Australia's National Arboretum, part 2: Bonsai collection

As mentioned in yesterday's post on the National Arboretum, the National Bonsai and Penjing Collection (NBPC) was one of the main reasons we went there. I would never have the patience to grow a bonsai myself, but I appreciate them as an art form.

Until the opening of the arboretum, the NBPC was located in Commonwealth Park near the city centre. Although that was more easily accessible especially during the annual Floriade, the new premises work well, and it fits the theme of the arboretum.

A significant part of the collection is made up by native plants such as Banksias or, as in the above case, paperbarks.

Bonsai are Japanese miniature trees, but what are penjing? They are in a way the Chinese counterpart, but the Penjing tradition does not focus on single trees but instead entails the construction of miniature landscapes. They often consist of several species of plants, interestingly shaped rocks, and small houses, boats or figurines.

Above a very nice penjing with fruiting and flowering plants of different species. One is reminded of model train sets without the trains.

And finally an example with figurines, in this case of horses. In addition to the plants, the collection also features examples of fossil wood from the Jurassic. All in all well worth a visit.

Australia's National Arboretum, part 1

Today we had a family outing to the National Arboretum of Australia, as we had been meaning to do for quite some time already. The arboretum only opened in 2013, as it had been built after the devastating 2003 bush fires on what used to be pine plantations.

Most parts of the arboretum are therefore very recent plantings and will only look interesting twenty years from now. Among the few forest elements that are older is the cork oak plantation seen above. It was planted shortly after Canberra's founding to give the city its own supply of cork. Another is a large stand of Himalayan cedars that is now home to a nice barbecuing site and outlook, and unfortunately some pine plantations have also survived the fires.

When I think of the arboretums I have seen in other parts of the world, I see park-like plantings of many different species of trees, often with an ecological or geographic theme: this is the forest of the Appalachian mountains of North America, over here is a typical mountain forest in southern China, and so on. It is therefore somewhat puzzling that the National Arboretum apparently decided that it would simply divide its area into 104 large cells and then plant only one (rarely two) species in each cell.

Seen in the picture above is the cell for the Californian Fan Palm, and as one can see it contains only Californian Fan Palms, and they are planted in straight lines, and the lines are very far apart. I have no idea why anybody would think that this would be of any particular interest to even a very charitable visitor even twenty years from now when the palms are taller. There will be lines and lines of the same type of tree of the same height, without any underlying story to it. How charming. Did the designers never visit other arboreta? Or is this all perhaps merely meant to safeguard genetic resources as opposed to educate the public?

Well, at least the background of the picture also shows that the arboretum provides magnificent views over Canberra...

...which are sadly marred by so-called artwork that looks like scrap metal. I will never understand why it is considered appropriate to clutter botanical gardens and parks that people visit for the plants and flowers with sculptures. Each to their own I guess.

But I don't want to come across as too negative. The so-called village centre depicted above is currently perhaps the greatest attraction. It features a restaurant / café, a shop, a large science exhibit, ...

...the truly awesome pod playground, which our daughter ultimately had to be dragged away from (I mean, just look at it!), and Australia's National Bonsai and Penjing Collection. These last two alone are worth the visit, and because this has already got quite long I will keep the Bonsai collection for another post, perhaps as soon as tomorrow.

Yet more funny science spam

Most of them are caught by the spam filters now, and most of the ones that make it through are unremarkable in their mediocrity, but the following two caught my eye:

JACOBS PUBLISHERS - Let your wisdom enkindle others

Is it too much to ask that they avoid gibberish at least in the company motto?

Warm greetings from Jacobs Publishers!

Sometimes I wonder what language it is that they get these flowery greetings from; other spammers write "greetings of the day" or similar. Is it Punjabi, or perhaps Yoruba? Whatever it is, it doesn't sound unpleasant.

We introduce ourselves as Jacobs Publishers, initiated to serve the scientific community. It is an Open access publishing group that publishes peer-reviewed articles related to different aspects of Medical, Life Sciences, Pharma, Chemistry and Engineering. We have initiated a Journal called Jacobs Journal of Environmental Sciences. With relentless efforts of our Editorial team, we have initiated Inaugural Edition for our Jacobs Journal of Environmental Sciences.

Somebody here really, really likes the word initiated - and could probably use a Thesaurus.

We are planning to release the edition in the month of April, 2015.  On this Occasion, we request you to submit your Research Work as manuscripts to our journal, we would request you to invite your colleagues, experts to submit their manuscripts. Manuscript submissions expected date March 31st, 2015.

Request, on the other hand, does not sound as polite any more.

Authors are requested to pay 199 USD as publication charges for Inaugural edition. Payment could be done only after the completion of Peer Review process and acceptance by our esteemed Editorial Board Members.

This is at least surprisingly honest. Many competitors hide the fees until a paper has been submitted.

Regards
Amy Alethia
Jacobs Journal of Environmental Sciences
Jacobs Publishers
9600 Great Hills
Trail # 150 w
Austin, Texas

Yeah, right. If this message is the English of somebody from the USA then I am the emperor of China.

The second one is below the fold. Content advice: may trigger seizures.

Botany picture #197: Darwinia taxifolia

Darwinia taxifolia (Myrtaceae), Jervis Bay, 2014. Most Myrtaceae are fairly easy to recognise, but this is a rather weird-looking genus that will easily confuse the uninitiated. I was surely surprised when I was introduced to it the first time.

What is the age of a species?

