Apples and Oranges

When I was a child, I frequently took bus trips across the Canadian-US border, usually to visit my grandma in the summer. On one of those crossings I was stopped for carrying an orange in my back pack. The offending fruit was promptly disposed of and I received a stern, but friendly warning. Customs were not keen in letting any type of citrus across that border. The risk that any one fruit could be carrying a deadly disease and somehow whisked from small town Minnesota to the Florida orange groves was too great. After all, the orange groves are genetically identical a single bacteria would effect each tree with the same devastation. Once infected the groves’ only real defense were attentive farmers armed with chemical sprays and pruning shears.

Oranges are big business in the United States, or atleast it was before the appearance of an invasive bacteria, the Huanglongbing (HLB) or Citrus Greening Disease. Its a bacterial disease spread by large flying insects, called citrus psyllids. Originally brought to the US by some unknown orange shipment in 1998, it spread throughout Florida and reeked havoc upon the lively hoods of the orange industry. Declining over the years from over 10 Million tons in the Nineties to 6.9 Million tons in 2007. Now researchers are turning toward bioengineering, by “genetically inserting anti-microbial amino acid compounds from plants like soy beans or spinach” with the hope that the invasive disease will be stunted or stopped before its too late.

Technological fixes are an approach we have been seeing increasingly over the past century, seemingly becoming the only means to solve problems in natural systems, such as orange groves. Having combatted one disease these technologies, whether it is chemical sprays or genetically engineered seeds, soon become obsolete as a new variety of the disease takes hold. The problem being that diseases and pests evolve fast. Faster then the peer review process, faster then beauracratic licensing processes, really just faster then technology. A community of farmers had traded old secrets for harvesting machines and propriety seeds have lost two important tools for combating disease, low density and high diversity.

Low density because the diseases need to first infect, reproduce and then spread. Increase the distance and the disease will have trouble spreading. Density is also about more individuals with striking distance, so an infected tree will likely infect more trees. The lower the density the slower the disease can spread and easier it will be for the attentive farmer.

Courtesy of http://www.destinationknowlton.com

High diversity means that even if the disease can spread it likely only to infect a certain number of individuals. In an orange grove or even an entire county with only a single cloned tree type, the disease will infect each tree equally well. Now imagine a forest where each tree support a different fruit: golden tears, blood red globes, sparkling emeralds, and almost purple spheres dancing about. Each one tree with its own taste and colour, sweet or sour, musky or light. Each of these trees also has its own tolerance to cold and disease. These forests still exist in valleys of Kazakhstan where entire forests are made of wild apples.  Even to this day 4.5 million varieties of apple can still be found. This is the epicenter of apple diversity, a place so rich with apples that it is considered the birth place of the apple. Due to its importance apple conservationists, Aimak Dzangaliev and Tatiana Salova, have struggled to convince Kazakhstan to protect even a small portion from urban encroachment and cultivation.

Here in North America, according to apple historian Dan Bussey, some 16,000 apple varieties have been named and nurtured over the last four centuries. By 1904, however, the identities and sources of only 7,098 of those varieties could be discerned by a USDA scientist named W. H. Ragan, who devoted his career to tracking America’s extant apple diversity. Since then, some 6,121 apple varieties—86.2 percent of Ragan’s 1904 inventory—have been lost from nursery catalogs, farmers’ markets, and from the American table”  – Gary Nabhan.

Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste names 129 apple varieties as “endangered”. The diversity of the wild apple forests and the early settlers is a source of strength: resistance to drought, diseases, and other pests. According to Gary Nabhan, when this diversity is lost we return to plague, famine, and market failure.

Perhaps a new seed company will emerge with the latest fool-proof apple or orange variety. Rather than maintaining a diverse crop of trees, groves and orchards. We will surely hear of a new super bug, followed by new and improved seeds, followed by another super bug, and to infinity. All the time at risk of losing the race. Should the Florida orange industry crumble or the wild apple forests be replaced by shopping malls and factories: people will lose livelihoods, fruit baskets will become empty, and shareholders will diversify their portfolio.

Whale’s Tale

This past week I found myself listening to the Radio Lab podcast from April 02, 2010 (they seem to be making the podcast available incredibly early). A friend introduced me to Radio Lab last summer, and it has become a staple in my podcast playlist. The thing that they do so well is to take full advantage of the intimacy of radio, really getting inside your head and using sound to create images. All while exploring somewhat forgotten or overlooked pieces of where science and culture meet. Topics range from placebos to sperm to laughter. You should real take a look my two favourites are the one about Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’  and the other about ‘parasites’. You can download from itunes or their website and don’t forget that if you like it you can support it to.

