Thoughts on mass extinctions and bees
Trolls, take note: No, this isn't a rant on the die-off of bees and other pollinators, so lower those flamethrowers and git.
In his book Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, Rowan Jacobsen points out that the critical phenomenon in the life of honeybees is the hive, i.e., the colony, not the individual -- and that if the colony, the superorganism comprising tens of thousands of closely related honeybees falls apart, the individual bees making it up will die, too if they can't somehow form another great colony, which is rare. And what keeps the hive alive and functioning optimally is communication, the continuous exchange of information among the hive's members that is necessary to everything that honeybees must do, from tending new-laid eggs and the larval bees from which those eggs hatch to keeping the hive clean, defending the hive from threats of any kind, going out to collect pollen and bringing it back to the hive, turning the pollen into bee bread, honey, and royal jelly, feeding and tending the queen, and all the other things honeybees must do if the hive is to thrive and their lineages are to go forward into the future.
One phenomenon Jacobsen describes in Fruitless Fall are the large-scale patterns of behavior seen in a typical healthy beehive. If you open the top of a commercial beehive and look into it during the day, at first you see tens of thousands of bees frantically bustling about in what seems to be random motions, but as you continue to observe them and your brain takes in just what you're seeing, patterns begin to stand out, wavelike pulses of activity that are actually highly organized and carefully orchestrated by the bees as part of the necessary cycles of their lives. Their activity isn't random at all, but rather comprises a number of attractors, sets towards which the dynamical system that is the hive evolves over time. Points that get close enough to an attractor remain close even when they are slightly disturbed. Mathematically speaking, an attractor can be a point, a curve, a manifold, or even a complicated set with a fractal structure known as a strange attractor; describing the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems has been one of the achievements of chaos theory. In the case of the superorganism known as a honeybee hive, these attractors are associated with activities such as housecleaning, nursing and feeding the queen, her eggs, or the larva that hatch from those eggs, excursions from the hive to gather pollen, etc., and in a healthy hive they are very stable.
But in a sick hive or one on the verge of collapse, those attractors fade away or disappear because of a sudden catastrophic event as bees die off or abscond from the hive and fail to return, or both. Always, before those last, tragic events signalling the demise of the hive occur, the attractors that have described the activities of the bees, which had been robust and very stable in the past, become perturbed and distorted, then disrupted, mirroring growing distortion and disruption of communication among the hive's members. Ultimately that communication virtually ceases as the hive falls into a coma, then dies. Like the general systems failure and death of the body following growing brain-damage due to ingestion of poison or an overdose of narcotics, the hive dies as a result of the inability of its "neurons" -- the individual bees making it up -- to communicate optimally with one another.
Now, think of an ecosystem impacted by some catastrophic event, such as the impact of a large asteroid, or a gigantic flood basalt event.
Normally, the creatures that make up the organism are continuously exchange information with one another and with their environment -- not, generally speaking, in the form of consciously thought-out and linguistically framed information, but rather in the form of the materials they take from their environment and the creatures around them in the form of food, water, air, and radiant energy and genetic information from mates or commensal bacteria or viruses; and those they give back to the world in the form of the gases they exhale, the solid and liquid wastes they excrete, any venoms or poisons they emit, the energy they give off in the form of infrared, optical, and sonic energy, genetic information they pass along to descendants or to commensal microbes, and, if they aren't consumed by other creatures first, the materials of which their bodies are composed when they die. As long as the lines of communication among organisms and between them and their environment are robust and stable, the ecosystem remains healthy, and its member species thrive.
