Month: February 2015

For the Love of Leps

bflyLeach, William. Butterfly People. An American Encounter With the Beauty of the World. Pantheon. New York. 388 pp. 2013.

This book, beautifully illustrated, is a history of the discovery and documentation of the butterfly fauna of the United States and of the entomologists, amateur and professional, who fed the public fascination with butterflies in the 19th century – Samuel Scudder, William Henry Edwards, Herman Strecker, Augustus Grote, W. J. Holland, and many others. The author has many reflections on the importance of both Darwin and Romanticism (especially German) on the interpretation of the biology and meaning of butterflies. There is also a lot on the collectors, scientific and commercial, who travelled throughout North America and the rest of the world to satisfy the demand for specimens, often at considerable risk and always with much hardship. Butterflies and moths were much more than a scientific concern: there was a great deal of commerce in specimens, as many, if not most, young men of middle class aspirations had a Lepidoptera collection, even if few collected themselves. It is strange to think in our day of fancy cars, world travel and electronic devices, how much one’s status might have been tied up in various collections, whether, insects, stamps, shells or books.

Leach mentions George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty several times as a perspective on the 19th-century’s fascination with natural form and color. As well as commercial specimens, large format books with color plates were an important part of the butterfly business. He talks about the illustrators and the changing technology of color reproduction.

The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was one of the repositories of collections, including the very early and important Titian Peale collection, which was to have formed the basis of a never-completed series of books by that second-generation Philadelphia artist. The American Entomological Society, founded 1859, played a role as well. The society’s book collection, still housed at the Ewell Sale Stewart Library of the Academy, includes many of the most attractive 19th-century publications.

This is a fine account of what natural history meant to Americans in the first century and a half of the nation and of the friendships and rivalries among these early naturalists.

Contact, Conflict and Cooperation

Soderland, Jean R. 2015. Lenape Country. Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn. Phila. U. Penn. Press. Early American Studies Series. 249 pp.

An interesting, if somewhat repetitive, account of the period from 1630s to mid-1700’s, when Lenape and Susquehanna Indians, Swedes and Finns, Dutch and English contended for the trade in beaver skins, etc. coming down from Canada. Soderland’s point is that most of this struggle was peaceful or at least not open warfare and the Lenape managed to remain masters of the territory surrounding the Delaware (Lenapewihittuck or South) River, until William Penn’s sons and other land swindlers got the last large tract on the west side from them in the 1700s. For much of that time, Swedes, Finns and Lenapes formed an alliance against the Dutch and English, resisting their attempts to acquire and govern large areas of territory. The Europeans were largely confined to small outposts along both sides of the river up to the time that the Quakers began to acquire large tracts for settlers.

Part of her contention is that Penn’s treaty was not anything really new. The Lenape had been fairly skillful negotiators all along and willing to employ threats and force to keep the other groups from extablishing large settlements and plantations, as Europeans had in Virginia and New England. They also had to deal with threats from Maryland settlers, but here they were aided by the other Europeans. She repeatedly points out that the only sizable massacre in the lower Delaware region was near the site of Lewes, Delaware, in 1631, an early show of willingness by the Lenape to use violence to stop large scale settlement.

The Europeans learned not to assume that their concepts of ownership and transfer of rights were understood by the Lenape, and they preferred to keep negotiating peace for the sake of continued trade rather than revenging past wrongs or trying for outright conquest. This may have simply been due to lack of means. Their “companies,” back in Sweden, the Netherlands and England had limited resources and aims and often could not supply trade goods or support for the settlers. Still, she implies that some of the local directors and governors were simply more inclined to diplomacy than war and that the Lenape were more than willing to go along, despite the mockery of other tribes, especially those to the north, who were often agitating for war. She claims that at one point, around the time of Bacon’s Rebellion and King Phillips’s War in the 1670s, if the Lenape had joined the rest of the native Americans in an all out assault, they might have driven out the Europeans. Seems unlikely, but they certainly could have dealt a massive setback in the whole mid-Atlantic region, with unimaginable future consequences, for example for the French position in North America, etc.

