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Ferris Jabr

Jul 26, 2018 • 5 tweets • 3 min read

If you put chalk under a powerful microscope—white cliffs of Dover type chalk, not the modern blackboard variety—you will see something like this

Because it's not just a rock. It's an accumulation of ancient skeletons: the armored husks of single-celled, ocean-dwelling plankton

These tiny photosynthetic creatures, known as coccolithophores, are extremely abundant. When their populations boom they can turn England-sized swaths of ocean an ethereal turquoise—a phenomenon visible from space

Coccolithophores are crucial to the ocean’s food webs, produce huge amounts of breathable oxygen, and have the power to alter the Earth's geology and atmosphere. Scientists are studying how they might sway climate change and vice versa

@richardson_beth

per @richardson_beth, the photo of coccolithophores is by Jeremy R Young of UCL. See nature.com/articles/natur… & genome.jgi.doe.gov/Emihu1/Emihu1.… & ucl.ac.uk/earth-sciences…

A passage from Thomas Henry Huxley's 1868 lecture/essay "On a Piece of Chalk"
ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/huxley/thoma…

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More from @ferrisjabr

Ferris Jabr

@ferrisjabr

May 21, 2021

https://twitter.com/RebeccaH2030/status/1395352584018399234

This is called inosculation: when branches or roots of different trees are in prolonged intimate contact, they often abrade each other, exposing their inner tissues, which may eventually fuse.

It's not so much one tree feeding another as the formation of a new hybrid organism.

https://twitter.com/RebeccaH2030/status/1395352584018399234

In this case, it looks like two beeches (which are partial to inosculation) fused their limbs. Later, the smaller tree's roots/lower trunk were cut away, yet it survived by continuing to exchange water and sugars with its other half. It had already become part of something bigger

Plants have an astounding ability to merge w/ one another & grafting is widely practiced in agriculture. It's very common for a fruit tree to be a hybrid: a fruit-bearing 'scion' (top part) grafted onto a hardy rootstock that grows well in local soil.

From McPhee's 'Oranges':

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Ferris Jabr

@ferrisjabr

May 8, 2020

By popular demand:

BIRD NESTING STYLES: A CRITICAL REVIEW - PART TWO

White tern
-This is it. This is the nest
-A failure to recognize the fundamental impermanence of being is the source of all suffering
-Taught Marie Kondo everything she knows

Red ovenbird
-Fond of turquoise
-Will challenge you to a contest measured in Scoville heat units
-Have you seen my prize-winning succulents?
-Knows the One True Cornbread recipe

Vogelkop bowerbird

-Apprenticed (read: volunteered) at MOMA one summer
-My favorite artist? You wouldn't know them
-Actually, it's not a "nest"—it's an interactive sculptural platform that uses found objects and corporeal semiotics to interrogate the very essence of intimacy

Read 13 tweets