plankton, however, whale sharks are sure to follow. For example, in the Springtime many whale sharks migrate to the continental shelf of the Central West Coast of Australia, where Ningaloo Reef is the site of a great coral spawning that produces water rich with plankton for our giant fishy friends to enjoy.
The whale shark contributes to nutrient cycling throughout its lifespan, providing important benefits to the ecosystems they are a part of. Some of the warm tropical waters that whale sharks call home tend to be low in nutrients and productivity, and in these areas whale sharks can make a big difference due to their size and force. As they undertake migrations or even as they go about daily swimming and feeding activities, their motion stimulates small ocean currents that can help nutrients travel from areas of high productivity to waters where they are much less concentrated.
Their own eating habits rely on an abundance of microscopic creatures and the nutrients they metabolize, and eventually each mighty whale shark passes on and becomes food itself, returning those nutrients to the ocean food web. After death, whale sharks sink to the ocean floor and the benthic organisms that reside there find food and shelter in the great carcasses. It can take decades for this decomposition to occur, and in the meantime hundreds of creatures benefit from the habitat and nutrients left behind.
In life as well, whale sharks can provide refuge to smaller species of fish that travel around their great bodies, taking advantage of the shelter these gentle giants create. As largely docile creatures, whale sharks can be quite approachable and playful with divers who are also interested in tagging along:
In a couple of instances, humans have even pushed their luck so far as to ride along on a whale shark’s back! Such close contact is discouraged by conservationists to protect the personal space of these beautiful animals, but whale sharks’ friendly reputation remains.
Though they may be steady, generous members of the ocean community, whale sharks are struggling to survive in changing conditions. They are an endangered species, and while some protections for these creatures have been enacted across the coastal waters of the world, they are still hunted for meat, fins, and oil, or captured or killed as bycatch in industrial fishing operations. Whale sharks also suffer from the plastic pollution in our oceans, as microplastics mingle with the food they rely on. Like the rest of us, whale sharks need clean, healthy, abundant environments in which to live and co-create.
Whale shark in the Maldives (Photo by Sebastian Pena Lambarri from Unsplash)
Unique beauties
Whale sharks may be known for their size, but that’s not the only special thing about their anatomy and appearance. Each whale shark sports a beautiful pattern of white markings on its dark gray back. Not only does this make these creatures look like giant mobile modern art pieces, but the patterns also uniquely identify whale shark individuals.
It is not conclusively determined why whale sharks carry these unique signatures, their own version of the human fingerprint. Some scientists speculate that the patterns, which tend to be common among carpet sharks and other species that find such markings useful for camouflage as they traverse the ocean floor, indicate a close evolutionary link among these organisms.
The World Wildlife Fund has used these markings to identify individuals in the waters around the Philippines and keep track of whale shark population numbers there, so that humans can make the interventions needed to mindfully coexist with our marine friends. Whatever its distant origin or function today, this feature makes it clear that each whale shark is a special and irreplaceable member of our blue planet.
For gentle giants and filtering friends, Maya
Maya Dutta is an environmental advocate and ecosystem restorer working to spread understanding on the key role of biodiversity in shaping the climate and the water, carbon, nutrient and energy cycles we rely on. She is passionate about climate change adaptation and mitigation and the ways that community-led ecosystem restoration can fight global climate change while improving the livelihood and equity of human communities. Having grown up in New York City and lived in cities all her life, Maya is interested in creating more natural infrastructure, biodiversity, and access to nature and ecological connection in urban areas.
The Banded Mongoose is a small mammal with a mass of approximately ≤2kg (or 4 lbs) found in (and indigenous to) various parts of Africa. While most other mongoose species live a solitary life, the banded mongoose is gregarious living in groups of approximately 5-40 individuals with at least one breeding male and female. They are named so due to the black stripes across their greyish-brown dorsal area (back) while their ventral area (chest and stomach) is lighter than other parts. This species is commonly known for its ability and behavior to attack, kill, and eat snakes – even venomous ones!
