The Secret Wisdom of Nature by Wohlleben
Ref: Peter Wohlleben (2019). The Secret Wisdom of Nature: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things. Greystone Books. ISBN: 978-1771643887.
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Summary
1.8M species have been described globally to date.
Almost every creature on this planet lives off processed solar energy. Photosynthesis produces sugar, which fuels plant life and therefore, indirectly, human and animal life, as well. In the natural world, there’s clearly a struggle for every ray of sunlight, for every smidgen of energy. Trees demonstrate this particularly well. The only reason they grow as tall as they do is to rise above the other plants and bushes that compete with them for light.
What should concern us most with climate change is the rate of change.
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Conservation
The deeper the realization that even the smallest disturbance can lead to unpredictable changes, the stronger the arguments are in favor of protecting larger areas.
Not only can we win back the original forests, but doing that could also steer the climate in the right direction. And to achieve this we don’t even need to do anything. Just the opposite, in fact. We need to leave things alone—on as large a scale as possible.
The claim that well-regulated forestry can do a good job of combining commerce and conservation across the whole forest should be banished to the realm of myth and legend immediately.
When we save individual animals or plants, we really believe we’re doing something good for the environment. Yet this is rarely what happens, mostly because when we have to change conditions in the environment to ensure the survival of one species, the survival of many others ends up in jeopardy.
We need areas of wild forests to be like the steppingstones we use to cross water without getting our feet wet. If there were enough of them, wild species could travel freely through our culturally manipulated landscape from one preserve to the next.
Rigid boundaries get in the way of what nature has in mind: change.
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Biodiversity
In nature, food is immediately converted into reproduction, so food abundance in any ecosystem causes the number of individual animals to explode.
True tropical diversity with millions of species depends on the return of all the fungi, insects, and vertebrates, all of which require such special conditions that their return is unlikely.
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Climate Change
It’s a question of the speed at which change happens—and thus the chances species have to adapt—that decides whether climate changes like these are catastrophic or benign.
<1000y after the arrival of the first Australians, 85% of the megafauna—that is to say, animals with a body weight of more than 100 pounds—had disappeared. The disappearance had nothing to do with excessive hunting. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the researchers’ opinion, the large animals reproduced so slowly that even a moderate level of hunting inflicted grave damage. The scientists calculated that every hunter removing just a single adult animal every ten years was enough to wipe out the species in a few hundred years.
It is vitally important for us that we don’t run out of CO2. But that’s exactly what the far distant future seems to hold. For hundreds of millions of years, leaving aside the fluctuations, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been falling. The warmer the world gets, the more this process speeds up, because warmth increases the rate of erosion and therefore the rate at which the gas binds to tiny particles.
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Trees
Temperature
Trees are able to register shorter days and falling temperatures. They use this information to decide when to drop their leaves before the first heavy snowfall.
10C; at this temperature, sunshine is being converted into sugar, new wood is being grown, and energy is being invested in extending the length of its branches and roots.
Energy
A mature beech contains ~14 tons of wood, which, if burned, would release about 42M kcal. To put this in perspective, a person—depending on how active they are—burns between 2500-3000 cal of food a day. (Food calories are actually kilocalories, even though we refer to them simply as calories.) This means that a mature beech stores enough solar energy to feed a person for 40y—if the human gut were able to digest wood.
(A small) forest grows more than 100K cubic yards of new wood annually—about the amount of energy used by 1000 modern single-family homes in Germany today.
Growth
~70% of the N in vegetation growing alongside streams comes from the ocean—in other words, from salmon. Their data show that N from salmon speeds up the growth of trees so much that Sitka spruce in these areas grow up to 3x faster than they would have without the fish fertilizer. In some trees, more than 80% of the N they contain can be traced back to fish (Study by Gende and Quinn).
In undisturbed ancient forests, youngsters have to spend their first 200y waiting patiently in their mothers’ shade. As they struggle to put on a few feet, they develop wood that is incredibly dense.
In modern managed forests today, seedlings grow without any parental shade to slow them down. They shoot up and form large growth rings even without a nutrient boost from added N. Consequently, their woody cells are much larger than normal and contain much more air, which makes them susceptible to fungi—after all, fungi like to breathe, too. A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old. This process is now accelerating rapidly because of the extra nutrients in the air.
