A good dose of earnest science recently in the Ranger's Blog gives him an excuse to exercise a question that has been puzzling him for some time. Just what is inside June Whitfield?

Luckily, a letter on his doormat when he arrived home from work this evening has the answer:

How awesome is this? The bacterium Wolbachia is thought to parasitically infect "70 percent of the world's invertebrates, coevolving with them"[1] (see previous posting on The Ranger's Blog). Now research has uncovered an extraordinary and startling phenomenon: Wolbachia has managed to copy its entire genetic code into its host. No, it's not like Jeff Goldblum in 'The Fly', but it is getting surprisingly close.

Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a full copy of the parasite's genome in the genome of a Drosophila fly. It's not unusual for bits of parasitic DNA to get muddled up with host DNA from time to time, but for an entire organism to be transcribed in this way is remarkable - and has far-reaching implications.

Classical evolutionary theory supposes that new features arise by natural variation such as mutations, and that natural selection then ensures that the beneficial features survive. Major changes should therefore take many generations, and very long periods of time. However there has for some time been debate in evolutionary biology about the time that evolution appears to take: there is evidence that it is not a constant, low-level and slow process, but that it sometimes happens in fits and starts.ScienceDaily reports on how this new discovery affects this theory:

The finding suggests that lateral gene transfer - the movement of genes between unrelated species - may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution.

Such large-scale heritable gene transfers may allow species to acquire new genes and functions extremely quickly, says Jack Werren, a principal investigator of the study...

Werren and [Michael Clark, a research associate at Rochester] are now looking further into the huge insert found in the fruitfly, and whether it is providing a benefit. "The chance that a chunk of DNA of this magnitude is totally neutral, I think, is pretty small, so the implication is that it has imparted some selective advantage to the host," says Werren. "The question is, are these foreign genes providing new functions for the host?" This is something we need to figure out."

So, not only has it managed to become an integral part of its host, but it might actually be benefiting it (as Wolbachia is known to do elsewhere). This would obviously provide a way in which evolution could proceed much more rapidly - if one organism is capable of simply adopting the genes of another, fully formed, a mechanism for considerably faster rates of evolutionary change may have been revealed. What other organisms have been absorbed in the past, maybe even into our own genome? It seems inevitable that at some point this will have occurred... and will probably occur again. Perhaps Wolbachia will one day be a part of us too!

The celebrated American entomologist and humanist Professor E.O.Wilson has set out his stall in favour of a new project: The Encyclopedia of Life.

"Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth available everywhere by single access on command." - E.O.Wilson

Already the project has some prodigious backers, with 12.5 million U.S. dollars in grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation[1].

Sounds fantastic. Doesn't it? Well, doesn't it? Can The Ranger possibly raise any objection to such a worthy and well-backed project? Actually, he might just do that. He's no scientist by profession (although he is by training) but he has a lot of experience of drawing down species data from the internet. And this EOL programme just seems somehow out of place to him: a great plan but maybe a bit late off the blocks. Probably that opening quote from E.O.Wilson was what did it. "Imagine an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth available everywhere by single access on command". Apart from sounding in style like a quote from about 1985 - excusable from such a grand old man - it demonstrates the key issue with this project. It's just not necessary to imagine such a thing. For many species, and for the majority of other groups, such a page already exists somewhere on the internet. And some of this data is pretty good. Want to see an example? Let's choose the EOL's example page about the polar bear:

• Here's the EOL version - this is a demo page as their site is not yet live. But there's plenty of stuff on it.
• Here's the ARKive page on the same species. This is in fact a live page. Looks pretty comprehensive, in fact if you click through 'More information' there's even more detail on the next page too.
• Wikipedia also has a polar bear article, predictably enough. It's not so authoritative but it's actually got a lot of the same information there. And you can edit it. Cool!
• For the technically minded the UNEP-WCMC database has exhaustive records of most endangered species - including polar bears - with a catalogue of data for each one available and searchable by just about anything.

There are many, many more. Now, EOL is honest enough to admit this, and says things like:
Wikipedia inspired us... Wikipedia... created some species pages, as have other groups. Encyclopedia of Life will, we hope, unite all such efforts and increase their value.

