Ad Reinhardt painting at the Museum of Modern Art, 1964. Photos by Burt Glinn.
This is far from new. If we band together we can stop evictions.
This is far from new.
If we band together we
can stop evictions.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Should we be troubled by the fact that, until efforts were made recently to reintroduce parrots to Martinique, there were no endemic species left on the island? How much should we grieve for the Cuban Red Macaw? Should we mourn the Caribbean monk seal? […] Hostages to the economic demands of metropolitan centers not always aware of the environmental damage caused by their policies […], the islands of the Caribbean have experienced successive waves of ecological assault chronicled in fiction and nonfiction alike through countless narratives of extinction. […] [I]n June 2008 the monk seal finally joined the growing list of victims of ecological changes unleashed by colonialism and postcolonial tourism development in the Caribbean basin. […] The Caribbean is (alas!) one of the world’s hotspots […] [w]ith around 7,000 species of plants and 160 bird species found nowhere else in the world […]. The Caribbean region’s subordinate entry into global mercantilism in the sixteenth century continues to haunt us. […] The history of fauna extinctions as recorded in the literature of the Caribbean region chronicles the impact of […] “slow violence […].“
—–
Barbados, one of the earliest plantation settlements in the Caribbean, is perhaps the best example of the impact of habitat collapse in the region in the first centuries of the European conquest. Colonized by English Royalists sent “beyond the sea” by a victorious Oliver Cromwell in the early seventeenth century, it was completely deforested in a little over twenty years as planters submitted nearly 80 percent of the landmass to sugar cultivation – a fate that the small colony would quickly share with neighboring islands. As Shawn Miller explains in An Environmental History of Latin America:
Scores of plants, mammals, reptiles, and birds were unique to each island, an an uncounted number of species, possibly ranging in the thousands, without their forest habitats, disappeared forever without […] notice. On Barbados, a few deletions were noted: the palmito palm, the mastic tree, the wood pigeon, a few species of conures, the yellow-headed macaw, and one variety of hummingbird – all vanished. No monkey species survived sugar’s colonization, and of the 529 noncultivated species of plants found on Barbados today, only 11 percent are native to the island.
—–
Throughout the Caribbean, deforestation to clear the land for sugar plantations led to the loss of a variety of unusual native rodents like the hutia and shrew-like insectivores, many of them ancient species that have now not been seen for centuries. The Martinican Amazon parrot became
extinct due to habitat loss as the island was cleared for agriculture
in the seventeenth century; it has not been recorded since 1722. In
1699, Pere Labat […] described a large population of small parrots living on Guadalupe, named Arantiga labati […], of which no specimens have been recorded since the mid-eighteenth century. Fifteen mammals have become extinct in Hispaniola […] due to the severe deforestation of Haiti. Jamaica was home to a monkey, the Xenothrix mcgregori, lost when its forest habitat was cut by European colonists. It died out in the 1750s. The Cuban Red Macaw was
reasonably common around 1800 in Cuba. Human encroachment in its
habitats increased dramatically in the early nineteenth century, when
Cuba intensified its sugar production to meet the demand created by the
collapse of the St. Domingue sugar mills after the Haitian Revolution.
[…] The last one is believed to have been shot in 1864 at La Vega in
the vicinity of the Cienaga de Zapata swamp […]. Nine species of Antillean iguanas and snakes became extinct after
Europeans introduced mongoose and rats to protect sugar cane workers in
the nineteenth century, joining the uncounted species that have
disappeared due to the introduction of […] species. […] In 2008, the Caribbean monk seal (Monachus tropicalis …) – the only
subtropical seal native to the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico –
was declared officially extinct […].
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The concern for the impact of biodiversity loss in
writings about the Caribbean can be found in some of the earliest
literary and proto-literary texts written about the region. […]
Aphra Behn, in her novel Oroonoko, published in 1688, already pondered what the increasingly intense clearing of the Caribbean forests would mean for the Indigenous peoples and animals relegated to the diminishing woods. Behn’s sojourn in Suriname in 1653 coincided with what has been called “The Great Clearing,” the period between 1650 and 1665, marked by devastating deforestation throughout the British and French Caribbean […] particularly for refining the sugar. […] At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Pere Labat […] written at a time of fast plantation development in Martinique and Guadalupe, writes of his concerns with the loss of biodiversity. In Guadalupe he had encountered the diablotin, an ungainly bird the size of a pullet that lived in “a hole in the mountains, like rabbits.” […] Their trajectory as a species had already been inexorably derailed by colonial agricultural expansion […].
