Life with Attenborough

Christmas day 1981, Horton General Hospital. Superman cloak: check. Grotesquely swollen neck: check. Life on Earth on the table: check.

Christmas day 1981. A six-year-old boy sits on his bed in the Horton General Hospital, Banbury. He feels poorly, no worse, but for now nobody knows quite what’s wrong with him. His parents hide their worry so well that he is only now, a parent himself, starting to appreciate it. But on Christmas day it’s all smiles, with mum, dad and big brother all crowded into the small room. His brother’s main present was a portable radio, and the two boys share the headphones when Adam Ant’s Prince Charming comes onto Radio 1. The boy has his presents to open too, and from mum and dad is a life-changing book: Discovering Life on Earth, by David Attenborough.

Soon enough I was home, neck back to normal after the glandular fever, a little delicate for a few months but happily free of hospitals for the rest of my childhood (until the late teenage rugby years and associated A&E loyalty card). And able to watch Life on Earth as it was repeated, following each episode studiously in my book, the start of my Life with Attenborough that continues to this day. The book has accompanied me throughout, picking up companions on the way as landmark series followed landmark series. I’ve a few of the Attenborough-narrated ones - The Blue PlanetandFrozen Planet stand out - but it’s the Attenborough-written ones I covet, the Life series and various other side projects that have been a thirty year masterclass in natural history broadcasting and inspirational science communication.

A well-travelled book, a constant companion for 32 years.

For instance: an early trigger for my interest in placing people within their ecosystems, The First Eden took on the parallel evolution of civilisation and nature in the Mediterranean.

For instance: as undergraduates in the mid 1990s (my decision to study biology not unconnected to BBC Natural History’s outputs), my housemates and I sat glued to The Private Life of Plants, wowed by the (at the time) phenomenally advanced filming that demonstrated plants growing and behaving in ways I’d never appreciated. Yes, Attenborough makes even plants interesting.

For instance: fresh from my PhD, my first ever DVD boxset The Life of Mammals took familiar beasts and exposed them in all their weird wonder, illuminating the lives of everything from platypusses (I have wanted one as a pet ever since) to people.

And if you want a single snapshot of the Attenborough magic, watch again the scene where he encounters a blue whale, from 1.17 here…

“I can see its tail, just under my boat here. And it’s coming up… it’s coming up… THERE!”

That’s part one of the Attenbourough appeal: he is exhilarated by the sight of the largest ever animal - just as we would be - and he breathlessly communicates that thrill. But without pause, we get part two: in seconds he has enriched that emotional response with three pieces of information, bang bang bang:

Bang: “The blue whale is a hundred feet long - 30 metres.”

Bang: “Nothing like that can grow on land, because no bone is strong enough to support such bulk.”

Bang: “Only in the sea can you get such huge size as that magnificent creature”

For part three, just watch from the beginning of the clip to see how he embraces the potential of technology - remember, this is the man who, as head of BBC2, introduced colour to UK television. But technology is only ever used to supplement - never to replace - the storytelling.

Mine's a signed copy, of sorts…

There we go. My life has been greatly enriched - its course changed - by the work of David Attenborough. So what if there is no conveniently round-numbered anniversary to celebrate? I want to say ‘thank you’, and I want to express my intense admiration of an astonishing oeuvre; and now is as good a time as any. Attenborough is still making fascinating television - although, in the recent When Björk met Attenborough (which, if you have any interest at all in music or nature, you should go to very great lengths to watch) he did, for the first time, look an old man to me, no longer quite so sprightly. Maybe that got me thinking about the profound influence he’s had on my life. Maybe my son’s chickenpox led to some Proustian pondering of my own childhood illnesses. Perhaps it was those UCAS supporting statements I recently read, confirming Attenborough’s influence on yet another generation of biologists.

Or maybe I just needed an excuse to link to this Christmas message…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMYgcBxKx-w

Happy holidays!

New conservation, old conservation

In 1999, at the inaugural Student Conference on Conservation Science in Cambridge, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself. I’d just given my first conference talk - something to do with extinction risk and phylogeny in birds - and it seemed to have gone OK. I was meeting lots of interesting people, sharing the cosy impression that our research was on track to make some real difference to conservation efforts. Then Stuart Pimm stood up to give the plenary.

He showed a map of the world’s biodiversity in which Europe was essentially blank; pointing this out he called on us to focus all our efforts on those parts of the world where there actually was some diversity to conserve, and to stop fiddling around with inconsequential bits of so-called ‘conservation biology’ while biodiversity hotspots burned.

This was a bit of a shock, and something to which I have repeatedly returned over the years in an attempt to articulate why it angered me. Of course this demonstrates the success of Stuart’s approach - it has led me to question constantly my motivation for doing the research I enjoy, and not to kid myself that it matters more than it really does. To his credit, too, he has put his money where his mouth is in the form of savingspecies.org, an organisation specifically aimed at preventing extinctions using the most practical means available.

But the total dismissal of Europe as a place worthy of conservation attention still irks me, because it is in this continent that all of my formative experiences of the natural world occurred. I never left Britain until my teens, Europe until my twenties (not until five years after Pimm’s speech, in fact), and yet already by that time I’d developed a keen appreciation of the value of nature even in the impoverished, human-dominated countryside of my native land.