But the triggers that initiate mass extinctions -- bolide impacts, basalt flooding, do their mischief not only by directly killing off countless creatures right at the start, they do something else: they disrupt or simply obliterate the lines of communication among creatures that theretofore kept the ecosystem or, on the largest scales, the biosphere, healthy. As the lines of communication go down -- as creatures at the base of the food webs die off and those who feed on them begin to starve, as the atmosphere is filled with noxious gases and/or is stripped of oxygen and/or greenhouse gases, as habitats are destroyed and the creatures who lived in them die in the process or are sent out, homeless and bereft, to wander the world without a refuge, as watercourses are diverted away from their accustomed beds or are dried up and the land rendered arid or are filled with rampaging floods that overtop their banks and rage through the land, destroying as they go -- the health of the ecosystem, the biosphere, begins to falter, then to fail rapidly. And as it does, the attractors that had once characterized the flow of materials, energy, information, and behavior of everything in that system become grossly distorted, then disrupted, then obliterated as well:
"Each species on the Earth is like a tiny piece in [an animated, four-dimensional] jigsaw, interlocking with other species, and a tiny conducting part of the energy flowing through the living world. But what if species are also stacked together like a giant house of cards, each supporting other species in some small (or large) way so that if enough species are kicked out of place by their extinction, the entire house falls down? Did that happen at the end of the Paleozoic? Did enough species get killed off to bring down a sudden torrent of extinction, removing 90 percent of the Earth's creatures? And how far from that cliff are we today?" [Italicized text mine, not Dr. Ward's, to indicate that life has temporal aspects, rhythms and cycles and ongoing changes that are part of its healthy flow. -- Yael Dragwyla]
-- Peter D. Ward, Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions, p. 82
Indeed. When the lines of communication holding those jigsaw pieces together fall apart, the great puzzle itself becomes more and more distorted and nebulous, and finally ceases to be. Life is a matter of communication: the continuous, intricately rhythmic exchanges of materials and energy with one another and ith their environment among the creatures comprising ecosystems and, ultimately, the biosphere in the long, long dance that is life on Earth. When that communication is badly disrupted by any sort of catastrophic event, the worse the disruption, the greater the die-off of species both initially and in the years that follow, because that communication is absolutely essential to maintenance of robust, healthy any ecosystem. And it takes time to restore those lines of communication -- often long reaches of time, perhaps as much as a hundred million years in some cases. Until those lines of communication are restored in some form or another, the world never fully recovers from the disaster. And the attractors, the patterns that emerge over time from the behavior and evolution of organisms, as evidenced in the record of the rocks, make it clear that over time, the progressive disruption of the rhythmic, ongoing communication that sustains ecosystems that results from the initial catastrophe that set it off is proportional to the severity and duration of a mass extinction. Likewise, the rapidity of the gradual healing of those ecological lines of communication is proportional to the time it takes for that healing to become complete, while the nature of that healing mirrors the types of species that constitute the restored biosphere and their differences from the lifeforms that went before them.
Just as attractors, seen in any dynamic system, whether biological or otherwise in nature, can be quantified, interpreted, and understood mathematically, so can the systems in which they are seen, and the components making up those systems. Thus the mathematics of attractors comprises one more tool for analysis of ecosystems past and present, their viability, any damage in them from outside events, and their potential for healing from that damage that can be used to good advantage by biological scientists, especially ecologists and paleobiologists.
In his book Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, Rowan Jacobsen points out that the critical phenomenon in the life of honeybees is the hive, i.e., the colony, not the individual -- and that if the colony, the superorganism comprising tens of thousands of closely related honeybees falls apart, the individual bees making it up will die, too if they can't somehow form another great colony, which is rare. And what keeps the hive alive and functioning optimally is communication, the continuous exchange of information among the hive's members that is necessary to everything that honeybees must do, from tending new-laid eggs and the larval bees from which those eggs hatch to keeping the hive clean, defending the hive from threats of any kind, going out to collect pollen and bringing it back to the hive, turning the pollen into bee bread, honey, and royal jelly, feeding and tending the queen, and all the other things honeybees must do if the hive is to thrive and their lineages are to go forward into the future.
One phenomenon Jacobsen describes in Fruitless Fall are the large-scale patterns of behavior seen in a typical healthy beehive. If you open the top of a commercial beehive and look into it during the day, at first you see tens of thousands of bees frantically bustling about in what seems to be random motions, but as you continue to observe them and your brain takes in just what you're seeing, patterns begin to stand out, wavelike pulses of activity that are actually highly organized and carefully orchestrated by the bees as part of the necessary cycles of their lives. Their activity isn't random at all, but rather comprises a number of attractors, sets towards which the dynamical system that is the hive evolves over time. Points that get close enough to an attractor remain close even when they are slightly disturbed. Mathematically speaking, an attractor can be a point, a curve, a manifold, or even a complicated set with a fractal structure known as a strange attractor; describing the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems has been one of the achievements of chaos theory. In the case of the superorganism known as a honeybee hive, these attractors are associated with activities such as housecleaning, nursing and feeding the queen, her eggs, or the larva that hatch from those eggs, excursions from the hive to gather pollen, etc., and in a healthy hive they are very stable.
But in a sick hive or one on the verge of collapse, those attractors fade away or disappear because of a sudden catastrophic event as bees die off or abscond from the hive and fail to return, or both. Always, before those last, tragic events signalling the demise of the hive occur, the attractors that have described the activities of the bees, which had been robust and very stable in the past, become perturbed and distorted, then disrupted, mirroring growing distortion and disruption of communication among the hive's members. Ultimately that communication virtually ceases as the hive falls into a coma, then dies. Like the general systems failure and death of the body following growing brain-damage due to ingestion of poison or an overdose of narcotics, the hive dies as a result of the inability of its "neurons" -- the individual bees making it up -- to communicate optimally with one another.
