Category: Biology

Autumn colours

There are exceptions to every rule, and sometimes exceptions to the exceptions. Conifers are an exception here, they stay green all year round. The exceptions to the exceptions include larch which shows autumn colour and loses its needles, swamp cypress, and the dawn redwood from China, three conifers with autumn colour.

Autumn colours at Westonbirt

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Image of the day – 205

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image whenever I can.

Click thumbnails to enlarge

One of our favourite places to visit, at any season of the year, is Westonbirt Arboretum. My Dad used to call it ‘the tree zoo’. It’s only a 30 minute drive along the route of the old Roman road from Cirencester towards Bath. This time of year the autumn colours are fabulous. The photo focuses on some Japanese maples, Acer palmatum. Acer palmatum is one one of the finest species with cultivars in a rich variety of reds, oranges and yellows. Westonbirt has glades of mature specimens and an area of newer planting. Both were looking glorious when we visited.

Why do the leaves become so brightly coloured?

I was hoping you would ask. During the long months of summer the mature leaves on trees produce the green pigment, chlorophyll, that reflects green light and absorbs the rest. That absorbed light contains energy that the leaves use to break apart carbon dioxide from the air, attaching the carbon atoms to hydrogen from water and expelling the oxygen. In a set of chemical steps, the carbon and hydrogen are converted to sugars used as building blocks to build starch as a storage product, and cellulose as a structural material to make wood. That’s a grossly simplified version of the story, but fundamentally it is correct. In biochemistry and in botany the process is called photosynthsis.

The starch in wheat, potatoes, rice and other plants can be used by herbivores and omnivores (for example humans) as food. We combine the starch with oxygen to recreate water and carbon dioxide, releasing the energy we need to walk, breath, pump blood, and think. Human brains consume a lot of energy. This process, the reverse of photosynthesis is called respiration.

So taking plants and animals together there’s a closed loop involving water, carbon dioxide and energy. In addition to the starch we use for energy, the cellulose in wood can also be combined with oxygen to provide energy. That is called ‘fire’, it also releases water and carbon dioxide. So when you relax in January in front of a wood burning stove you’re using the sun’s heat and light trapped by trees perhaps a hundred years earlier! If you burn coal it was trapped millions of years earlier.

So that’s why plants have green leaves.

Autumn

As the days grow shorter and the weather grows colder, trapping energy by means of chlorophyll becomes less and less efficient. The leaves on trees become a liability, being battered by the wind and worth little to a tree until the weather warms again in the spring. But the leaves contain useful materials that can be recovered before the leaves are discarded. There are other coloured substances in leaves, mostly coloured yellow, and as the leaves stop producing green chlorophyll, these are unmasked and the leaves change appearance from greens to yellows.

Nutrients in the leaves are recovered and stored in the main bulk of the tree so that, when the leaves fall, these nutrients can be called upon in the spring when new leaves need to be made. Some of the bright reds and purples in autumn leaves are synthesised as the weeks go by, and they play a protective role enabling the tree to recover greater amounts of the nutrients. (Waste not, want not for trees!) Not all species of tree have this refinement, and in those that don’t the leaves remain yellow. Once the nutrients have been recovered a weak layer develops near the base of each leaf stalk, a point where wind action will cause the leaf to break away cleanly and fall to the ground. You can watch this happen on any windy autumn day, leaves fluttering down with every gust. In natural woodland the fallen leaves decay, acting as a rich mulch and forming compost where seeds can germinate and grow. In parks and gardens they are swept up for tidiness and composted in bins or heaps.

Our eyes can distinguish the changes in leaf colour and we enjoy the spectacle and joy of glorious autumn colour, then we endure winter but look forward to the lovely, fresh greens of spring.

Exceptions

Dawn redwood (Wikimedia)

There are exceptions to every rule, and sometimes exceptions to the exceptions. Conifers are an exception here, they stay green all year round. The exceptions to the exceptions include larch (Larix decidua) which shows autumn colour and loses its needles, swamp cypress (Taxodium distichum), and the dawn redwood from China (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), three conifers with autumn colour. Life is indeed a many-varied thing! The image shows a mature dawn redwood in autumn colour.