The background to all this, of course, is the gradual decline of the native population due to epidemic disease. Does this stark fact lend credence to Jared Diamond’s guns, germs and steel theory? I’d like to not think so. Part of what’s missing in that view is the central role played by trade in keeping both sides in contact with each other throughout the period. The other point is that both sides suffered a lot from diseases, although Europeans may have been somewhat more resistant. There is no suggestion that the epidemics were an actual weapon. In fact, they instigated revenge killings (she calls it “mourning war”) and so were a source of friction between Europeans and Americans.

The other point is that the Lenape and the Europeans rather quickly began to intermingle in many ways – tools, agriculture, marriage. The Lenape didn’t like the Europeans’ domestic animals, which were often a cause of conflict, and they showed little inclination to become Christians, which led a lot of preachers to accuse them of devil worship. But particularly with the Swedes and Finns, there seems to have been a fair amount of cooperation. There are several cases described in the book of both sides handling criminal complaints about the other side in a way that worked fairly well.

One aspect that surpised me was the very low estimate of the number of European heads of household in West Jersey as late as the count in 1671: seven men and no women. Was some segment of the population simply being missed? Do other records indicate that there were Europeans living in some places where they were missed in the count? One of the recent books she criticizes is Bernard Bailyn’s The Barbarous Years. (Knopf 2012), may be worth a look.

Image: Nautical chart of the Dutch colony Zwaanendael and Godyn’s Bay (Delaware Bay), 1639 – Wikipedia

Fearful scimitars

Sabertooth by Mauricio Anton (2013) Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 243 pp.

This is the natural history of an ecological niche: an ambush predator that captures prey by a throw and pin, with powerful forelimbs and a long, strong back, followed by a bite to the neck, using greatly elongated canine teeth, made possible by jaw adaptations that permit a huge gape and a long, strong neck. The bite results in bleed out and death of the victim. It is argued that this leads to quicker and safer kills than the suffocation method employed by modern big cats on large prey. The author does a remarkable job of tracing the paleontology of successive groups of species that have occupied this role since the Permian, although there seem to have been no dinosaurs that did so.

The illustrations of fossils, reconstructed animals and landscapes are beautifully done, in loving detail. The painstaking anatomical analyses to show how these killing machines worked are clear and persuasive, at least to a non-expert. There are interesting accounts of the constantly changing nomenclature of the fossils.

It would be useful to see similar accounts of modern large cats, hyaenids and other carnivores to get a sense of how the sabertooths fit into the big picture of carnivore evolution and why it is they went extinct instead of the others.

The extinction happened several times, as the successive groups of sabretooths disappeared, and they were not quickly replaced. Sometimes millions of years seem to have elapsed before a new lineage appeared to fill the niche. Indeed, sometimes there were no large felids of any kind for extended periods, if we can trust the fossil record. At other times, a new group may have out-competed the current occupants of the sabertooth niche. One might say that there is room at the top of the food web, but it is a precarious position that isn’t always filled.

Perhaps the most recent occupants of the niche went extinct with the megafauna of the old and new worlds, but could they have been done in by more efficient pantherids? Was their technique only suitable for very specific types of prey that got replaced by more wary and evasive herbivores or did vegetation change doom their hunting methods? Did their very specialized anatomy and techniques simply run out of room for improvement against ever more challenging prey? Anton thinks that their very specialized niche may have left them relatively more vulnerable to shifts in prey abundance. This would be a major factor in the late Pleistocene, along with competition from lions and humans, among others. As the least flexible group, they may have been the first to go.

Does it mean there’s an unoccupied niche now, or are those habitats and resources simply gone?

What other convergences in form and behavior has natural selection produced across time and biogeographic realms? We all know at least a few ecological equivalents, like pangolins and armadillos, or moles, marsupial moles and mole crickets. There’s an interesting one involving modern beetles’ and early rodents’ mandibles, but it isn’t clear what the functional significance is (John Acorn in American Entomologist, Summer 2014, p 128). Thanks to Mauricio Anton for presenting this story so beautifully.

