Bye, bye styrofoam! Hello, mealworm brownies!

Some things decompose readily; some things decompose slowly; some thing essentially decompose so slowly that they essentially don't decompose; a very few things are forever. Waxes decompose very slowly, which is why cuticles of fossil leaves persist so well for millions of years. Sporopollenin is the stuff that land plant spore and pollen walls are made of and it doesn't decompose at all. No organism has an enzyme that breaks these molecules down. Wonder if they've tried feeding pollen to meal worms? TPP asks this because humans have invented a few nasty things that do not decompose either, so they hang around and accumulate. Styrofoam and other polystyrenes being some of the more common ones. But say what? Mealworms can eat styrofoam and subsist on it? That's just amazing! A colleague of mine used to keep a colony going and hand out the mealworms (beetle larvae really) to visiting school kids as a snack because they are edible. The real funny part came when he'd turn to their teacher and say, "Your teacher will show you how to try new foods." Ha! They were worse than the kids.  So now you can raise mealworms on styrofoam, one of the nastiest kinds of plastic pollutants, and then use the mealworms as a stir-fry ingredient, or chicken or fish food, or energy bars, or something. Where is my Man Eating Bugs cookbook?  This is such a handy discovery.

Where have all the vultures gone, long time passing?

One of the many fox squirrels that inhabit our estate failed to pass on their genes and the remaining population is just a tiny bit better at avoiding motor vehicles when crossing the street. While this is not a very big animal, nonetheless the presence of a rotting carcass was detected by the Phactor’s olfactory sense from a considerable distance. Now of course what should happen is that scavengers should have found is delectable bit of carrion, dined well, if but briefly, and then moved on having disposed of the body. Of course some scavengers did find the flat squirrel fritter, flies, and their offspring are dining away, and while efficient with the fleshy bits, they are slower than large scavengers. Now scavengers are not an entirely necessary component of nature’s recycling, bacteria and fungi will decompose things quite well, the problem is what you have to put up with in the interim.
Vultures are very efficient scavengers, but our native species, the turkey vulture, is seldom seen in urban settings, except maybe in Hinckley Ohio, especially on a semi-busy street, so the squirrel just sort of slowly rots away. Annoying but not a huge problem unless of course it was a bison that got hit crossing the street. Unlikely, but think about how long that carcass will be around!
Now consider India. Vultures were a common sight in India, massing in great numbers to scavenge, especially in places where bodies were regularly disposed of, and in a big, densely populated country, where diverse religious and cultural beliefs prevent people from handling dead bodies, cow, goat, human, whatever, vultures played an important role as nature’s recycling system. Even if the organism died of a serious disease, after being processed through the vultures’ remarkable digestive system and deposited as nasty vulture scat no health risk from the diseased body remains. So vultures served a body disposal service, until they began to disappear.
First it took awhile for people to realize that the loss of vultures was taking place. Then it took awhile to figure out why. And then it took even longer to act. The vultures were dying from dining on livestock carcasses treated with diclofenac, a mild painkiller akin to aspirin or ibuprofen. Yes, they can eat an anthrax infected carcass with no harm, but this seemingly harmless painkiller using in treating animals is very harmful to vultures.
The lesson in this is that delicate are the scales of nature, and complex are its workings. We humans tilt the scales and put wrenches into the delicate machinery of nature at our own peril. When will we ever learn?

From carbon dioxide to carbon dioxide - lesson from the tropics

Here in the rain forest life is a pretty dramatic process. While the great towering giants of wood have a aura of permanence about them, the tree turn over in a wet tropical forest is 2 to 3 times as fast as in temperate forests. Trees are great store houses of carbon dioxide, relatively short term reservoirs, and it is hard for people to rap their brains around the fact that all that stuff is primarily built out of a colorless, tasteless gas that only makes up a fraction of one percent of the atmosphere.

In the temperate zone we are used to seeing mushrooms pop up out of the ground, reproductive structures that are dwarfed by the huge filamentous organisms hidden from sight. And of course such fungi are the primary recyclers of cellulose and the other stuff trees and plants are built from. So you might expect to see lots of fungi on the ground in rainforests, but such is not the case. Decomposition is so fast here, no organic material builds up in or on the soil. Most of the fungi you see are growing right out of decomposing plant material. The fungi shown here are called "dead man's fingers", cute, eh? And they are growing out of a log that is pretty far along in terms of decomposition. The Phactor is not an expert on fungi, but he seems to remember that this fungus is called appropriately enough Xylaria, after xylem, wood. And so after being stored in this log for decades or in some cases even centuries, all that carbon dioxide is going back into the air. And if, as some of the best data indicates (see for link), even a slight increase in temperature causes a higher rate of tree mortality, then you have a very scary scenario where an increasing concentration of carbon dioxide is driving an increase in tree mortality and more carbon dioxide is being released.