How Climate Has Changed the Flowers of Thoreau's Concord

[F, Calla & Luca]

http://www.popsci.com/science/gallery/2012-03/gallery-warming-clima...

I thought this little view of possible climate change effects was interesting.

[Karen, Jasper and Jackdoodle]

This made me sad, and a little worried. I love wildflowers. Coming upon them in the woods or by the roadside is like finding a treasure. I hate that so many have become rare.

 Here, flowers that normally would not have opened for another few weeks have bloomed and faded already, due to the 10 days of record-breaking temperatures (mid 80s!) we had in March, coupled with the mild winter. I wonder what that means for the future.

[F, Calla & Luca]

All sad but true.

[Pat and Traveler]

It really is a treat to find those wild flowers.  It's a little off-topic, but according to Loren Eiseley, a naturalist, humans owe their existence to flowers.  This is a relatively short essay, but with some interesting ideas. 

“HOW FLOWERS CHANGED THE WORLD”

If it had been possible to observe the Earth from the far side of the solar system over the

long course of geological epochs, the watchers might have been able to discern a subtle

change in the light emanating from our planet. That world of long ago would, like the

red deserts of Mars, have reflected light from vast drifts of stone and gravel, the sands

of wandering wastes, the blackness of naked basalt, the yellow dust of endlessly

moving storms. Only the ceaseless marching of the clouds and the intermittent flashes

from the restless surface of the sea would have told a different story, but still essentially

a barren one. Then, as the millennia rolled away and age followed age, a new and

greener light would, by degrees, have come to twinkle across those endless miles.

This is the only difference those far watchers, by the use of subtle instruments, might

have perceived in the whole history of the planet Earth. Yet that slowly growing green

twinkle would have contained the epic march of life from the tidal oozes upward across

the raw and unclothed continents. Out of the vast chemical bath of the sea—not from

the deeps, but from the element-rich, light-exposed platforms of the continental

shelves—wandering fingers of green had crept upward along the meanderings of river

systems and fringed the gravels of forgotten lakes.

In those first ages plants clung of necessity to swamps and watercourses. Their

reproductive processes demanded direct access to water. Beyond the primitive ferns

and mosses that enclosed the borders of swamps and streams the rocks still lay vast and

bare, the winds still swirled the dust of a naked planet. The grass cover that holds our

world secure in place was still millions of years in the future. The green marchers had

gained a soggy foothold upon the land, but that was all. They did not reproduce by

seeds but by microscopic swimming sperm that had to wriggle their way through water

to fertilize the female cell. Such plants in their higher forms had clever adaptations for

the use of rain water in their sexual phases, and survived with increasing success in a

wetland environment. They now seem part of man’s normal environment. The truth is,

however, that there is nothing very “normal” about nature, Once upon a time there

were no flowers at all.

A little while ago—about one hundred million years, as the geologist estimates time in

the history of our four-billion-year-old planet—flowers were not to be found anywhere

on the five continents. Wherever one might have looked, from the poles to the equator,

one would have seen only the cold dark monotonous green of a world whose plant life

possessed no other color.

Somewhere, just a short time before the close of the Age of Reptiles, there occurred a

soundless, violent explosion. It lasted millions of years, but it was an explosion,

nevertheless. It marked the emergence of the angiosperms—the flowering plants, Even

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the great evolutionist, Charles Darwin, called them “an abominable mystery,” because

they appeared so suddenly and spread so fast.

Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know—even man

himself—would never have existed. Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote

that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star. Intuitively he had sensed like

a naturalist the enormous interlinked complexity of life. Today we know that the

appearance of the flowers contained also the equally mystifying emergence of man.

If we were to go back into the Age of Reptiles, its drowned swamps and birdless forests

would reveal to us a warmer but, on the whole, a sleepier world than that of today.

Here and there, it is true, the serpent heads of bottom-feeding dinosaurs might be

upreared in suspicion of their huge flesh-eating compatriots. Tyrannosaurs, enormous

bipedal caricatures of men, would stalk mindlessly across the sites of future cities and

go their slow way down into the dark of geologic time.

In all that world of living things, nothing saw save with the intense concentration of the

hunt, nothing moved except with the grave sleepwalking intentness of the instinctdriven

brain. Judged by modern standards, it was a world in slow motion, a coldblooded

world whose occupants were most active at noonday but torpid on chill nights,

their brains damped by a slower metabolism than any known to even the most

primitive of warm-blooded animals today.

A high metabolic rate and the maintenance of a constant body temperature are supreme

achievements in the evolution of life. They enable an animal to escape, within broad

limits, from the overheating or the chilling of its immediate surroundings, and at the

same time to maintain a peak mental efficiency. Creatures without a high metabolic rate

are slaves to weather. Insects in the first frosts of autumn all run down like little clocks.

Yet if you pick one up and breathe warmly upon it, it will begin to move about once

more.

