<insert The Count From Sesame Street's laugh here>
Okay, so the International Institute for Species Exploration has come up with a list of ten new species named in the last year. It's clearly for promotional purposes, with nothing much other than an interest in new species underpinning it for all that there were a slew of experts involved in the choice, so I fail to see what the Bleiman Bros. are bitching about. Just like lists of the Best Songs of All Time, beauty and significance lie in the eyes of the beholder. What is significant is that thousands of new species were named and described (the two are synonymous operations in biology) last year alone, and that we lack descriptions of perhaps 90% of macrobiological species. In that cause the Top Ten SOS list is a good marketing tool.
And while on biodiversity, a new paper in PNAS (sometimes called "penis" for reasons that only a scientist would find funny) presents results that, it is claimed, show that heat rather than light is responsible for tropical species-richness. The paper's not online yet, but the press-release is (this has got to stop - releases should not go out until the paper is available at the journal's site). It makes a kind of sense - if one of the things species have to do is expend energy warming up, an increase in the ambient temperature will reduce that energy budget, permitting species to persist when otherwise they wouldn't. But forgive my lack of education: aren't light and heat just different wavelengths on the EM spectrum? In which case tropical environments get both more light and heat, and differentiating the role played is not so easy (see? That is why you have to ensure the paper's online first). Photosynthesis relies on the amount of energy received, not just the visible light component, or am I wrong here?
Environment
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No, photosynthesis only works for certain wavelengths, mainly at the red end of the spectrum. This is why leaves are green, the chlorophyll absorbs red and blue and reflects yellow/green light.
Posted by: Zarquon | May 28, 2008 5:36 AM
I think that the main difference is that while sunlight does indeed provide incident electromagnetic radiation, heat is sort of an after-effect of that radiation after it's been absorbed by the ground (or whatever it hits). The sun isn't giving off a significant amount of infrared thermal radiation: the air around a plant warms up because it's in contact with the ground which has heated up because of the light it absorbed from the sun.
I think.
Posted by: Tim | May 28, 2008 10:00 AM
Ha ha. You said PNAS.
Posted by: PsyberDave | May 28, 2008 11:15 AM
In graduate school, in Mexico, we used to call PNAS "penas" (pronounced peh-nas), which means "pains", for the hard work required to publish there.
Posted by: Ribozyme | May 28, 2008 1:00 PM
Just in case it's interesting (not really relevant here), heat is not just EM radiation. Heat is mean kinetic energy, and around these parts that's transferred almost entirely as EM radiation, but it can also be transferred as e.g. alpha particles in cosmic rays and in lots of other ways. Another example is in heating a room: heat can be transferred from a radiator to your body by radiation (EM) and by air convection (non-EM), and you set up the room differently according to which of those is your priority.
Posted by: Jason Grossman | May 28, 2008 3:46 PM
I think reading the paper will be crucial. We have no idea how they have conducted their methodology, or even if this press release was really their major finding or a through away thing they said MIGHT arise from obscure laboratory studies, the press has leeched onto.
I know I made wild assertions at the end of my thesis that could be taken well out of context if you ignored my 'maybe, could do, need more research'
The cause of origination and dispersal patterns form the tropic towards the poles, in a more long terms sence, may be of ineterest to we who study the long dead, because things weren't always as they are. For example: Polar dinosaurs. No matter what else was going on it was still dark half the year, but it cannot have been as cold, if Gondwannan dinosaurs were not migratory, and there is some evidence for this (see some papers by rich and rich). Here the decoupling of causation between light and heat may be very important.
Posted by: Pubcat | May 28, 2008 9:41 PM
Benny is bitching because he made out with the International Institute for Species Exploration and it never called him back. Also, he has a weight problem and low self-esteem.
Posted by: Andrew | May 29, 2008 10:43 AM