Closing thoughts

This website covers a range of topics, one of which is faith. I do my best to follow Jesus, not just in his teaching, but in how he lives and thinks and touches people’s hearts and minds. Sometimes people take faith and science as self excluding opposites; you can choose one or the other but you cannot have both.

In fact there are many, many scientists who also have a faith and many followers of Jesus or other teachers of faith (Mohammed, Buddha and more) who accept the process and findings of science. And we all use technology every day, all of it based on scientific foundations and principles. It makes no sense to accept the successful results while rejecting the reasoning behind them. I will throw away neither science nor faith. I need both, and I am far from alone in that. I recommend you explore both. Make a start on my Welcome page, nobody is excluded; all are welcome, all are invited.

See also:

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You might also like:

Cotinus in autumn
Large White
Butterfly dead or alive?
Evolution and behaviour

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Butterfly dead or alive?

Like all living things, butterflies have a metabolism in which interlinked biochemical processes are always active. On death these processes cease and the remains are consumed as food by other organisms or colonised by fungi and bacteria which digest and reprocess the remains.

Painted lady

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Image of the day – 200

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image whenever I can.

Click thumbnails to enlarge

This painted lady butterfly was feeding on nectar from flowers of Verbena Bonariensis at Sizergh Castle in the southern Lake District. There were bees working these flowers as well, mostly bumble bees but also honey bees. The entire garden was buzzing with activity.

Why dead or alive?

This is not as random a question as it might sound. I’m part of a group of around ten people who meet weekly to think together about following Jesus in meaningful ways. We’d been considering Ephesians 2:1-10 where Paul writes that we were dead but have been given new life. I chose a random animal, a simple butterfly and asked the question – ‘What is the difference between a dead butterfly and a living one? We didn’t go into the answer in any depth, so I thought I might consider the differences here instead. Let’s make a list and work our way down.

  • A dead butterfly cannot move, it just lies on the ground motionless unless someone picks it up, the ants carry it away as food, or the wind blows and sweeps it along the ground. A living butterfly generates usable energy by feeding on the sugars in nectar from a flower and uses that energy to flap its wings for flight. And a simple brain controls the direction of the flight while the butterfly uses sight and smell to home in on useful flowers to collect more sugars. Being capable of directed movement is a key difference between death and life.
  • Appearance is another difference; a living butterfly has beautifully coloured wings. A recently deceased butterfly might look just the same for a short time, but those lovely wings will lose their lustre as the butterfly dries out. The colourful patterns will fade, dust and cobwebs will contaminate the surfaces. This is typical for all creatures, while they live they maintain and clean themselves, but after death these processes stop.
  • Ability to sense danger. When a butterfly is alive, if it’s resting in the sushine on a leaf or a flower and your shadow passes over it, it will launch itself into the air and fly away. The butterfly can’t distinguish between you and a predator (like a bird or a dragonfly) so it gets out of the way just in case.
  • Butterflies, like all lifeforms, are capable of reproduction. Adult butterflies mate, the males fertilise the female’s eggs, the eggs are laid on the plant that this particular butterfly needs for the growth of its caterpillars, the eggs hatch as baby caterpillars and these voraciously eat the leaves of the foodplant and grow and grow, then pupate on a stem, in a crevice, or underground to emerge as butterflies in the following spring or summer. It’s a complex life cycle, far more complex than that of a mammal, but it works well for butterflies. If a butterfly dies before it is able to mate, it will not contribute to the ongoing future of the species. If it dies after mating it will make a contribution to the next generation. Timing is everything!
  • Like all living things, butterflies have a metabolism in which interlinked biochemical processes are always active. On death these processes cease and the remains are consumed as food by other organisms or colonised by fungi and bacteria which digest and reprocess the remains through their own, different metabolic processes.

So it appears there are quite a few distinctions that can be made between something that is dead and the same thing when it’s alive. So, leaving biology aside for a moment, if we are aiming to follow Jesus, what might the difference between dead and alive look like? Can we gather some clues from the butterfly?

I’ve written another short article about that question.

See also:

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You might also like:

The Lake District
Large White
An old castle made new

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If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

The Bingham Library

The new library in Dyer Street had a meeting room with seating for 200 people, but it quickly became clear that a larger meeting place was needed. And this is one of the reasons that Bingham decided to fund the Bingham Hall.