Deciduous Trees: Include Birches, Poplars, Willows; with seeds traveling much farther than conifers and can repopulate quickly after forest fires. Deciduous trees lose less water than conifers in the winter, because they transpire relatively less.
Forests
It takes a native forest in Central Europe about 500y to achieve a stable balance.
Wood Wide Web: A network comprised of fungi that grow their filaments through the soil and connect trees and other plants with each other. Like the fiber-optic cables of our internet, the subterranean filaments (of fungi) carry messages from tree to tree so that the whole forest soon knows what to expect. The fungi tap Beeches, Oaks & Co. for up to one-third of the sugar and other carbohydrates they produce by photosynthesizing. That is a sizeable chunk of energy and is about the same amount the tree uses to grow wood. (The other third is converted into bark, leaves, and fruit.)
Defense
Trees (emit) scent signals that contain information about which villain the trees are up against. The appropriate defensive compound can then be stored under the bark to spoil the appetite of hungry insects or mammals.
Trees are attacked by a multitude of species, all of them with one thing on their mind: getting their share from the gigantic warehouse of carbohydrates that is a tree.
Aphids: Suck sap from plants causing leaf wilting, protected by Red Wood Ants.
Red Wood Ants: Symbiotic with Aphids; the ants feed on the honeydew produced by the aphids.
Bark Beetles: Bore hotels into the bark and deposit their eggs, which attack the inner bark as larvae. When the bark beetle arrives at the living cells of wood, these cells immediately commit suicide, releasing a potent insect toxin. If there’s just a lone beetle, it’s killed; however, if it has been joined by colleagues summoned by the chemical call for reinforcement, the beetles will weaken the tree until, exhausted, it quickly surrenders.
Mountain Pine Beetles: Destruction caused by the mountain pine beetle, however, is on another scale altogether. This beetle lives in pine forests in western North America, where it is particularly partial to lodgepole pines. It behaves much like the spruce engraver beetle, except it is the females that lead the attack and summon the males with seductive scents. To shut down a tree’s defenses (its flow of pitch), the beetle carries a fungus that attacks and paralyzes the living layers of bark. That way, not only are the tree’s defensive mechanisms shut down, but it also cannot feed itself, and the defenseless victim can easily be colonized. They have destroyed approximately 55% of all the commercially harvestable pine in British Columbia. You have to wonder how this can happen. Usually, a species doesn’t destroy its natural habitat. Scientists suggest it has to do with climate change. Higher winter temperatures allow more eggs and larvae to survive, and the beetles to extend their range farther north. Warming also weakens trees so that they have less energy to defend themselves against their attackers. Ultimately, we, not the beetles, are to blame for upsetting the carefully calibrated balance of nature. Instead of blaming the beetles, you could see them as an indicator that things are not as they should be. You could argue that all they are doing is exacerbating a situation that is already out of balance, making it all the more urgent that we change course to bring us more in line with the natural order.
Woodboring Beetles: Lay their eggs on bark and their larvae then tunnel into it.
Weevils: Chew leaves until the edges look as though they’ve been riddled with shot. This kind of damage is probably much more detrimental to the trees than donating some of their vital fluids to aphids.
Plant that do not equip themselves with thorns depend on toxins, including foxglove, broom, and ragwort.
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Insects
Greater wax moths can hear sounds in the range of 300KHz—the highest hearing score in the animal kingdom.
Overwintering: The insect version of hibernation.
Toadflies: Lay their eggs on the skin of toads and when the larvae hatch, they crawl up into the toad’s nostrils, where they begin to eat their host’s head from the inside out. The toad briefly shuffles around zombielike before finally giving up the ghost.
Aphids: Excrete constantly, responsible for the yellow droplets on car windshields in forested areas.
Aphids have no need of males (none have ever been found). The females lay unfertilized eggs that hatch into larvae. These larvae are carried on the wind to nearby beeches, where they immediately begin feeding.
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Mammals
Humans
Human Ears: Use 20K hair-cells that vibrate in the ear, converting sound into neural signals that are capable of hearing frequencies as low as 20KHz.