So they do realise there are other resources already in existence. But what do they hope to add to them? In National Geographic News there is a report of the project launch in May 2007:

...the Encyclopedia of Life will standardize the presentation of "information about the plants and animals and microorganisms that share this planet with us," said James Edwards, the project's executive director. The information will be accessible to scientists, policymakers, educators, and the general public, who have all clamored for the encyclopedia for years, Edwards said. "No one can really get it together in an edited form and know what's going on, and without that, there's no hope of using it for all the purposes where it could be applied," he said.

So they seem to be suggesting that without the Encyclopedia of Life, nobody can 'get it together', and there would be 'no hope of using it'. That seems a bit harsh to The Ranger and a little dismissive of current efforts. Many of the benefits EOL promises are actually benefits of the internet itself, rather than any one website or format (for example with such marvels as "Wherever a species name occurs, there may also be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia"[2]): it's almost as if they are trying to sell the wonders of the web to a pre-internet audience. Undoubtedly there are huge areas of biodiversity which are woefully under-catalogued and under-represented on the internet. There are also large paper resources of biodiversity data which would benefit greatly from digitisation - as EOL acknowledges in referring to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a successful existing project. But how will EOL actually help? EOL does not seem to be suggesting that it would do anything other than draw such information sources together, and building a kind of portal layer on top for people to access the data. This is a large-scale, centralising, top-down project plan which seems likely to deliver little more than the sum of its parts. This is because it will reply upon constant input from those actually creating the information by research and cataloguing, and this will inevitably come from a wide variety of different sources; just as it does now. Researchers at the front line will not rely on such abstracted, standardised data because they will want to go straight to the source, as they always do - to the journals, to their peers' websites, and to many diverse small organisations. To control and manage such diverse data into uniformity will take huge ongoing resources - but would that be the best use of those resources? EOL will not in itself make more of this data, nor put more online. Simply centralising and controlling data will not make that data better.

Anyway, is the EOL really setting out to do something so new? In 1985, maybe. But in fact, it's not that hard to find a great deal of quality information online right now. It's certainly very far from a 'no hope' situation, and it's constantly improving - without the guiding hand of an overarching uber-library. Sites such as ARKive seem already to be doing more or less what EOL is setting out to do, albeit for a sizeable subset of information. And they've been doing it for years.

So, here's the suggestion. What if the EOL backing consortium decided not to set up a whole brand new system for data wrangling, but chose instead to offer the resources they have committed to the scheme to enhance existing websites and programmes to achieve the same goals?

Harold Whitlock was a British athlete who won the gold medal in the 50 kilometre walk at the 1936 Summer Olympics held in Berlin. Most famously, the 1936 Olympics were marked by the success of Jesse Owens, the black US sprinter who upstaged Hitler by winning four gold medals. A lesser-known fact is that along with their gold medals, the champions of the 1936 Olympics were each presented with an oak sapling on behalf of Adolf Hitler.

Another Hitler Oak, won by Jack Lovelock of New Zealand

The whips, each in a terracotta pot, were awarded by the German Olympic Committee. Although the extent of Hitler's personal involvement in the scheme is not recorded, the potency of his name has made the tag of 'Hitler Oak' the one which people tend to remember.

Perhaps not surprisingly, of the 130 trees presented, only a few are known to have survived (one source suggests only 16): some unmarked, a few celebrated. Great Britain won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics, so what happened to the British Hitler Oaks? The Observer runs a story which sheds some light on the fate of one, at least:

Harold Whitlock, the British long-distance walker... brought his sapling back to Britain, but decided against planting it in his garden in case he moved to a different address. So he donated it to his former school, the then Hendon Grammar School, where a ceremony marked the occasion.

For 70 years it stood giving shade to generations of children and famed as a local landmark nicknamed the 'Hitler Oak'. No more. Last month the magnificent 50ft tree was chopped down, severing a precious link with Britain's sporting past.

Hendon School explained that the tree had been diagnosed with a fungal disease and was in danger of falling down and injuring pupils.

