Time Capsule 2.5

  

It seemed not quite right to only take pictures of weedy flowers, so I amplified a bit.  Here's a wider range of some enduring, if not always endearing, members of our community, all 8/9/2015:

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

I did get home early, walked the dogs down the road and out through the fields, all early enough that I had time to read for an hour (what else is there to do at that midnight hour?), so I started on Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction.  Very readable, fun since I'm been to several places she talks about right at first, El Valle de Anton in Panama, the Monte Verde Cloudforest up in the mountains of Costa Rica, though not the Big Bone Lick in Kentucky!  Kolbert explained the concept of "background extinction rate" which is "expressed in terms of extinctions per million species-years."  She adds that for mammals, that rate has "been reckoned to be roughly .25 per million species-years.  This means that, since there are about fifty-five hundred mammal species wandering around today, at the background extinction rate you'd expect...one species to disappear every seven hundred years" (15).  As she points out somewhere I didn't mark, the plain odds are that none of us should ever be witness to a species of mammal going extinct.  Like tigers, for instance.

Here's a framework to consider when looking at our ordinary weeds:

Today, amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world's most endangered class of animals; it's been calculated that the group's extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate.  But extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels.  It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion...If you know how to look, you can probably find signs of the current extinction event in your own backyard. (17-8)

Of course, I'm showing you pictures not of animals, but all sorts of "weeds," many of them hardy or noxious.  "Hardy," yes, with the world as it is now, our well-stirred, mowed, mixed, human-made place.  Yet all of these plants are still linked in complex relations, not only to rain and sun, and competition with each other (though how well they "take turns"), but also to the bees, butterflies, bumblebees, birds, insects and so on that pollinate them, or help them along, and all of these hungry helpers have to line up with these shy blooms.  And in the next few decades, there are no guarantees.

later, bob