Image: Smilodon fatalis – National Park Service

Ecosystem lost and found?

Looking for Longleaf. The Fall and Rise of an American Forest by Lawrence S. Earley (2004) Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 322pp.

When I was a teenager, my grandfather recalled for me how the longleaf pine forests in eastern North Carolina looked when he was young, some seventy to eighty years before. It was like being in a cathedral, he said, with the trunks of the trees like columns and the forest floor clear as far as you could see. This book gives an introduction to the character and extent of the longleaf pine ecosystem, once dominant over a vast region of the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain, introducing the plant, Pinus palustris, the diversity of associated plants (sometimes hundreds of species in a square kilometer and as many as 40-60 in a square meter) and several of the more distinctive animals, like gopher tortoise and red-cockaded woodpecker.

Earley explains the critical role of fire and soil in establishing the diversity of types within the overall longleaf ecosystem.

The middle part of the book is a historical account of the European encounter with the forest, its exploitation by the naval stores industry and its eventual destruction by that industry and the railroad based loggers. Some of these descriptions fit closely with what I heard from my grandfather and from a friend in North Carolina (whom Earley interviewed for the section on turpentining). He talks about rafting logs down the coastal rivers (as my grandfather, born in 1869, did as a boy) and shipping naval stores (my grandfather also described how the cooper made the barrels for turpentine). He explains that what preserved so much of the forest were the limitation of cutting timber to areas close to usable streams, that is until the railroads came. My father (born 1913) recalled how the railroad was brought in to log some of the most remore and inaccessible places when he was growing up. Some time around 1970, before the railroad was finally abandoned, I saw carloads of longleaf pine stumps waiting to be hauled off to extract the valuable resins or to make fatwood kindling, sold by L.L. Bean, among others. Earley also mentions the continued interest in salvaging sunken logs and getting lumber from old buildings.

The final chapters are on the development of forest management ideas, from failed attempts at replanting to replacement by loblolly and slash pine and the gradual development of methods to regenerate longleaf, first as even aged stands but now moving towards uneven age management and overall ecosystem restoration. Red-cockaded woodpecker played a key role in several changes in policy, driven by court decisions under the Endangered Species Act. Many of the agencies involved, like the US forest Service have serious problems dealing with the steady increase in scientific and ecological understanding of the forests. Institutional change is difficult, especially when institutional memory is impaired by frequent reassignment of key people and political pressures. The US Forest Service has had an especially hard time admitting it has been wrong about fire suppression and even-aged management.

He talks about the role of national and state forests and of large and small private landholders (currently there is increasing longleaf acgeage on federal and maybe state land and on large private conservation holdings, but continued losses on timber company lands and small private holdings) and what the trends may mean for the future of the ecosystem and many of its species. New incentives under the Conservation Reserve Program may be changing the minds of some private owners. It is possible to derive a pretty steady income from restored longleaf, partly through sale of raked needles in the 10th to 15th years after replanting. Poles are much in demand, using middle aged trees. The author seems most impressed by adaptive management approaches using small group-selection cuts and frequent growing season fire. Several interesting examples are described in the next to last chapter on restoration. Some of these areas sound like they would be worth seeing, and there are some groups that can help with restoration, a topic that is on my mind lately, as I and my brothers and sisters still hold a small remnant of thousands of acres of longleaf land owned by my great-great grandfather in the early 1800s. We will soon be clearing the stand of loblolly pine, planted decades ago, to make way for longleaf again.