Banded mongooses are mostly found occupying covered areas like savannahs, open forests, and grasslands for vigilance. They sleep and nurture their young in dens such as abandoned termite mounds, buildings, and even under bridges. By possessing short muscular limbs with strong claws, banded mongooses can dig to find food and get creative at creating and modifying their dens. Because they live in large groups as compared with other mongooses, their burrows have many entrances to ensure their escape during an attack and for sufficient ventilation. Despite having such nice dens, they are not sedentary to the specific den but rather frequently move from place to place every few days to avoid and distract their enemies. However, they can return to their favorite den after a certain time. In addition, their body color allows them to blend with several habitats and hence ensures their safety.
Like other animals, banded mongoose adults, especially males, are responsible for the safety of the whole group. Unlike many other animals, all adult members are fully responsible for raising their young who are born synchronously (all matured female members get pregnant and give birth at the same time). Having muscular limbs, banded mongooses can stand by using their hind limbs just like their cousins (meerkats) to ensure the area is safe.
These animals also exhibit altruistic behaviours whereby adults are ready to give up their life for the safety of the group. They were recorded standing and fighting against lions, birds of prey, and other animals, and while doing so other group members evacuated from the area. Additionally, since they are small in size, they move in groups and close to each other so that they may be seen as one large animal. And as they move, the young ones are located in the middle and the adult ones around them.
Diet and behavioral adaptation
The banded mongoose is a meso-carnivore with a diet consisting primarily of invertebrates such as beetles, millipedes, scorpions and others. Nevertheless, they also eat vertebrates such as snakes, rats, amphibians, mice, young birds and eggs. And in the case of plants, they eat wild fruits (if they’re available). Normally, they move together while locating the food area but each member finds and eats its food. In urban areas, they are mostly found around damp areas during their mealtime because there is plenty of food there, and then they rest in the covered areas mostly at noon to avoid the day heat.
On other hand, banded mongooses cope with food problems by using different symbiotic relationships with other animals like birds, warthogs (watch the video below to see this in action), elephants, and others (see more from attached YouTube links in the References). In this way, they become more successful in foraging and thriving in nature. They also use other animals, especially birds, to be alerted of various threats around them.
Though they are social animals, banded mongooses also exhibit inter-group territorial behaviour and their territories are marked with various scents, especially urine. Not only are territories scent-marked but so are group members. This is well seen when new pups are taken out for their first foraging and adults urinate over the young ones. When two different groups meet, they normally fight and the winning group takes over the area that they fought for. However, during the fight, some mature males and females from each group may mate.
Communication
Banded mongooses mainly communicate through sounds and scents. They possess various sound pitches, each with a different meaning and message to other members. They also developed anal and cheek glands which assist in the marking of their territory and young. They have a well-developed sense of smell, which they use to detect food.
Threats
Currently, banded mongooses are not faced with any critical danger and are listed as a“Least Concern” species due to their large population number and distribution in most parts of Africa. But this does not mean they don’t need any concern at all. I found some of them died in road accidents, and for those in urban areas most people used to attack them. Remember, even extinct species were once “Least Concern” and where are they now? Therefore, let’s give attention to every species in the world before their situation becomes worse.
Lesson to humanity
From such a small animal, we may think that there is nothing to gain, but there is a lot to learn from it. Banded mongooses, as said before, are ready to sacrifice their safety and even life just to make sure their groups are safe. This act shows love for others, something which nowadays very few people can do to others regardless of whether the one in need is their relative or not. I also like the way they raise their family. All group members are fully responsible for that, and if people were to do the same, there would be no street children and other problems also could be solved.
This lesson shows how we can learn from banded mongooses, but it is not just this species that we can learn things from. The whole of nature provides us with enough knowledge, materials and services that are essential for our survival. Therefore, let’s love nature and put our individual or organizational efforts into conserving it to ensure its natural existence lasts and more generations to come will continue to gain what we are gaining now.
What creature grows tall and sturdy, cleans up its neighborhood, and defends itself from predators – all without moving a muscle?
The Giant Barrel Sponge, or Xestospongia muta!
Photo By Twilight Zone Expedition Team 2007, NOAA-OE – NOAA Photo Library (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
A Giant Barrel by any other name…
Giant barrel sponges are aptly named for their shape and great size. They grow over 1 m tall, but only grow an average of about 1.5 cm a year. After all, good things take time!