The Bingham Library

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Image of the day – 193

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every week or so.

Bingham Library

Cirencester’s Bingham Library building is now the Town Council Offices and the Tourist Information Centre. When I was a pupil at Cirencester Grammar School in Victoria Road, this grand old building was still the town’s main library. I remember walking to it from the family home at 37 Victoria Road, often to return books and take out different ones on science fiction, astronomy, or whatever interested me at the time; sometimes to visit the reference library to read articles from Encyclopaedia Britannica and make notes for Geography essays on coffee, rice or tea production in exotic places.

Daniel George Bingham

Blue plaque (click to enlarge)

The Bingham Hall in King Street as well as the Bingham Library in Dyer Street were built as town amenities and improvements by Daniel George Bingham. For more details of his life and career, click the blue plaque on the right.

Bingham worked in railway management, first at Cirencester, later at Paddington in London, and finally in Utrecht in the Netherlands where he became wealthy. He visited Cirencester briefly but quite regularly and spent part of his wealth providing the library in 1905 and the Hall in 1908. He and his wife Jane had friends and family in Utrecht so they were always keen to remain living there, though clearly Bingham retained a fondness for his town of birth – Cirencester.

From the beginning, the new library in Dyer Street had a meeting room with seating for 200 people, but it quickly became clear that a larger meeting place was needed. And this is one of the reasons that Bingham decided to fund the Bingham Hall to provide expanded facilities for meetings, dinners, theatre, music, and even a rifle range. I remember being in the Army Cadets in the sixth form at the Grammar School and taking part in target practice with .22 calibre rifles in the Bingham Hall rifle range. Morning assemblies were held in the main hall at the Bingham Hall, also school theatrical productions and musical performances.

What about us?

Few of us will ever have enough money to contribute something major like Bingham did. But most of us can afford to buy a little extra food and put it into the Food Bank receptacle as we leave the supermarket. Or we can join a local organisation helping others in some way, or keeping the local environment tidy. We all have the capability to improve our fellow citizens’ well-being in some way, it may cost no more than a little thought and a simple action.

So why not join in? Bingham did. We all can!

See also:

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You might also like:

Cirencester Hospital
A grand old house in Cirencester
Cirencester Abbey
Guests and another move

Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

A recommended site

In first-century Jewish society, a woman approaching a rabbi — in public, uninvited, without the mediation of a husband or male relative — was itself an act that would raise eyebrows and clench jaws.

Chris Dryden’s website

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On the web – 1

CD’s website

Sometimes I read something so good that I want to share it with my readers. This happened recently with one of Christoper Dryden’s posts. When I asked if I might republish it here, he very generously agreed. But I’m having second thoughts. Not about sharing it, but about sharing it in full. I think it will be better to share enough that my readers will want to go and read the rest on CD’s blog.

The extract

Reading: Mark 5:21-43

Context: What social barriers does the bleeding woman overcome to reach Jesus, and why is this significant?

This scripture does not indicate the social barrier, but we can infer the following: she has a disease, which doesn’t make her socially acceptable for starters. The nature of the disease, apparently, would make her unclean, so she shouldn’t be seen in public. Touching the garment of Jesus would be considered scandalous and outrageous cos the belief was that those touched by the unclean would be unclean themselves. She’s a social outcast, and she should know her place and deal with the fact that she’s worse off for looking to get her problem sorted, only for it not to work out. She’s a woman, that also ain’t becoming of someone who wishes to approach this guy. Seen in that light, the amount she’s overcome to reach out speaks volumes about the level of faith she has that one touch could make all the difference. It explains Jesus’ own commentary on the situation, namely that her faith has made her whole. And as I reflect on that, there’s the nudge to consider what level of faith can be exercised to trust Jesus. And also, there’s a challenge of how we can demonstrate and declare, for the benefit of other social outcasts, that their issues can be solved by reaching out to touch Jesus, who is near them?

