Before the carbon rush

The Economist's Natasha Loder has a post on her blog worth reading about the speculators getting preemptively involved in carbon forest credits in Papua New Guinea. A former Australian horse trader and cock-fighting impresario, it seems, is going around the place "signing up landowners for big carbon trading deals in advance of negotiations to trade forest carbon as offsets between countries".

There's something Conradian about this story; the old one of white folks going into the jungle to try and get rich, making up the rules as they go along. Is this how carbon trading is going to work?

Although not just white folks, apparently. Natasha is commenting on a story by the AP's Ilya Gridneff. I can't find the original elsewhere online (it's reproduced on her post), but a google reveals he's all over this kind of stuff in PNG. Sample first par: "A nephew of Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Michael Somare is accused of pressuring remote villagers to sign away their land for carbon deals despite there being no carbon trade laws in place."

Thoughts on hearing the 7 o'clock news

A long time ago, BBC Radio 1 broadcast a documentary about Kraftwerk. The thing I remember most clearly from it was a story about how, when they heard 'Billie Jean', the band was thrown into crisis, believing that the song was such a leap forward that there was nowhere for them left to go.

Much later, I saw a clip of Jackson performing the same song at the Motown 25th Anniversay concert, and thought 'Well, pop music should have given up at that point, because nothing is ever going to top that.'



This morning, there were no tracks from 'Off the Wall' in the clips played on the Today programme (not big MJ fans, I guess), so we put the cd on. Anyone who doesn't like this record doesn't like happiness. Let us single out for praise 'Rock With You': that rare thing, a brilliant mid-tempo pop song, totally sophisticated and totally disco at the same time. You can imagine Smokey Robinson or Ella Fitzgerald singing it, and that's the company he deserves to be remembered alongside.

I give in

OK, so I've no desire to read anyone else's tweets, but I've been thinking that it's a good medium for saying 'hey, check this paper out', which is often all I want to do. So I've set up a feed, and put that last post on it. I think it's called @gentraso. We'll see if it's as colossal a waste of time as I've always believed.

9 July update. That really was a very graceless post, wasn't it? On poking around twitter, I can see that there's a some interesting stuff, and I can see how it's potentially addictive. I've still not signed up to follow anyone yet, though (though I may). And I'm still not sure where all the time for this stuff comes from.

Pigeons

They don't know much about art.
But they can learn what you like.

Seeds of an edible city architecture

I've got a piece in today's Nature looking at recent efforts to integrate plants and buildings to help produce food and adapt to climate change.

It's loosely pegged to three recently stopped or upcoming exhibitions: London Yields at the Building Centre; Vertical Gardens at Exit Art, New York (both finished); and Radical Nature at the Barbican, London (starting on Sat 19th).

Best. Title. Ever.

Nothing to do with ecology etc., but I couldn't resist saluting Peter Leeson for calling his book on the economics of piracy 'The Invisible Hook'.

I bet no other blog spots this

So, the avian gunge scraped out of the engine of the US airways flight that ditched in the Hudson river this January was (Canada) goose rillettes. Ho hum.

More exciting is this piece of nominative determinism (from the press release)...

“It’s important to not only know what species of birds are involved in collisions, but to also understand the role that migration plays in the larger picture,” said Carla Dove, a coauthor and program director at Smithsonian’s Feather Identification Laboratory.

Hear my voice

My south-London tones are getting an outing on US radio tomorrow, on New Hampshire Public Radio's Word of Mouth, from 12 noon EST. I'll be talking spite.

5 June Update. Here's what I said.

My journalistic heroes...

...are the guys who couldn't be arsed to follow up on Watergate. That's what I call work/life balance.

Why is it easier to get away with keeping a live leopard than wearing a dead one?

I can see why people take drugs, despite their illegality. Drugs get you high. But I find it a lot harder to understand the massive illegal trade in live animals. I guess a pet leopard or monitor lizard is a status symbol, but not one that's easy to flaunt, and what kind of a dick wants one in the first place?

That's what I thought when I read the excellent New Yorker piece ($) from April about the havoc being wreaked by escaped exotic pets in Florida.

The answer must be partly because the chances of getting caught are minimal and the punishments footling. That's unlikely to change (and besides, drugs policy shows how ineffective prohibition is). What we need instead is an effort to change norms. The animal rights movement has had some success in demonizing the wearing of fur (this train of thought was prompted when I saw the piece in today's Guardian about PETA's shock tactics, which I haven't read, because life's a bit on the short side), likewise the campaign against conflict diamonds. The conservation movement - so polite, reasonable and ineffectual compared with those who campaign for the welfare of captive animals - needs to do the same for exotic pets.