Giant barrel sponges come in a range of colors, depending on the presence of the cyanobacteria that they work with in symbiosis. They can be pink, purple, brown, reddish brown, and gray, and tend to be different colors at different depths.
You may be wondering why this “giant barrel” doesn’t look very much like Spongebob Squarepants, or the sponge you use to clean up in the kitchen. Well sponges, or animals of the phylum Porifera, come in all shapes and sizes, and there is great diversity among the 8,550 species of them. Sponges are quite ancient, with their oldest fossil records dating back 600 million years, so they’ve had time to differentiate and find their own ecological niches.
The giant barrel sponge is known as the “Redwood of the Sea.” The phrase comes from the fact that giant barrel sponges share the tendency for individuals to live long lives, from a few hundred to thousands of years old. In fact, the oldest known giant barrel sponge is over 2000 years old.
Old age isn’t the only thing they have in common with their counterparts on land. Like the magnificent redwoods, they do wonders to clean up and support the environment around them. Giant barrel sponges can filter up to 50,000 times their own volume in water in a single day. They also provide habitat to several small fish and other invertebrates that can be found living inside or on the surface of the sponge.
Although giant barrel sponges are, well, giant, their diet is anything but. These creatures, like many species of whales, sustain their size not by eating very large sources of food, but by eating large volumes of it. Giant barrel sponges are filter feeders, and consume microorganisms from the water around them that they pump through their bodies. The sponges have special cells along their inner cavities called choanocytes, which work to facilitate the movement of water and the capture of food from it.
In their ocean food chain, giant barrel sponges take their place above their symbiotic partners cyanobacteria, and are consumed in turn by macroorganisms like fishes, turtles, and sea urchin. They try to defend themselves by releasing chemicals to repel their predators, but there’s only so much they can do when stuck in one place, waiting to be ingested by so many types of marine life. Like other filter feeders, giant barrel sponges ultimately form an important branch in the transfer of nutrients from very small to much larger life forms.
They don’t even have tissues, let alone organs, but their simple structure is more than enough to ensure their survival and proliferation. Giant barrel sponges reproduce by spawning, and are one of the few species of sponge that undertake sexual reproduction. Males and females release sperm and egg cells into the ocean synchronously, so that when the time comes, they have a chance of contributing to a fertilized egg that grows into a larva and, after being carried by currents to a new spot of the ocean floor, establishes itself as an independent sponge.
Check out this short video of the spawning phenomenon:
A valued community member
Giant barrel sponges are native to the oceans of the Americas, found primarily in the Caribbean Sea, and observed as far south as the coasts of Venezuela.
Due to their filtration capabilities, giant barrel sponges are real assets to the ecosystems they are a part of, but boosting water quality is not the only ecological role they play. As mentioned, many other creatures live in and around the cavernous sponges, and giant barrel sponges are one of the largest organisms in the coral reef environments where they are found. They are thought to help coral anchor to substrate (the mix of mineral, rock, and skeleton that binds reefs together), and themselves make up about 9% of coral reef substrate in certain areas where they are found. By helping in this binding process, giant barrel sponges can play an important role in reef regeneration.
Though the giant barrel sponge is not currently classified as threatened, like all of us, it is living in vulnerable times, as reef habitats are weakened in warming, acidifying waters. It is susceptible to a disease called Sponge Orange Band disease that afflicts all kinds of sponges. They can also be damaged or killed by human activities that disturb reefs and break sponges off from their surroundings.
On the flip side, when these great creatures are doing well, they enable the thriving of life all around them. May all of us aspire to say the same.
With one giant smile, Maya
Maya Dutta is an environmental advocate and ecosystem restorer working to spread understanding on the key role of biodiversity in shaping the climate and the water, carbon, nutrient and energy cycles we rely on. She is passionate about climate change adaptation and mitigation and the ways that community-led ecosystem restoration can fight global climate change while improving the livelihood and equity of human communities. Having grown up in New York City and lived in cities all her life, Maya is interested in creating more natural infrastructure, biodiversity, and access to nature and ecological connection in urban areas.
Pacific salmon are famous for their migrations from the saltwater habitats they live in as mature adults to the freshwater rivers and streams where they were born and return to spawn. Salmon have two means of finding their way back to where they first hatched, often to the very same patch of gravel.