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Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. “Extinctions: Chronicles of Vanishing Fauna in the Colonial and Postcolonial Caribbean.” 2014.
Windcatchers are fascinating.
Also called wind towers and wind scoops, windcatchers have been used in North Africa and the Middle East for thousands of years to provide natural ventilation & passive cooling. They fell out of popularity after the introduction of HVAC systems, but are now experiencing a revival because they’re so practical and cost-effective. Here’s how they work:
Not only are they an engineering masterpiece–they’re gorgeous
Windcatchers rely on local weather instead of the electric grid, making them affordable, reliable, and eco-friendly. they’re a terrific example of how vernacular and traditional architecture is often more suited to its environment–and more livable–than modern polite architecture.
a couple months ago someone sent me an ask asking if I’d ever heard of Boquila trifoliolata and I was like ‘no way. this can’t be real’ and i looked it up and it was and I forgot about it until just now when my supervisor and I got sidetracked and I looked it up again to prove to her that it’s real and found out that not only does this plant vaguely mimic the leaves of whatever plant it’s vining on, it does it when it climbs on fake plants too so any theories about how it does it that include gene transfer or chemicals or touching it in any way are just out the window and those were like, the only theories the original researchers had about how it might be doing it. so anyway I am screaming and crying and whatnot
The more you read the better this gets – from Krulwich, Nat Geo 2016:
Boquila feels more like a cuttlefish or an octopus; it can morph into at least eight basic shapes. When it glides up a bush or tree that it’s never encountered before, it can still mimic what’s near. And that’s the wildest part: It doesn’t have to touch what it copies. It only has to be nearby. Most mimicry in the animal kingdom involves physical contact. But this plant can hang—literally hang—alongside a host tree, with empty space between it and its model, and, with no eyes, nose, mouth, or brain, it can “see” its neighbor and copy what it has “seen.”
(Artifical plant modeling & c. discussed in White & Yamashita, Plant Signaling & Behavior,
https://doi.org/10.1080/15592324.2021.1977530)
Don’t like this at all! Thank you!!
One theory from that above White & Yamashita paper is that Boquila does this using plant ocelli—a very basic type of eye! If you’re interested in a brief infodump about ocelli: Many animals have ocelli, like jellyfish and insects. Here’s a picture of a wasp head—you can see its two main eyes to the side, and those three dots in the middle are ocelli.
(Photo cred: Assafn, Wikipedia)
These ocelli don’t form sharp images, but instead probably detect light and shadow for sleep patterns, directionality, flight stability, etc.
Some reptiles and amphibians also have a light-sensitive third eye called a parietal or pineal eye! It’s similarly right on top of their heads. Again, they’re not forming complex images, but instead use general light information to regulate other things. It’s also why even tame reptiles may bolt if you reach at them from directly overhead, out of range of their normal eyes—that third eye sees an incoming shadow and goes HAWK, RUN.
So with that in mind, plant ocelli…Basically they think the upper epidermal cells have evolved to have a particular convex dome shape that focuses light. I don’t know what proportion of cells are ocelli, if it’s just some or all, but basically the leaf itself IS the “eye”.
Plant ocelli were first proposed over a century ago but they haven’t been well studied since then. Cyanobacteria (a photosynthetic bacteria) focus light. Arabidopsis thaliana has been documented to recognize other Arabidopsis plants…basically when competing for resources, if the Arabidopsis recognizes it’s competing with other Arabidopsis plants, they’ll cooperate and move leaves so that they don’t shade each other, ensuring each plant has access to nutrients. But if the competing plant isn’t Arabidopsis, screw ‘em, they’ll shade it. Crepy & Casal narrowed this down to a light-based response, not just chemical identification, so it’s possible Arabidopsis is visually identifying friend from foe. At any rate, that’s about the extent of plant ocelli research that I was able to find. So this Boquila thing is cool and weird.
What we don’t yet know is how precisely Boquila is seeing the world. Boquila is clearly getting some level of resolution in order to be able to copy shape, size, AND color. Unlike an insect’s 2-3 ocelli, it has tons, so even crude data over a lot of inputs might lead to a pretty good picture. The paper also says the mimicry gets more accurate over time, so there appears to be some learning involved. I would also love to know if it has some equivalent of depth perception! If the target plant is near vs. far, does Boquila produce the same appropriately sized mimic leaf? Does it adjust? They’re going to keep studying it so hopefully we have some answers in a few years!
Anyway here’s a picture of the variation of Boquila mimic leaves.
(Photo cred: Gianoli figure)
👁 🌱 👁
fatehbaz