In a sheltered spot such creatures may sleep away the winter, but they are hopelessly

immobilized. Though a few warm-blooded mammals, such as the woodchuck of our

day, have evolved a way of reducing their metabolic rate in order to undergo winter

hibernation, it is a survival mechanism with drawbacks, for it leaves the animal

helplessly exposed if enemies discover him during his period of suspended animation.

Thus bear or woodchuck, big animal or small, must seek, in this time of descending

sleep, a safe refuge in some hidden den or burrow. Hibernation is, therefore, primarily a

winter refuge of small, easily concealed animals rather than of large ones.

A high metabolic rate, however, means a heavy intake of energy in order to sustain

body warmth and efficiency. It is for this reason that even some of these later warmblooded

mammals existing in our day have learned to descend into a slower,

unconscious rate of living during the winter months when food may be difficult to

obtain. On a slightly higher plane they are following the procedure of the cold-blooded

frog sleeping in the mud at the bottom of a frozen pond.

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The agile brain of the warm-blooded birds and mammals demands a high oxygen

consumption and food in concentrated forms, or the creatures cannot long sustain

themselves. It was the rise of the flowering plants that provided that energy and

changed the nature of the living world. Their appearance parallels in a quite surprising

manner the rise of the birds and mammals.

Slowly, toward the dawn of the Age of Reptiles, something over two hundred and fifty

million years ago, the little naked sperm cells wriggling their way through dew and

raindrops had given way to a kind of pollen carried by the wind. Our present-day pine

forests represent plants of a pollen-disseminating variety. Once fertilization was no

longer dependent on exterior water, the march over drier regions could be extended.

Instead of spores, simple primitive seeds carrying some nourishment for the young

plant had developed, but true flowers were still scores of millions of years away. After a

long period of hesitant evolutionary groping, they exploded upon the world with truly

revolutionary violence.

The event occurred in Cretaceous times in the close of the Age of Reptiles. Before the

coming of the flowering plants our own ancestral stock, the warm-blooded mammals,

consisted of few mousy little creatures hidden in trees and underbrush. A few lizardlike

birds with carnivorous teeth flapped awkwardly on ill-aimed flights among archaic

shrubbery. None of these insignificant creatures gave evidence of any remarkable

talents. The mammals in particular had been around for some millions of years, but had

remained well lost in the shadow of the mighty reptiles. Truth to tell, man was still, like

the genie in the bottle, encased in the body of a creature about the size of a rat.

As for the birds, their reptilian cousins the Pterodactyls, flew farther and better. There

was just one thing about the birds that paralleled the physiology of the mammals. They,

too, had evolved warm blood and its accompanying temperature control. Nevertheless,

if one had been seen stripped of his feathers, he would still have seemed a slightly uncanny

and unsightly lizard.

Neither the birds nor the mammals, however, were quite what they seemed. They were

waiting for the Age of Flowers. They were waiting for what flowers, and with them the

true encased seed, would bring. Fish-eating, gigantic leather-winged reptiles, twentyeight

feet from wing tip to wing tip, hovered over the coasts that one day would be

swarming with gulls.

Inland the monotonous green of the pine and spruce forest with their primitive wooden

cone flowers stretched everywhere. No grass hindered the fall of the naked seeds to

earth. Great sequoias towered to the skies. The world of that time has a certain appeal

but it is a giant’s world, a world moving slowly like the reptiles who stalked

magnificently among the boles of its trees.

The trees themselves are ancient, slow-growing and immense, like the redwood groves

that have survived to our day on the California coast. All is stiff, formal, upright and

green, monotonously green. There is no grass as yet; there are no wide plains rolling in

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the sun, no tiny daisies dotting the meadows underfoot. There is little versatility about

this scene; it is, in truth, a giant’s world.

A few nights ago it was brought home vividly to me that the world has changed since

that far epoch. I was awakened out of sleep by an unknown sound in my living room.

Not a small sound—not a creaking timber or a mouse’s scurry—but a sharp, rending

explosion as though an unwary foot had been put down upon a wine glass. I had come

instantly out of sleep and lay tense, unbreathing. I listened for another step. There was

none.

Unable to stand the suspense any longer, I turned on the light and passed from room to

room glancing uneasily behind chairs and into closets. Nothing seemed disturbed, and I

stood puzzled in the center of the living room floor. Then a small button-shaped object

upon the rug caught my eye. It was hard and polished and glistening. Scattered over

the length of the room were several more shining up at me like wary little eyes. A pine

cone that had been lying in a dish had been blown the length of the coffee table. The

dish itself could hardly have been the source of the explosion. Beside it I found two

ribbon-like strips of a velvety-green. I tried to place the two strips together to make a

pod. They twisted resolutely away from each other and would no longer fit.