A shame - but these things do happen. Mind you, the article goes on to quote Scott Sturgeon, head caretaker of Hendon School, saying:

The tree expert I work with said in 20 years he'd never seen such large spores

That doesn't exactly give one confidence in his expertise - fungal spores are too small to see anyway, but perhaps he had particularly good eyesight.

Interestingly, The Observer described Whitlock's oak as "Britain's only known [Hitler] oak". Gilbert Addison, the Tree and Countryside Officer at Breckland Council commented on the story in the UK Tree Care Mailing List:

We've got a 'Hitler oak' in Norfolk awarded to a local broadsman along with a sailing medal in the '36 Olympics. I worked on the tree back in the 80's ... The tree was still there in an inferior sort of way last winter.

And indeed Great Britain did win a gold medal in the 6m mixed sailing in 1936, so it looks as though another Hitler Oak still stands in England to preserve this curious quirk of history.

The Wildlife Gardener sends a remarkable image of a carrot found pirouetting around her garden...

Looks familiar? It should do - it's the very carrot that the late Rudolf Nureyev was reincarnated into. For those who don't recall Nureyev, here's an image to remind you:

Who'd have thought it?

This one's almost, but not quite beyond belief. It's even on the BBC so it must be true, mustn't it?

Professional adventurer Colonel John Blashford-Snell, founder of Raleigh International, for some reason took it into his head to take an expedition of the Scientific Exploration Society to Bolivia to investigate a shallow crater about five miles in width. The expedition geologists are "95% certain that the crater is that of a large meteorite"[1] which struck the Bolivian Amazon Basin up to 30,000 years ago. But that was nothing compared to his rediscovery of the once-mythical Double-nosed Andean Tiger Hound. First reported in 1913, the dog is thought to be descended from another double-nosed breed of dog in Spain called the 'Panchon Navarro'.

So that's quite a story. Perhaps its gilding the lily to add that Blashford-Snell's expedition carried with it a church organ as a gift to local Bolivians, and included an organist and other musicians who taught the locals to play it. The organ — donated by St James' church in Milton Abbas, Dorset — was transported by lorry 120 miles over the Andes to the Beni river then loaded on to a boat for a 430-mile onward journey.

By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

The Wildlife Gardener's favourite landscape is chalk downland. She lives in it, walks through it, gardens on it, raises a family on it. So this August, for a change, la famille Wildlife Gardener went on holiday to…another bit of chalk downland.

To the Isle of Wight, home spiritual and temporal of The Ranger and The Cat, and the downland, a close cousin of our own North Downs. I maintain that on every countryside walk you do, you always see something new and interesting, and thus it was when The Ranger treated us to a night-time chalky walk.

We were not disappointed: spooky lights in the vegetation! What on earth were they? Glow-worms! I have always wanted to see glow worms, and there they were – single points of light in the bushes. Glow worms are beetles, members of the Lampyridae (yes, really) and their luminescence comes from a chemical reaction they create in their own bodies, involving the vividly-named protein, luciferin. The beetle can switch its light on and off as required, by increasing and decreasing the air (and hence oxygen) supply to the luciferin. At night, the 25mm long and wingless female glow worm switches on the lamp at the end of her abdomen, attracts a roving male, copulates, switches off her lamp, lays eggs, then dies. A short but spectacular life.

Glow worms, though not common, are found all over England, although they are best-known from chalk and limestone areas. One way to find out about the habitat you're walking through is to watch out for indicator species. An indicator species may be a plant or an animal, and its presence, or absence, gives clues about the environmental conditions in that area. So if you see these plants:

Bird's-foot-trefoil

Centaury

Devil's bit scabious

Harebell

...and these butterflies:

Blue butterfly

Brown argus

Mating meadow browns

...you are in an area of chalk downland. Although you might have noticed the big white cliffs first, which are a bit of a giveaway. The soil on downland is thin, and nutrients are washed out of the soil down through the chalk. So plants need to be small and tough to succeed there.

When you go for a downland walk, don’t just look at the skylarks. Take a moment to crawl around on the grass – the exquisiteness of the tiny ecosystem will astonish you.

Suffolk geologist Tim Holt-Wilson has written a new article for Naturenet about geodiversity:

...the rocks, soils, landforms and landscape-forming processes that make up the substrate for all living things, including human life. Geodiversity is a term for these non-biological aspects of nature.