Human Eyes: Converts light waves via the retina into information.
Photopigment Melanopsin: A pigment found in the eye that when struck by blue light, signals our brain that it’s daytime. Later, in the evening, the light spectrum shifts to red and we automatically feel tired.
Bats: Catch up to half their own body weight in insects a night (or ~4K mosquitoes/bat).
Deer: Today, the number of roe deer in German forests is at 50x the level once found in the region’s ancient forests, and red deer, originally animals of the plains, now hang out in the safety of the trees as people take over their ancestral ranges.
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Ecology
Aphids & Red Wood Ants
Aphids: Suck sap from plants causing leaf wilting, protected by Red Wood Ants.
Red Wood Ants: Symbiotic with Aphids; the ants feed on the honeydew produced by the aphids.
Aphid-farming ants reduce attacks by other plant-eating insects to such an extent that plane trees with ants increase their girth 2-3x faster than plane trees that have to manage without the ants’ protection.
When aphids want to leave, the next generation grows wings so that they can fly to greener pastures. This doesn’t escape the notice of their guardians, and the ants end the aphids’ dreams of flight by summarily biting off their transparent appendages. And as if that were not enough, the ants also use chemical means to prevent their domesticated herds from escaping. The ants exude compounds that slow the growth of the aphids’ wings, and, for good measure, they also slow down the aphids.
Ravens & Wolves: Ravens spot bears from afar and help wolves by alerting the pack to approaching danger. In return, wolves allow ravens to help themselves to a share of the booty—something the birds wouldn’t be able to do without the wolves’ permission. Wolves would have no difficulty making a meal of ravens, but they teach their offspring that these birds are their friends. Wolf pups have been observed playing with their bird companions; the young wolves imprint on the smell of the ravens and come to regard the birds as members of their community.
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Pathogens
Virus: A hollow shell containing a blueprint for multiplication that lack cells and can’t reproduce or metabolize on its own. Once they contact a cell, they smuggle their blueprint into the host organism, forcing it to create millions of copies of itself.
Malaria
In 2015 alone, 200M people fell sick with malaria, and 440K of them died from the disease (WHO).
Sickle Cell Anemia: A rare genetic blood disease common in places where Malaria is endemic. In SCA, RBCs, which are normally round like a disc, become sickle shaped, which reduces the oxygen carrying capacity of the RBCs to the organs. With malaria, parasites passed on through mosquito bites attack and destroy RBCs; malaria advances in stages with periods of fever, triggered by blood cells bursting enmasse, often leading to the complete breakdown of the organism. Carriers of sickle-cell anemia have a natural resistance to malaria. How this works has yet to be adequately explained. In any event, people who have sickle-cell anemia and are significantly affected by this disease have a distinct advantage over those who don’t. This advantage means that in areas where malaria is widespread, you also find many people with this genetic mutation.
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Organic Chemistry
O is our most important elixir of life because we need it for the cells in our body to burn C compounds.
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Oceanography
In winter, water in the ocean acts like a heater, and in summer, it acts like an air conditioner, as the air passing over the water is either warmed up or cooled down.
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Meteorology
It only gets really cold under a HP system, when cloudless night skies allow warmth from the earth to radiate into outer space.
Dust storms blow from the desert into the air an enormous amount of tiny particles of dirt, which are then carried way up high on the wind from Africa to South America. There, the dusty cargo is washed down by regular heavy rain to fertilize the ground. Nearly 33M tons arrive this way every year, including about 24K tons of P, which is a potent plant fertilizer.
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Geology
At 100-130’ below the surface, the temperature rises to 52-54 degrees, and it increases by 5.5 degrees every ~300’ as you continue to descend.
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Terminology
Fracking: Water is pumped deep into the ground under HP to fracture rocks. Grains of sand and chemicals mixed in with the water hold the factures open, allowing the gas and oil contained in the rocks to flow to the surface.
Trophic Cascade: A change in the entire ecosystem via the food web, starting at the top.
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Chronology
500 ma: Atmospheric CO2 levels are ~4000ppm.-Secret Wisdom by Wohlleben.
250 ma: Atmospheric CO2 levels are ~2000ppm.-Secret Wisdom by Wohlleben.
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