This particular Radio Lab episode was called “Animal Minds”, where they deal with the problem of whether or not we can know what animals are thinking, assuming they have thoughts at all. The show proceeded to discuss what has been a major pet peeve of mine for as long as I can remember. It goes something like this “people are rationale thinkers, and animals are not.” Often this view will be used to explain how humans are superior to the rest of the animal kingdom. I personally have never understood the need to be superior, certainly it comes with no prize. Besides its pretty lame to win a contest where you get to change the rules until you win.

Throughout the show they drop a few unbelievable and compelling stories about  animals demonstrating their capacity to think. This is then tempered with the musing of animal psychologists and writers who warn against the temptation to anthropomorphise the complex social gestures of dogs, whales and primates. For instance one Dr. Horowitz had shown that dogs act guilty when their owners say “NO!”, regardless of whether they did anything or not. Instead she says that its an act of submission, which is a well known dog behaviour. Of course she fails to connect that same behaviour in people, as one commenter on the show’s blog questions – “if you were to yell the same way at a small child, even if they had done nothing wrong, would they not also act submissive and look as if they were guilty?” I would take it one step further and say that the same is done with bosses and employees or parents and there forty year old children. Submission is common trait, dog or person, even if it has different meanings and even different consequences in our two social orders. More to the point how could you distinguish guilt and submission.

The show really tried to separate humans and other animals in an interesting way. This starts with the rather heart warming tale of a humpback whale trapped in a series of crab traps, only to be freed by the hours long toil of a group of divers. This school bus sized whale returns to the divers and proceeds to gaze into each of the eyes for a minute, from one to the next.

Was this a sign of gratitude?

One blog commenter says that “key social memes” such as gratitude would converge. Meaning that social groups are successful if they can show gratitude or simply, to say thank you ensures that your children will pass on. The assumption being that such a politeness communicates to others around you that helping you is worth while. This is one of the ways to cooperate. Of course communicating to another species that you are grateful probably require you to dumb down your message. Potentially a whale thank you is an elaborate process, but she figured that se would just nudge the person and stare into his eyes, perhaps she was expecting some reciprocated action from the divers. Of course we will never really know because are communication with them is for the moment limited.

I think with dogs and other pets we can imagine that communication does occur, even if a little slowly. Raising a social animal gives them experiences with us, we and them begin to anticipate signs and corresponding actions. But ultimately dogs who have an evolved sense of family/pack will work to communicate with the ones in there pack. Which now a days is the common family (1.7 dogs per household).

Welcome to Bioplicity

This blog is a place to discuss anything and everything through the lens of the biological world. Whatever the subject, whatever the place, or culture, we humans are biological. We cannot escape our nature. We think as if from nature; we act as if from nature. We pretend we are beyond nature. Yet every human problem, pattern, or achievement is only an echo from the symphony of the living world. Or perhaps you might call it a cacophony.

The following blog posts will be a mixture of opinions, book review (or other media), critical analysis of ideas and events, the explanation of biological ideas, news, links, or even a comment on the quirkiness of us humans as biological entities.

Take for instance the drive home, a potentially harrowing experience that mixes high speeds with hard surfaces and tons of metal. Our brains see the patterns, absorbing the road and its surrounding as if it will be what it has been on this day, the next day, and forever. Gradually the routes we come to know are driven near ‘automatically’. Things that may have once been a source of stress and potentially dangerous become unimportant, since no problems have occurred.  We gain a certain confidence that makes the ride more enjoyable, but miss new signs or worse the proverbial child chasing a ball across the street. Driving requires constant attention, yet our brain tells us to relax we have had no problem in this place before. Not surprisingly accidents are more common close to home. Not only because you spend more time there, but because your brain is adapting to the situation. A phenomenon well catalogued in Tom Vanderbilt’s ‘Traffic‘.

I have been a biologist, which partly explains my biological tunnel vision. Biology is the study of life. That’s what we are talking about here.

Life.

It’s all around us. Life perseveres by changing itself or its surroundings. Constantly reinventing itself. Stretching out – with its grimy tentacles (real and metaphoric) extending into the darkest crevices. Expanding, contracting, hiding, exposing, consuming, and producing. We humans are part of the story. We cannot escape it. It encompasses nearly every part of our existence, mediating our experiences, being our beings.

Its absence is the end.