Read Tim's entire article here

By The Hampshire Ponderer

Not much of a machine by modern standards; only four Sturmey-Archer gears modestly tucked away in the rear hub rather than eighteen whizzing cogs and yards of chain. In an age of petite chubby wheels and buxom tyres, these are large and thin. Modern riders accustomed to having their bums higher than their hands (while riding of course, The Ponderer doesn’t presume to contemplate bum/hand relationships at other times) would feel uncomfortable with the almost vertical riding posture required by the lofty handlebars which, and I scarcely like to mention this in an article for a sober and educative site such as Naturenet, are beyond question bent.

Acquired in Sandown over thirty years ago from a gentleman who'd reached an age when his leg would no longer arc gracefully over the saddle when dismounting, The Bike has served The Ponderer loyally ever since and there is no suggestion that The Fall mentioned above was The Bike’s fault. Rather that The Ponderer’s graceful leg arcing capability may also now be diminished so that he pitched sideways on to a smooth section of local pavement when attempting to get off the bike.

As a matter of general interest he reports the following :

• Newton’s law of gravitation still applies in Mid Hants. A falling body accelerates at 32 feet per second squared until it hits something.
• A friend much experienced in falling – he’s suffered from MS for many years – confirmed the strange phenomenon that while the body accelerates, time decelerates so that for instance while proceeding downwards at 32 feet per second squared the falling person has bags of time to think "I'm going to hit that object" before the collision actually happens.
• Surrounding people are extremely kind and present the faller with a range of options - ranging from A & E at once, through tea with three spoons of sugar, sticking on plasters magicked from a lady’s handbag and dabs of soothing cream - which is confusing at a time when thought processes are not very clear.

During the time of recuperation The Ponderer, realising that lots of folk fall over for lots of reasons, came to wonder why more people don't fall off bikes and concluded first, bikes are a remarkable safe means of getting around and then there are only a relatively small number of them off which to fall. Think about it. Everyone knows someone who’s been hit by a car and probably, and tragically, knows someone who has been killed by a car but the likelihood of knowing someone hurt in a bike crash (unless they’ve been hit by a car) is small. Of the two chief means of wheeled transport in general use bikes have got an awful lot to be said for them.

So why not reduce the number of cars and increase the number of bikes? After all it would not only make roads safer but would make us a fitter and leaner people dealing as a by-product with childhood obesity and the school run. Riders would easily be able to stop to chat to a neighbour or post a letter without double parking or hazardous reversing, thus enhancing community solidarity. It would produce cleaner air, the Securicor Van seen this afternoon parked outside a local shop for over fifteen minutes belching out carcinogenic particles as the customers walked in and out through the exhaust would be shamed into carbon consciousness because it would be the only vehicle in a car park with a couple of hundred beautifully crafted bike racks and the rest of the space turned into a real park with flowers, trees and a small bandstand. And – this is of course the clinching argument - it would save lots and lots of money.

A Future Tesco Car Park (Bike Racks Just Out Of Picture)

It's unlikely to happen because in our present stage of social development we don't like making decisions on the basis of benefits for all so much as decisions made, at least apparently, on the basis of benefits for one (i.e. me). So while the residents of Portsmouth for instance and drivers travelling to Bournemouth on the M27 know that total car gridlock is now a standard part of our way of life our response still includes spending several billions on widening the M1 so that gridlock may be experienced by more people rather than one or two millions on providing safe cycle ways so that children can bike to school. It is of course some while since wheels took over from legs as the normal means of travel, and it will take a lot of determination for us humans to celebrate our bipedalism and our bicyclism again, but it will be well worth the effort.

At bottom it's all about vision, seeing now how things might be in the future and recognising that visionaries need a place in our structures alongside managers, lawyers and computer programmers. There's a definite unrecognised wish for visionaries around – every other wedding, not to mention the WI and the Last Night of the Proms pay homage to one of the greatest when Jerusalem is sung with real fervour and just for a moment we salute William Blake and think "Yes, it is possible to do away with dark satanic mills, or life destroying and climate changing motorways". Perhaps a chariot of fire isn’t the best model for a bike but visionaries operate by inviting us to see things beyond the mundane and to hope for things beyond the pragmatic. In the next round of Local Government changes let's hope that one of the specifications will be for each Authority to establish a Department for Visionaries with a seat in the Cabinet.