In the open ocean, they have a GPS system based on the earth’s magnetic fields sensed through their lateral line (a highly-sensitive line of nerves running down each side of their bodies). When they get near shore, they then follow smells that they imprinted from their natal river up to where they originally hatched, to spawn again and continue this cycle.
How do salmon manage to get back upstream?
Salmon make their way back home against the current of streams and rivers, even climbing mountains in the process. As they go, they feed upland forests by transporting ocean nutrients into the headwaters of their natal streams, supporting all kinds of life in the process (and not just hungry bears)!
What happens to Pacific salmon after they successfully spawn?
Spawned-out Pacific salmon all die after completing their journey. In late fall, on a salmon river, rotting corpses and dying fish appear everywhere, white with mold and stinking with decay. In doing so, they feed forests and the aquatic life that sustains the next generation of fish when they hatch in the spring. We don’t really know why they all die after spawning, unlike the Atlantic salmon, which live after the process is complete.
Bears also increase the ecological reach of these salmon by catching them in rivers and streams and carrying them deep into the forest to feast. This brings their helpful nutrients, particularly nitrogen, into dense stretches of forest where they can fertilize the ecosystem and help trees grow. In fact, it is estimated that eighty percent of the nitrogen in the trees of the Great Bear Forest in Canada comes from salmon. Learn about the interdependent links of salmon, bears, and forest health here.
Where do we find Pacific salmon?
Pacific salmon are an anadromous species, which means they live in seawater but spawn in freshwater. They hatch from eggs in gravel and spend their early years in freshwater rivers up high in the mountains and forests along the Pacific coast. Then, once they reach about 6-8 inches in length, they move down through the estuarial waters to spend several years in the open ocean, feeding and growing large, before they journey upstream to spawn and die.
What is the cultural significance of these fish?
Pacific salmon are part of a religious cycle of life for Indigenous peoples on the American and Canadian West coasts as well as across the planet. Their annual return is celebrated as part of a natural process in which Autumn brings a bountiful harvest of fish to add to other stores of food to last through a long cold winter. Salmon are objects of worship by coastal native inhabitants, human and nonhuman alike, who depend on the annual return of these salmon in the fall to help them get through a long cold winter.
A Shoshone-Paiute tribal member during the reintroduction of the Chinook Salmon into the East Fork Owyhee River by the Shosone-Paiute Tribe (May 28, 2015) (Photo by Jeff Allen, Northwest Power and Conservation Council)
We want renewable energy sources! So why are we destroying them for these salmon?
From the 18th into the 20th centuries, our human thirst for factory power had us constructing many dams on our rivers, with little attention to their harmful ecological impact. Many of our anadromous fish species – adapted to the specific conditions of their river watersheds – were lost forever when dams left them unable to complete their journeys upstream.
It is only in recent decades that a powerful movement for dam removal and habitat restoration has been gaining momentum as a means of saving these precious species. The beneficial effects of removing these barriers have been spectacular, as rivers – freed from their shackles – blossom with new life. Along with the salmon have come a revival of other runs, including steelhead, herring, eels, shad and other diadromous fish (ones that transition between freshwater and saltwater environments), as well as birds and wildlife previously not seen in these areas. Our rivers are showing us all that we had lost and all the flourishing that is possible once we get out of their way.
How are human activities impacting these salmon?
Pacific salmon are in serious trouble. A thirst for hydropower has placed them at dire risk of extinction. We are removing dams, building fish ladders on existing dams (since their proper design is crucial), making sure culverts and other means of fish passage stay open and unhindered. But salmon are cold water species, so a warming planet puts them in peril.
However, there is much we can do to protect them, and restore them once they are threatened or lost. Several short but informative videos on salmon restoration efforts can be found here and here.
May we keep supporting the Pacific Salmon,
Fred
Fred is from Ipswich, MA, where he has spent most of his life. He is an ecological economist with a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Stanford, both in economics. Fred is also an avid conservationist and fly fisherman. He enjoys the outdoors, and has written about natural processes and about economic theory. He has 40 years of teaching and research experience, first in academics and then in economic litigation. He also enjoys his seasonal practice as a saltwater fly fishing guide in Ipswich, MA. Fred joined Biodiversity for a Livable Climate in 2016.
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