We had journal club today, and I realised that something that I had always considered quite obvious and logical is not as obvious and logical to everybody else. The question here is: how old is a species?

If you are like me, you will visualise the phylogenetic tree of the species and its closest relatives, point to the moment where it diverged from its sister group, and say that that is its age. See the following diagram:

We know today of the existence of species A, C and D, and if we reconstructed the phylogeny I would say that the divergence time of A on the one side and the ancestor of C and D on the other side, marked with the black line and the number 1, is the age of species A.

However, there is a little snag: What if there were side branches on the tree of life that we do not know about because they are now extinct? In the hypothetical case above, there existed a species B for some time but then it died out. So really the age of species A should be the divergence time from B, indicated with the purple line and the number 2. But if we only know about A, C and D, we can at least say that A is at the most as old as indicated by the black line.

So far so good. What I learned today is that there are apparently people who believe that the age of a species is where the gene copies it is carrying or the family lineages inside it coalesce back in time. This is indicated by the red line and the number 3: the yellow gene tree shows that all extant gene copies (of that gene) in species A are derived from an ancestral copy that existed at time 3.

This time would often be much closer to the present than times 2 and 3. In the case of us humans, we are usually inferred to have diverged from the chimpanzee lineage a few million years ago, but the last female and male common ancestors of all of humanity - the individuals from whom we have all inherited our mitochondria and Y chromosomes, respectively - have been inferred to have existed a few ten to hundred thousand years ago. And indeed some people seem to assume that that is then the age of our species. (See also my earlier dissection of the Doomsday Argument.)

When I was reminded of this concept today I couldn't believe that this would make sense to any biologist. Mike Crisp pointed out the first major problem: this coalescence point constantly moves through time as gene lineages and family lineages proliferate and die out again. As one can see even in my little diagram above, there were several earlier times at which the same would have been true. So how can the age of the same species constantly be corrected downwards as it gets older?

Worse, if speciation events are spaced closely in time and effective population sizes are large, it is well possible that coalescence time might actually be in an ancestor of species A instead of itself; this is known as incomplete lineage sorting or ancestral polymorphism. In other words, species A would then be older than its existence as an independent lineage. Surely that is immediately recognisable as nonsensical.

However, Mike also pointed out that (as I would add: in cases where it is after the lineage divergence time that we can infer), this coalescence point provides a lower limit on the age of a species. So it must then at least be as old as that, and it is at most as old as the divergence time from its living relatives.

Field guide to the native plants of the ACT

A few weeks ago Meredith Cosgrove self-published her Photographic Guide to Native Plants of the Australian Capital Territory.

It is a great field guide, and in my eyes much more useful than the one I used before. Every species is given a full page with several high quality photographs. Importantly, the photographs are not, as all too often, restricted to the flowers but instead cover all identification relevant characters. Thus most species will be shown in flower, in fruit, and with their overall habit, and then there are pictures of other key traits, such as leaf tips in the case of Lomandra or bark in the case of Eucalypts.

About a third of each species profile is taken up by descriptions and notes. At the bottom of each page are little bars that allow the user to check whether some character on the plant they have in front of them falls into the diversity exhibited by the species presented on the page, leaf width or flower size for example. Then there are a little map of the ACT with known occurrences and a density plot showing occurrence along the elevational gradient. All in all a very useful and informative book that will make identification of plants in the Canberra region much easier for plant enthusiasts.

Although I am very happy with it, there are two issues that other people might find unfortunate. One is that the book is restricted in its coverage to dicots and petaloid monocots; in other words, it doesn't include grasses (Poaceae, Cyperaceae, Juncaceae, Restionaceae). The second is that the plants are ordered alphabetically by family. That makes it easy to find something if you already have a bit of botanical knowledge and can recognise something as, say, an Ericaceae, but it will not help those who are totally at sea and just want to browse though all species with white flowers until they find something that looks right. That being said, there is an intuitive tabular key at the beginning that allows the reader to narrow families down by petal number and flower colour. Anyway, I personally prefer the systematic structure that has all members of one taxonomic group together.

The guide is also affordable at (Australian) $45, and with its A5 format it fits comfortably into a bush-walker's backpack. More information can be found at the publication website.

Euthyphro

The following is, once more, my personal opinion and not necessarily that of my employer, colleagues, friends, family or pot plants. Also, I do not claim to be an expert on moral philosophy or theology.

Continuing my readings of Thomist theologian-philosopher Edward Feser suggested by commenter Cale, I have decided to tackle the Euthyphro dilemma next, out of genuine personal interest. (I will probably rue leaving the posts I find least interesting for last...)

Admittedly, Feser's real topic in the linked post is whether god has, as he puts it, obligations to us, which he answers with no. But I find that much less interesting than the religious replies to Euthyphro. For what it is worth, I see two possible answers to his question. From an intuitive, human perspective it seems fairly obvious that somebody has a responsibility for what they cause and create, and thus a hypothetical creator-god would have responsibility for us. Stepping outside of everyday moral intuition and trying to justify that responsibility from first principles, however, I come up empty-handed because I personally do not see any way to bridge the is-ought gap. But that means merely that ethics and moral imperatives are made up by humans, leaving us again with the human intuition that says that you have a responsibility for your creations.

Anyway, Euthyphro - what is it again? It was Plato's (or supposedly Socrates') response to divine command theory, the idea that our moral compass can only be derived from the gods. I understand that in the original text, which I admittedly have not read, the discussion was rather more complicated, but it boils down to the question whether something is good because the gods command it or whether something is good independently of whether they command it or not.