There aren't many perks to being a Ranger - just doing the job is enough, of course. But yesterday this Virtual Ranger actually got a present from the Country Land & Business Association to help promote their latest campaign, Just Ask!

Yes, it's a fetching new apron for the keen amateur chef. And what's this he's holding? A lovely potato salad made of vegetables that were grown by The Wildlife Gardener, and it's to demonstrate what this campaign is about: helping to remake the connection between food and farming.

The CLA website explains:

The Just Ask campaign is seeking to encourage the general public to ask where the food on their plate comes from whenever they are out for a meal – whether in a hotel, restaurant, pub or canteen. The campaign aims to increase public awareness of the origin of food so that the consumer can make an informed choice as well as helping the public reconnect with food and farming.

We are asking that when you eat out you simply ask where the beef in your steak, where the apples in your apple pie or the milk in your custard comes from.

The objective is simple: to raise both the public’s and food chain operator’s awareness as to the origin of their food.

So, why is this important and why should we care? Knowing about where our food comes from is useful to us for several reasons - perhaps the most obvious one is the idea of food miles - a term which refers to the distance food travels from the time of its production until it reaches the consumer. In simple terms, more food miles means more fuel used and more contribution to global warming.

But there's also a subtler reason, which is probably why the CLA are running this particular campaign. Encouraging consumers to ask about food origins is only a small step from them asking their supplier for locally produced food. "Buying British" has been promoted for decades, but these days we should expect much more detail and information about the origin of food. Did it come from near me, or far away? And was it all produced there or was some imported from elsewhere? What sort of farming conditions produced it?

Encouraging producers and suppliers to create local and easy to follow markets and food chains is important not just because it benefits farm businesses - clearly an important issue from the CLA point of view - but for all of us, because it will benefit the wider countryside and landscape. That's why The Ranger is interested in this too. Local supply chains support and promote more small enterprises, and a much wider and more changeable diversity of products. Local varieties of fruit and vegetables, seasonal specialities, and premium local products are things that we have sometimes given up in the search for quick, homogeneous, cheap, sanitized food. Along with this we also have lost some of the small farms and farmers that have created and maintained the countryside landscape we enjoy so much. Just Ask is a small but valuable step towards helping us to understand this connection between the landscape and the food we eat, and how we can all play our part in supporting it.

By Ruth D'Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener

There was strange vibration going on in the Wildlife Gardener’s bedroom today. Ooer. When I went to investigate, I found a hornet clinging to one of the curtains, buzzing forlornly. It did look enormous and rather magnificent from where I was standing.

Spur on hornet's leg

I fetched a piece of paper and coaxed it into a pint glass. It crawled about listlessly, then curled up and expired quietly before I had a chance to photograph it at full stretch.

It looked like a normal-sized British hornet to me, but I can understand why people think they are monster insects:

• We shy away from wasps, and these things are four times as big, all wings and legs with SPURS on them! Aaargh!
• They are really quite long at full stretch, as are their wings, which gives them a sort of cubic largeness
• They buzz like a microlite, making them sound more terrifying than they are
• We expect wasps to be black and yellow – these are weirdly brown, orange and yellow, pale and seemingly mutant, not what we expect

We have been conditioned to fear hornets because of the phrase, 'to stir up a hornets' nest'. In fact, I’d rather do that than stir up a wasps' nest – hornets are a lot more docile.

So I felt just a little sad as my hornet turned up its tail. A creature of beautiful engineering and aeronautical ability, feared and persecuted because of its little cousin. Hornets have been victims of bad PR – we should learn to love them.

Well, fancy! Naturenet has reached the final list for the Hantsweb Awards 2007.

This means that The Ranger and Naturenet designer Cat will get to travel to exotic Basingstoke this September for the awards ceremony, and maybe pick up a gong! Watch this space to see if the Hantsweb judges do the decent thing - after all, it's been ten years since Naturenet's first major award... maybe it's time for the second.