What I'm Reading

WEEDS

What do dandelion, jellyfish, and coyotes have in common?

You can definitely eat the 1^st two in the list. Dandelions, jellyfish, and coyotes belong to different living groups: plant, fish, mammal and, while adaptable, do have some specific environmental requirements (water, for instance).  All three can be annoying, irritating, even dangerous . And, for my purposes, all three are prime examples of weed species – invasive, prolific, and hard to stop once they get going. Dandelions, jellyfish, and coyotes are all weeds.

One of the themes running through this year’s 2011 The Best American Science and Nature Writing collection: how humankind has successfully destroyed numerous species of living things mostly by destroying their habitats and how, in some cases (the BP oil spill, fracking), threatens to destroy human habitat as well.

“The planet of weeds,” as David Quammen describes it,” is an impoverished place in its abundance because it heralds the end of diversity. And it is likely our inexorable future.”

Here’s a little bit about the jellyfish from “The New King of the Sea” by Abigail Tucker.

Tucker starts by describing an abrupt total power outage one night in 1999 on the Philippine island of Luzon, home to 40 million people. Was there an immense storm? A military strike? No, it was a jellyfish. Or, rather, as Tucker writes, “Some fifty dump trucks’ worth had been sucked into the cooling pipes of a coal-fired power plant, causing a cascading power failure.”

Scientists don’t understand why jellyfish are proliferating so rapidly and congregating in such large numbers; but it’s happening around the world. The jellyfish have ‘swarmed’ into huge masses and caused not only the collapse of infrastructure (and, how about the possibility of nuclear power plants being compromised?), pain and even death to people inadvertently caught in their midst, but the cascading loss of species who rely on the same food source (plankton) that they decimate.

The conditions that lead to jellyfish flourishing are predicted to increase. Jellyfish can live and breed under extremes: in highly acidic water, in dead zones in the sea poisoned by fertilizer runoff, and they love the warmest of temperatures (global warming: yes!!). They appreciate human depletion of many of their predators by overfishing and, in turn, their increasing densities push out other species that compete for the same food.

Now, the coyote.

Christopher Ketcham in “New Dog in Town” introduces the coyote as the survivor of the great Pleistocene die-off twelve thousand years ago. All the giant predators suddenly disappeared in a mass extinction, the causes of which are still uncertain; the coyote’s distant relative Canis latrans survived. The gray wolf, a sort of cousin, came over later from Asia, and became an immediate competitor.

Differences between coyote and wolf have favored the former. As humans settled more and more wilderness, pushing their way throughout the continent, coyotes have also spread with amazing speed and numbers. “The coyote is the most successful colonizing mammal in recent history,” says Justina Ray, an ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Coyotes have succeeded where the wolf has faltered because the coyote pack structure is more flexible than that of the wolf, coyotes are fine living in open spaces, will eat almost anything, and – most significantly – when coyotes are killed off in an area, they simply produce bigger litters until the numbers are up again.

Ketcham reflects about the coyote, the ‘ghost dog’, as the Trickster in American Indian mythology. “Where is Trickster? We need him. The hominids are screwing up and don't have a plan to fix things. We've got global warming and rising seas and peak oil and fish dying off and deserts spreading....The coyote survived the great Pleistocene extinction and may very well survive the present one...One wonders whether, before it is all through, Homo sapiens might be among the deceased.”