I relaxed in a chair, then, for I had reached a solution of the midnight disturbance. The

twisted strips were wisteria pods that I had brought in a day or two previously and

placed in the dish. They had chosen midnight to explode and distribute their

multiplying fund of life down the length of the room. A plant, a fixed, rooted thing,

immobilized in a single spot, had devised a way of propelling its offspring across open

space. Immediately there passed before my eyes the million airy troopers of the

milkweed pod and the clutching hooks of the sandburs. Seeds on the coyote’s tail, seeds

on the hunter’s coat, thistledown mounting on the winds—all were somehow

triumphing over life’s limitations. Yet the ability to do this had not been with them at

the beginning. It was the product of endless effort and experiment.

The seeds on my carpet were not going to lie stiffly where they had dropped like their

antiquated cousins, the naked seeds on the pine cone scales. They were travelers. Struck

by the thought, I went out next day and collected several other varieties. I line them up

now in a row on my desk—so many little capsules of life, winged, hooked or spiked.

Every one is an angiosperm, a product of the true flowering plants. Contained in these

little boxes is the secret of that far-off Cretaceous explosion of a hundred million years

ago that changed the face of the planet. And somewhere in here, I think, as I poke

seriously at one particularly resistant seedcase of a wild grass, was once man himself.

When the first simple flower bloomed on some raw upland late in the Dinosaur Age, it

was wind pollinated, just like its early pine-cone relatives. It was a very inconspicuous

flower because it had not yet evolved the idea of using the surer attraction of birds and

insects to achieve the transportation of pollen. It sowed its own pollen and received the

pollen of other flowers by the simple vagaries of the wind. Many plants in regions

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where insect life is scant still follow this principle today. Nevertheless, the true flower—

and the seed that it produced—was a profound innovation in the world of life.

In a way, this event parallels, in the plant world, what happened among animals.

Consider the relative chance for survival of the exteriorly deposited egg of a fish in

contrast with the fertilized egg of a mammal, carefully retained for months in the

mother’s body until the young animal (or human being) is developed to a point where it

may survive. The biological wastage is less—and so it is with the flowering plants. The

primitive spore, a single cell fertilized in the beginning by a swimming sperm, did not

promote rapid distribution, and the young plant, moreover, had to struggle up from

nothing, No one had left it any food except what it could get by its own unaided efforts.

By contrast, the true flowering plants (angiosperm itself means “encased seed”) grew a

seed in the heart of a flower, a seed whose development was initiated by a fertilizing

pollen grain independent of outside moisture. But the seed, unlike the developing

spore, is already a fully equipped embryonic plant packed in a little enclosed box

stuffed full of nutritious food. Moreover, by featherdown attachments, as in dandelion

or milkweed seed, it can be wafted upward on gusts and ride the wind for miles; or

with hooks it can cling to a bear’s or a rabbit’s hide; or like some of the berries, it can be

covered with a juicy, attractive fruit to lure birds, pass undigested through their

intestinal tracts and be voided miles away.

The ramifications of this biological invention were endless. Plants traveled as they had

never traveled before. They got into strange environments heretofore never entered by

the old spore plants or stiff pine cone-seed plants. The well-fed, carefully cherished little

embryos raised their heads everywhere. Many of the older plants with more primitive

reproductive mechanisms began to fade away under this unequal contest. They

contracted their range into secluded environments. Some, like the giant redwoods,

lingered on as relics; many vanished entirely.

The world of the giants was a dying world. These fantastic little seeds skipping and

hopping and flying about the woods and valleys brought with them an amazing

adaptability. If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound

us. The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world had changed into something that glowed

here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard-of fruits and little intricately

carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way

that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leafcrunching

days of the dinosaurs.

That food came from three sources, all produced by the reproductive system of the

flowering plants. There were the tantalizing nectars and pollen intended to draw insects

for pollenizing purposes, and which are responsible also for that wonderful jeweled

creation, the hummingbird. There were the juicy and enticing fruits to attract larger

animals, and in which tough-coated seeds were concealed, as in the tomato, for

example. Then, as if this were not enough, there was the food in the actual seed itself,

the food intended to nourish the embryo. All over the world, like hot corn in a popper,

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these incredible elaborations of the flowering plants kept exploding. In a movement

that was almost instantaneous, geologically speaking, the angiosperms had taken over

the world. Grass was beginning to cover the bare earth until, today, there are over six

thousand species. All kinds of vines and bushes squirmed and writhed under new trees

with flying seeds.

The explosion was having its effect on animal life also. Specialized groups of insects

were arising to feed on the new sources of food and, incidentally and unknowingly, to

pollinate the plant. The flowers bloomed and bloomed in ever larger and more

spectacular varieties. Some were pale unearthly night flowers intended to lure moths in

the evening twilight, some among the orchids even took the shape of female spiders in

order to attract wandering males, some flamed redly in the light of noon or twinkled

modestly in the meadow grasses. Intricate mechanisms splashed pollen on the breasts

of hummingbirds, or stamped it on the bellies of black, grumbling bees droning

assiduously from blossom to blossom. Honey ran, insects multiplied, and even the

descendants of that toothed and ancient lizard-bird had become strangely altered.

