It's hard not to see the world through the lens of our own preconceptions and biases.  We tend to be more interested in other large mammals.  We're drawn to human-like qualities in pets.  But even the most benign insect is disturbingly alien when seen up close.  We also tend to use the familiar as a metaphor for understanding the unfamiliar.  Sometimes this gives us additional insight.  Other times, it leads us down the wrong path.

I saw the coolest thing ever on the Rachel Maddow Show tonight. Ever. Thomas Gillespie of the Geography Department at UCLA was on the show discussing his attempt to predict bin Laden's location using satellite imagery and biogeographic theory! It was so amazingly cool to hear him discussing distance-decay models and island biogeography theory to predict bin Laden's location. It's all the cooler because Gillespie is, at least in part, a tropical forest ecologist, did his Ph.D. on tropical dry forests in Nicaragua, and has published on dry forest fragments in south Florida.

In my last article, I ended with the observation that:

While we cannot reject Cook's scientific contribution simply on the
basis of his embrace of racist pseudoscience, we also can't simply
ignore it either. Sloppy thinking, after all, is sloppy thinking.

Roystonea, the royal palms, are the most striking palms in the Caribbean, and arguably, in the world (though, granted, a talipot palm in flower comes a close second). The name of the genus was coined by Orator F. Cook, an American botanist, in 1900, in honour of Roy Stone, an American general involved in the capture of Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American war.

The 12th edition of Berry Go Round, the botanical blog carnival, is now online at Foothills Fancies.  Lots of good reading to be had.

There's a discussion going on over at Wikipedia regarding the naming convention for articles about plants.  In general, article titles are supposed to be the "most common" name for the thing in English.  But when you're trying to compile "the sum total of human knowledge", that simple rule can be problematic.  Do you really want to use "the most common" name, or do you want to use the most accurate name?  After all, Wikipedia seeks to be an encyclopaedia.

Things get far worse when you try to write articles about plant species.  There are about a quarter million species of flowering plants.  Most of them lack common names in English.  But where they exist, common nam

In a closed system (and the biosphere as a whole is a closed system) the only way to generate additional species is through evolution. 

While the evolution of new species is a necessary condition for the generation of diversity, it isn't good enough on its own.  If a species splits into two daughter lineages that are unable to interbreed, you should have two species.  But in order for them to coexist in a given area, some sort of ecological difference needs to have evolved.  If two species occupy the same area, they are in a position to compete for resources.  The more similar their needs, the more intense the competition is likely to be. 

If you set out to answer questions about species diversity, there are two questions you need to consider - how is diversity generated, and how is diversity maintained?

In my recent post on Mexican dry forest, I mentioned the fact that about 80% of the species in the genus Bursera were endemic to Mexico.  Things like that tend to jump out at you.  Why are there so many species in one area, relative to the rest of its range?

Bursera simaruba has always been one of my favourite tree species. It’s a dry-season deciduous tree with compound leaves and a coppery peeling outer bark and a green (presumably photosynthetic) inner bark.  It’s a conspicuous element of tropical dry forests in Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico and parts of southern Florida (where they call it the ‘gumbo limbo’ tree).  In all these places it’s the only representative of its genus.  In my experience, Bursera was Bursera simaruba, so I was surprised when I came across a Bursera that was grown from seed collected in Costa Rica that was obviously not B. simaruba.