Of course, you wear a fur coat in public. Which brings me back to pondering the point of a status symbol you need to hide, and makes me wonder and despair at what in human nature (including mine) delights in ownership for its own sake.

More research is needed

Apparently, you need to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.

Turns out you also need to examine a lot of piles of elephant dung before you find a frog. 48.33, to be precise.

Now, if someone could be a bit more quantitative about the frog/prince ratio, we could work out princes per pile of elephant dung.

Nascence man

Having been away from my computer, this is now a week old. But I've written a feature for Nature about Mike Russell's work on the origin of life, especially his efforts to recreate the key moment in the lab.

No animals, no trees

A couple of recent papers show how seed dispersal is harmed when forest vertebrates disappear - it's not just bees and microbes that provide ecosystem services, we need the big stuff too.

In Biotropica, Stephen Blake of the WCS and colleagues look at seeds in the dung of forest elephants in the Congo. There are a lot:

Analysis of 855 elephant dung piles suggested that forest elephants disperse more intact seeds than any other species or genus of large vertebrate in African forests, while GPS telemetry data showed that forest elephants regularly disperse seeds over unprecedented distances compared to other dispersers. ... Our results suggest that the loss of forest elephants (and other large-bodied dispersers) may lead to a wave of recruitment failure among animal-dispersed tree species, and favor regeneration of the species-poor abiotically dispersed guild of trees.

And in Ecological Applications a US/Thai team look at the impact of bushmeat hunting on the dispersal of the hog plum, Choerospondias axillaris which, as the name suggests needs mammals (although not just pigs) to move it about. The clue is in the paper's title 'Bushmeat poaching reduces the seed dispersal and population growth rate of a mammal-dispersed tree.' "Extinction of C. axillaris is a real possibility, but may take many decades," they add. "Recent and ongoing extirpations of vertebrates in many tropical forests could be creating an extinction debt for zoochorous trees whose vulnerability is belied by their current abundance."

In Guanacaste, Costa Rica, they (especially Dan Janzen) got round this problem by introducing cattle, replacing the large herbivores that had gone extinct in prehistory. The trees thrived as a result. But Guanacaste is a dry forest. To paraphrase the music hall song about the horse and the lighthouse, I imagine it'd be harder to keep a cow in a jungle.

Cruel to be kind

Why are people such *****? I've got a feature in this week's New Scientist looking into it.

Blood feuding and antagonistic pleiotropy

This week, I wrote a story for Nature’s online news about a PNAS paper on the link between violence and reproductive success in the Waorani, an Amazonian tribe. The basic message is that men who went on more blood-feud-motivated raids had fewer children surviving to adulthood. This is the opposite result to that found by Napoleon Chagnon’s studies of the Yanomano, where men who had killed in raids had more wives and children.

Chagnon’s work and methods have been controversial, and the debate around all that, and what this study says about the possible link between aggression, reproduction and natural selection is too complicated to go into here.

Instead I want to offer up some quarter-baked speculation on a slightly different topic. The paper suggests that one reason that Waorani violence seems counterproductive is that, unlike the Yanomano (and apparently other societies where blood feuding goes on), there’s no gap between rounds of violence. The Yanomano, says the paper, wait a generation between taking up the cudgels, during which time the attacks are sorcery-based. The Waorani were always at it.

This long delay reminded me of what’s called antagonistic pleiotropy. This is the idea that organisms age because natural selection can favour a gene that has a selective benefit in one’s youth but is detrimental later on — i.e., the bad stuff kicks in after you’ve bred and evolution has stopped caring about you. Could something similar, I wondered, allow delayed blood-feuding to persist, or even confer a benefit to such behaviour in some circumstances?

I can imagine how the initial aggressor might benefit. You prove your toughness in a handicap-principle kind of way, and/or reduce the competition, and then get to enjoy the benefits for a couple of decades. But what does he who waits get out of it? Maybe it reduces the cost that continual feuding imposes on everyone — apparently the Waorani were on their way to wiping themselves out. Or maybe the delay has kin-selection benefits — if the feud passes down the generations, maybe the next cohort gets to prove its toughness, reap the benefits etc.

I thought the analogy was interesting, but I don’t know if there’s any validity to this comparison, and I’m not saying blood feuding is, like, cool. And besides, these days we have libel lawyers to settle this sort of thing. Who, I suppose, are the sorcerers de nos jours.