posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

All things

I had this lined up as part of a draft for Rocktalk, but with only a week left at the j-o-b, I’ll use it here:

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent …. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.

The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men [Vol. 4] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882., Emerson, Edward Waldo, 1844-1930.
posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

interspecies communications

Yet another example of cooperation between kingdoms of life is found on acacia trees. These trees sometimes develop galls on their bark: woody chambers that are ideal homes for certain ants. The ants colonize the galls, and when a browsing giraffe approaches the tree to gorge on its tender leaves, the tenant invertebrates rush to the scene to defend their landlord, squirting acid at the giraffe until it is discouraged.

Interspecies communication is an integral feature of life on Earth and has been around for Billions of years. All these mutualistic symbioses have one thing in common: They are held together by signals. A growing fungus will send out special feelers called hyphae and produce mucus to sense the signaling molecules on potential algae teammates, in order to size them up with a view to making a lichen together. The honeyguide bird sings a special song to the honey badger to get its attention, then flies ahead to lead it to the beehive. A foraging shrimp will keep one of its long antennae resting on its goby pal’s tail so that if the eagle-eyed fish spots danger, it will signal to its myopic friend by waggling its tail and both will scuttle to safety. An acacia tree will release chemical signals (hormones) that alert its resident ants to a munching herbivore and tell them where to come to help. Living things survive by signaling to other life-forms, within and across the species boundaries. This includes both whales and humans.

Mustill, Tom. How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication. London, UK: William Collins, 2022.

Tom authored an easy read across a relevant subject: the whole effort initiated after a humpback whale breached over the sea-kayak he was whale-watching from: the energized and auspicious start of a personal search.

I kept getting the feeling that much of the theoretical and applied research—as articulated by the scientists he interviews—is (still!) mired in the most mechanistic of physical worlds, though. Oblivious of the concept that sound—in its spectral complexity—is merely one of a plenitude of energy-exchange, energy-transmission pathways. This, between and among the plenitude of species (who are themselves merely varying configurations of life-energy flow).

The flows are there, we are immersed and part of them. An individual of a species will use the embodied pathways of energy expression available to it. Transmission, signals. Others of its species have resonant energy receptors, communication; other species sometimes have overlapping receptors as well:

“Did you hear that? Ugh, the smell!”

“I did, that was Claude Shannon farting!”