Equipped with prodding beaks instead of biting teeth they pecked the seeds and

gobbled the insects that were really converted nectar.

Across the planet grasslands were now spreading. A slow continental upthrust which

had been a part of the early Age of Flowers had cooled the world’s climates. The

stalking reptiles and the leather-winged black imps of the seashore cliffs had vanished.

Only birds roamed the air now, hot-blooded and high-speed metabolic machines.

The mammals, too, had survived and were venturing into new domains, staring about

perhaps a bit bewildered at their sudden eminence now that the thunder lizards were

gone. Many of them, beginning as small browsers upon leaves in the forest, began to

venture out upon this new sunlit world of the grass. Grass has a high silica content and

demands a new type of very tough and resistant tooth enamel, but the seeds taken

incidentally in the cropping of the grass are highly nutritious. A new world had opened

out for the warm-blooded mammals. Great herbivores like the mammoths, horses and

bisons appeared. Skulking about them had arisen savage flesh-feeding carnivores like

the now extinct dire wolves and the saber-toothed tiger.

Flesh eaters though these creatures were, they were being sustained on nutritious

grasses one step removed. Their fierce energy was being maintained on a high, effective

level, through hot days and frosty nights, by the concentrated energy of the

angiosperms. That energy, thirty per cent or more of the weight of the entire plant

among some of the cereal grasses, was being accumulated and concentrated in the rich

proteins and fats of the enormous game herds of the grasslands.

On the edge of the forest, a strange, old-fashioned animal still hesitated. His body was

the body of a tree dweller, and though tough and knotty by human standards, he was,

in terms of that world into which he gazed, a weakling. His teeth, though strong for

chewing on the tough fruits of the forest, or for crunching an occasional unwary bird

caught with his prehensile hands, were not the tearing sabers of the great cats. He had a

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passion for lifting himself up to see about, in his restless, roving curiosity. He would

run a little stiffly and uncertainly, perhaps, on his hind legs, but only in those rare

moments when he ventured out upon the ground. All this was the legacy of his

climbing days; he had a hand with flexible fingers and no fine specialized hoofs upon

which to gallop like the wind.

If he had any idea of competing in that new world, he had better forget it; teeth or

hooves, he was much too late for either. He was a ne’er-do-well, an in-betweener.

Nature had not done well by him. It was as if she had hesitated and never quite made

up her mind. Perhaps as a consequence he had a malicious gleam in his eye, the gleam

of an outcast who has been left nothing and knows he is going to have to take what he

gets. One day a little band of these odd apes—for apes they were—shambled out upon

the grass; the human story had begun.

Apes were to become men, in the inscrutable wisdom of nature, because flowers had

produced seeds and fruits in such tremendous quantities that a new and totally

different store of energy had become available in concentrated form. Impressive as the

slow-moving, dim-brained dinosaurs had been, it is doubtful if their age had supported

anything like the diversity of life that now rioted across the planet or flashed in and out

among the trees. Down on the grass by a streamside, one of those apes with inquisitive

fingers turned over a stone and hefted it vaguely. The group clucked together in a

throaty tongue and moved off through the tall grass foraging for seeds and insects. The

one still held, sniffed, and hefted the stone he had found. He liked the feel of it in his

fingers. The attack on the animal world was about to begin.

If one could run the story of that first human group like a speeded-up motion picture

through a million years of time, one might see the stone in the hand change to the flint

ax and the torch. All that swarming grassland world with its giant bison and

trumpeting mammoths would go down in ruin to feed the insatiable and growing

numbers of a carnivore who, like the great cats before him, was taking his energy

indirectly from the grass. Later he found fire and it altered the tough meats and drained

their energy even faster into a stomach ill adapted for the ferocious turn man’s habits

had taken.

His limbs grew longer, he strode more purposefully over the grass. The stolen energy

that would take man across the continents would fail him at last. The great Ice Age

herds were destined to vanish. When they did so, another hand like the hand that

grasped the stone by the river long ago would pluck a handful of grass seed and hold it

contemplatively. In that moment, the golden towers of man, his swarming millions, his

turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries, would glimmer dimly there in

the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand. Without the gift of flowers

and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at

all, would be today unrecognizable. Archaeopteryx, the lizard-bird, might still be

snapping at beetles on a sequoia limb; man might still be a nocturnal insectivore

gnawing a roach in the dark. The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world

and made it ours.

 

[F, Calla & Luca]

Interesting. Sometimes I like to watch impatiens seed pods burst open. It is truly amazing what flower seeds can do.