Neotropical travellers

Essay on the Geography of Plants, by Alexander von Humboldt, and Aimee Bonpland. 2009 (1807). Edited by Stephen Jackson. Translated by Sylvie Romanowski. University of Chicago Press. Chicago. 274 pp with tableau in pocket
This book is pure descriptive natural history, with almost no speculation or discussion of causes. It is divided into Humboldt’s Essay of some 30 or 40 pages and the longer Tableau Physique prepared by Humboldt and Bonpland. Some of Von Humboldt’s fascinations, like barometric pressure, which he includes along with temperature, humidity and “electrical tension” as factors influencing plant distribution, seem peculiar to me, but I have to remember that he was much more limited in what he could measure than we are today. Another peculiarity is his notion of “social” plants, by which he seems to mean those that form dense monocultures as opposed to mixed stands. He says these live “in organized society, like ants and bees…” His examples include mangroves, Cladonia lichens and pines, but also Vaccinium. He notes that such plants are more common in the temperate regions than in the tropics. Mexico is an exception, harboring many temperate species, like pine, oak and sweet gum, which he attributes in part to the vast geographical expanse of the northern part of America, narrowing southwards. Somehow this causes Mexico to be colder than similar latitudes elsewhere. Then there is his idea of “subterranean vegetation,” which seems to mean fungi in caves and mines. He treats these “cryptograms,” alongside lichens and mosses. How aware was he of the fundamental distinction between autotrophs and heterotrophs? Photosynthesis was barely beginning to be understood in his time.
He also lacked a clear notion of geologic time, referring only to remote ages, but with no sense of the scope and significance of the fossil record. Only the epoch of human spread across the earth is accessible to his reflections on the distribution of plants. When compared to Graham’s Natural History of the New World, he has far less to go on, and barely any sense of the potential of fossils to shed light on modern plant communities and their distributions. Yet Graham clearly is following in the footsteps of von Humboldt and Bonpland.
One advance he makes is to point out the importance of physiognomy alongside taxonomy in describing communities of plants (another of his ideas) what we today commonly call life forms or growth forms.
The main thing, though, is the Tableau Physique, the profile of the Andes, using the volcano Chimborazo thought, at the time, to be the highest peak in the world. The detailed data packed into a single illustration is startling and quite beautiful. The other wonderful part is his concluding reflections in the essay on the value of natural history writing and artwork in elevating and liberating our understanding, even if we cannot experience these amazing places directly.

New world history

A Natural History of the New World. Ecology and Evolution of Plants in the Americas, by Alan Graham. 2011. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 387 pp.
This is an ecological and evolutionary story acted on the stage of two continents from the close of the Mesozoic to the recent. South America starts out isolated or nearly so, while North America begins joined to Eurasia across the proto-Atlantic. It ends with two continents joined by a narrow isthmus and a sporadic connection to Siberia across the Bering Sea. During this time as the Americas override the Pacific plates, a series of great mountain ranges form along the western edges of both continents, altering the directions of rivers and radically altering the climate of the continental interiors. Late in the period, the shift towards glacial climates turns what were temperate climates under a polar insolation regime into boreal forest and tundra, with deciduous forests to the south and new dry ecosystems in the arid west.
It is a dramatic story, with a shifting cast of characters, most impressively the higher angiosperms and the radiating mammals responding to each other as well as struggling among themselves to dominate under the shifting conditions. The rise of groups like the grasses and the ungulates with their associated carnivores are among the most visible and dramatic developments, if not quantitatively as significant as the insects and fungi, which changed much less over the same time. This is a vexed question; megafauna and keystone species enthusiasts on the side of top-down regulation and ecosystem engineering, those of us who look at energy flux and nutrient cycles as keys to ecological processes and who see microbes as the dominant force, alongside plants, on the bottom-up side. Probably both views are right some of the time. No doubt, though, that climate and geology – lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere – are the ultimate regulators, although the biosphere’s impact on carbon cycling is also significant.
This is a very detailed book, giving an account of dozens of types of communities both in the past and the present vegetation of the Americas. It also describes the phases of development step by step, tracking the geologic changes and the shifting vegetation as revealed by pollen and macro fossils. The author is a noted paleobotanist at the Missouri Botanic Garden. There are good photos, maps and graphs of changing temperatures over the epoch. Truly a history of nature.
Graham also has excellent chapters on the techniques of paleoclimate reconstruction and the collection and interpretation of fossils. The text is also a wonderful travelogue, full of historical and prehistorical anecdotes, and covering the modern biogeography of the new world as well as the story of how it came to be as it is.