Co-evolution in action

The Daily Mail has reported a "soaring demand" for the Mwanza Flat Headed Agama lizard due to the African native's obvious resemblance to a certain comic book hero: Spiderman. Apparently calls for the little creatures started flooding in after photographer Roy Daines captured the "simply Marvel-ous" image (above) of this little lizard crawling around a hotel lodge pool in Kenya. Daines told the Daily Mail:

"His colourings were very bright making him look like he was dressed in a suit - crawling around on the rock made him look exactly like Spider-Man."

Read more here

Lovin' Nat Geo Right Now (as always)

Not only is the National Geographic Society sharing 150 vintage prints from their archives at an exhibition at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea beginning September 17th (read all about that awesomeness here), their newest issue features an article that truly brightened my day upon discovery. I'll give you a hint: Michael Pollan.

Okay, I'll give you more than a hint. It's about Orchids and it's fascinating. MP's "The Botany of Desire" changed my outlook on life and nature. His insight, study and consideration of the co-evolution between plants and animals captivates me. If you haven't read the aforementioned book, which examines the relationship human beings have had and continue to have with the cultivation of apples, tulips, potatoes and marijuana, think of this article as an introduction to this arena of Pollan's writing. Here's the teaser:

Love and Lies: How do you spread your genes around when you're stuck in one place? By tricking animals, including us, into falling in love.

By Michael Pollan

Photograph by Christian Ziegler

We animals don't give plants nearly enough credit. When we want to dismiss a fellow human as ineffectual or superfluous, we call him a "potted plant." A "vegetable" is how we refer to a person reduced to utter helplessness, having lost most of the essential tools for getting along in life. Yet plants get along in life just fine, thank you, and did so for millions of years before we came along. True, they lack such abilities as locomotion, the command of tools and fire, the miracles of consciousness and language. To animals like ourselves, these are the tools for living we deem the most "advanced," which is not at all surprising, since they have been the shining destinations of our evolutionary journey thus far. But the next time you're tempted to celebrate human consciousness as the pinnacle of evolution, stop to consider where you got that idea. Human consciousness. Not exactly an objective source.

You know you want to read on. And see Christian Ziegler's amazing photographs. Find the full article here.

Evolutionary dance

I am currently reading the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Kingsolver, her husband and their daughters (although the youngest is, as Barbara puts it, too young to enter into a book contract). The memoir/journey is based on the decision to sustain/live/eat for one year on only food they grew themselves or that was grown or raised locally. I've only just begun the book and already I have to share a passage Barbara wrote about co-evolution because it's superb. So much so that I won't bother going on about how great the book is and will simply share her words. From 3. Spring Forward:

"Disease pathogens and their crop hosts, like all other predators and prey, are in a constant evolutionary dance with each other, changing and improving without cease as one evolves a slight edge over its opponent, only to have the opponent respond to this challenge by developing its own edge. Evolutionary ecologists call this the Red Queen principle (named in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen), after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who observed to Alice: 'In this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.' Both predator and prey must continually change or go extinct. Thus the rabbit and the fox both get faster and over the generations, as their most successful offspring pass on more genes for speediness. Humans develop new and stronger medicines against our bacterial predators, while the bacteria continue to evolve antibiotic-resistant strains of themselves. (The people who don't believe in evolution, incidentally, are just as susceptible as the rest of us to this observable occurrence of evolution. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.)"

Highly recommend this book, folks. A joy to read.