In first-century Jewish society, a woman approaching a rabbi — in public, uninvited, without the mediation of a husband or male relative — was itself an act that would raise eyebrows and clench jaws. Layer on top of that the twelve years of haemorrhaging, which under the Levitical code rendered her perpetually ritually unclean (Leviticus 15:25-27), and you start to appreciate what she was carrying before she ever took a single step toward Jesus. It wasn’t just a physical condition. It was a sentence. Twelve years of isolation. Twelve years of being untouchable. Twelve years of being told, in effect, that she didn’t qualify.

She had also spent everything she had on physicians who left her worse off, not better. So not only is she socially marginalised, she is financially spent and medically hopeless. She has nothing left to lose. And that, right there, might be the very thing that unlocks her faith. When you’ve exhausted every other option, the audacity to reach for Jesus becomes a lot less surprising.

Seen in that light, the amount she’s overcome to reach out speaks volumes about the faith she has that a single touch could make all the difference. It explains Jesus’ own commentary on the situation: her faith has made her whole. And as I reflect on that, there’s a nudge to consider what level of faith is required to trust Jesus. And also, there’s a challenge of how we can demonstrate and declare, for the benefit of other social outcasts, that their issues can be solved by reaching out to touch Jesus, who is near them?

Someone might feel like they don’t qualify. They feel like they’ve been told — by circumstance, by history, by the voice in their own head — that the door to Jesus isn’t for them. This woman’s story is a loud and clear rebuttal of that lie. She reached, He responded, and the power that went out of Him was not accidental. He knew. He always knows. And He is never contaminated by what comes to Him, broken and desperate. He is only ever transformative.

Content: How does Jesus treat both the synagogue leader and the unclean woman with equal dignity?

What a fascinating word – dignity. Let’s get ourselves a running definition or walking, if we prefer the strolling approach.  Dignity is about worth, value and honour. To treat people with dignity is to confer on them a sense that they are of worth and value and should be duly honoured…

Reading more

My hope is that you’ll want to read the whole thing. Don’t miss the opportunity, you will not regret it! And if you like Dryden’s writing as much as I do, you’ll bookmark his site and keep coming back for more.

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Another great post
Understand and explain
Life, death, resurrection

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If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

Life always wins out

All forms of life are precious and we depend on many of them to provide food, purify water, generate the oxygen we need to breathe, clean away life forms that have died, and much, much more.

Fallen tree, climbing ivy

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Image of the day – 192

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Fallen tree, climbing ivy

This old tree trunk, clearly felled by chainsaw, is being colonised by ivy. Once the tree stood tall and strong and it’s likely that ivy clung to its trunk and branches. Now the tree lies on the ground, entirely dead, but ivy still uses the trunk as a support to grow upwards to continue to reach the light.

No giving up

Life is not in the habit of giving up, generations come and go, no individual tree, person, or anything else lasts for ever, not even a species. But life itself adapts, changes, and takes advantage of what went before. There has been life on planet Earth for around four billion years, that’s only 500 million years after the planet itself was formed. And it’s developed enormously in variety and complexity since chemistry first gave rise to biology.

We’re still filling in the gaps in what we know, but our knowledge is expanding and the gaps are shrinking. What we do know is that living things are very good at taking advantage of circumstances. That’s what the ivy is doing on the dead tree trunk. The need for sunlight is critically important for plants as the energy from that light allows them to build sugars from water and carbon dioxide. A stock of sugars enables them to survive the nights where the sun is absent, and survive the long, dark, cold, winter months as well.

All forms of life are precious and we depend on many of them to provide food, purify water, generate the oxygen we need to breathe, clean away life forms that have died, and much, much more.

Animals of all kinds and sizes ultimately depend on the sugars made by plants. Many animals feed on plants, stealing their sugars in a variety of forms, some feed on other animals, stealing sugars in secondhand forms; some, like us humans, eat both plants and animals. But almost all life depends ultimately on sunlight for its supply of energy.

That same great source of light also informs us, lets us see. Without light, eyes would be of no value whatsoever. Without light we would all be profoundly blind.

Jesus said, ‘I am the light of the world’. What does he mean by that? Is he saying that he is a light without which we’d be profoundly blind?

I think that’s exactly what he’s saying. Light is essential for vision and vital energy. The sun enables physical vision and energy. Jesus provides another kind of vision and energy. Search it out! It’s not too hard to find.

See also:

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You might also like:

Life, death, resurrection
Early steps towards life
Umbellifers

Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!