Now, think of an ecosystem impacted by some catastrophic event, such as the impact of a large asteroid, or a gigantic flood basalt event.
Normally, the creatures that make up the organism are continuously exchange information with one another and with their environment -- not, generally speaking, in the form of consciously thought-out and linguistically framed information, but rather in the form of the materials they take from their environment and the creatures around them in the form of food, water, air, and radiant energy and genetic information from mates or commensal bacteria or viruses; and those they give back to the world in the form of the gases they exhale, the solid and liquid wastes they excrete, any venoms or poisons they emit, the energy they give off in the form of infrared, optical, and sonic energy, genetic information they pass along to descendants or to commensal microbes, and, if they aren't consumed by other creatures first, the materials of which their bodies are composed when they die. As long as the lines of communication among organisms and between them and their environment are robust and stable, the ecosystem remains healthy, and its member species thrive.
But the triggers that initiate mass extinctions -- bolide impacts, basalt flooding, do their mischief not only by directly killing off countless creatures right at the start, they do something else: they disrupt or simply obliterate the lines of communication among creatures that theretofore kept the ecosystem or, on the largest scales, the biosphere, healthy. As the lines of communication go down -- as creatures at the base of the food webs die off and those who feed on them begin to starve, as the atmosphere is filled with noxious gases and/or is stripped of oxygen and/or greenhouse gases, as habitats are destroyed and the creatures who lived in them die in the process or are sent out, homeless and bereft, to wander the world without a refuge, as watercourses are diverted away from their accustomed beds or are dried up and the land rendered arid or are filled with rampaging floods that overtop their banks and rage through the land, destroying as they go -- the health of the ecosystem, the biosphere, begins to falter, then to fail rapidly. And as it does, the attractors that had once characterized the flow of materials, energy, information, and behavior of everything in that system become grossly distorted, then disrupted, then obliterated as well:
"Each species on the Earth is like a tiny piece in [an animated, four-dimensional] jigsaw, interlocking with other species, and a tiny conducting part of the energy flowing through the living world. But what if species are also stacked together like a giant house of cards, each supporting other species in some small (or large) way so that if enough species are kicked out of place by their extinction, the entire house falls down? Did that happen at the end of the Paleozoic? Did enough species get killed off to bring down a sudden torrent of extinction, removing 90 percent of the Earth's creatures? And how far from that cliff are we today?" [Italicized text mine, not Dr. Ward's, to indicate that life has temporal aspects, rhythms and cycles and ongoing changes that are part of its healthy flow. -- Yael Dragwyla]
-- Peter D. Ward, Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions, p. 82
Indeed. When the lines of communication holding those jigsaw pieces together fall apart, the great puzzle itself becomes more and more distorted and nebulous, and finally ceases to be. Life is a matter of communication: the continuous, intricately rhythmic exchanges of materials and energy with one another and ith their environment among the creatures comprising ecosystems and, ultimately, the biosphere in the long, long dance that is life on Earth. When that communication is badly disrupted by any sort of catastrophic event, the worse the disruption, the greater the die-off of species both initially and in the years that follow, because that communication is absolutely essential to maintenance of robust, healthy any ecosystem. And it takes time to restore those lines of communication -- often long reaches of time, perhaps as much as a hundred million years in some cases. Until those lines of communication are restored in some form or another, the world never fully recovers from the disaster. And the attractors, the patterns that emerge over time from the behavior and evolution of organisms, as evidenced in the record of the rocks, make it clear that over time, the progressive disruption of the rhythmic, ongoing communication that sustains ecosystems that results from the initial catastrophe that set it off is proportional to the severity and duration of a mass extinction. Likewise, the rapidity of the gradual healing of those ecological lines of communication is proportional to the time it takes for that healing to become complete, while the nature of that healing mirrors the types of species that constitute the restored biosphere and their differences from the lifeforms that went before them.
Just as attractors, seen in any dynamic system, whether biological or otherwise in nature, can be quantified, interpreted, and understood mathematically, so can the systems in which they are seen, and the components making up those systems. Thus the mathematics of attractors comprises one more tool for analysis of ecosystems past and present, their viability, any damage in them from outside events, and their potential for healing from that damage that can be used to good advantage by biological scientists, especially ecologists and paleobiologists.