I was reminded of this old grievence recently on reading Michael Soulé’s Conservation Biology editorial, The “New Conservation” (available at michaelsoule.com), which I highly recommend. In this impassioned essay, Soulé lands some hefty blows on the so-called ‘New Conservation’ which, in his definition, “promotes economic development, poverty alleviation, and corporate partnerships as surrogates or substitutes for endangered species listings, protected areas, and other mainstream conservation tools,” its mission “primarily humanitarian, not nature (or biological diversity) protection”. He qestions whether it deserves to be called either new or conservation, and concludes that “conservationists and citizens alike ought to be alarmed by a scheme that replaces wild places and national parks with domesticated landscapes containing only nonthreatening, convenient plants and animals”.

I have a great deal of sympathy with these arguments, and firmly believe that our remaining wildernesses are a priceless universal heritage that must be cherished. And yet a couple of phrases took me back to Pimm’s talk, and to my uneasiness with a total focus on wilderness-based conservation. Soulé asks, “Is it ethical to convert the shrinking remnants of wild nature into farms and gardens beautified with non-native species, following the prescription of writer [Emma] Marris [in her book Rambunctious Garden]? … I doubt that children growing up in such a garden world will be attuned to nature…”

Well, I did grow up in such a world, and as a matter of fact I am pretty attuned to nature.

It’s a cultural thing. Unlike in the vast expanses of the New World, on this crowded island we have become accustomed to coexistence with nature (accepting we have not looked after it as well as we should have, as articulated by Tim Birkhead in another passionate piece you should read). Not only do many of our most valued landscapes, from hay meadows to heather moorland, depend on human intervention - leading us to question the idea of what 'natural' means, or when our baseline should be drawn - but we also know well that nature cares not for prettiness or authenticity. The National Park on my doorstep is beautiful, a source of inspiration to many but a long, long way from uninhabited wilderness, with its agriculture and settlements, abandoned mines and active quarries. The kingfishers I see on the canalised River Don, in the middle of Sheffield remain special despite emerging from banks of Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed.

Of course this is not an argument for neglecting wilderness where it does still occur. But rather to acknowledge that people can be profoundly inspired by the semi-natural, the domesticated, the biologically impoverished. Millions of us have been, including many who are now striving to reconcile the wellbeing of people with the continuing prosperity of the natural world, treading the path between old and new conservation that will enable happy and healthy future generations to enjoy and be inspired by nature too.

An Appreciation of John Steele

When I received the sad news, yesterday, that John Steele had died of the cancer that had afflicted him this last year, my instinct was to share the passing of a scientific hero as widely as possible. I duly tweeted, but given the general lack of response I wondered if perhaps his legacy is not as widely appreciated as I believe it should be. Hence this personal appreciation. I never met John, although I had been corresponding with him over the last couple of months, and was due to speak to him the morning after he was hospitalised for what turned out to be the final time. As an aside - the fact that I was approached, in such a generous manner (His first email to me ended: “This email is a rather long-winded way of saying - welcome; and I look forward to useful and illuminating discussions”) to collaborate with someone whose work, as you’ll see, has been an inspiration to me, is one of those great egalitarian things that happens from time to time in science, and I was thrilled to have this opportunity. But, as a result of this limited personal interaction - just a handful of emails - my appreciation is limited to John’s work, both his publications and this new, unpublished material to which I was contributing, which was buzzing with intriguing and innovative ideas.

Actually, I can’t hope to do justice to John’s wider scholarship here, and cover only really that small part of his work which addressed the issue of differences in temporal and spatial dynamics between marine and terrestrial ecosystems, an issue that has been central to my own research. As I set out in an earlier post, my own journey to the position now where I (reasonably confidently) call myself a marine ecologist has been rambling and convoluted. Along the way, certain of John’s papers stood out like beacons, reassuring me that there was indeed a path to follow, no matter how overgrown.

Mainly, these beacons consisted of a clutch of papers published in the early 1990s, in particular a 1991 paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology (Can ecological theory cross the land-sea boundary?) and a 1994 Phil Trans paper with Eric Henderson on Coupling between phyiscial and biological scales). Similar ideas were further developed in papers in Ecological Research (Marine Ecosystem Dynamics: Comparison of Scales) and Bioscience (Marine Functional Diversity). All of these, in turn, were building on John’s 1985 review in Nature, A comparison of terrestrial and marine ecological systems.

Key to all of these papers is the idea of scale, both spatial and temporal, and especially how the scale of variability is different in marine than in terrestrial systems. Because the seas act as an enormous thermal buffer, variability is fundamentally different there than on land. I’ve been playing with some data to try to show this (see below), but the concept is simple: if you stand in one place for 24 hours on land, depending where on Earth you are, you might easily experience a temperature range of 20˚C or more. In most places, the temperature of the sea - even at its surface - won’t vary nearly this much in a year. Spatial variation is similar - you will typically find much more variability (along all kinds of axes, not just temperature) in a square kilometer of terrestrial habitat than in a square kilometre of sea. This clearly has impacts on the organisms living there: if you’re a lizard and you’re too hot, you can maybe move a metre or two from full sun into the shade. A marine fish might have to move hundreds of kilometres (or tens of metres deeper) to achieve a similar drop in temperature. So these patterns of environmental variation are clearly important in order to understand species’ responses to climate change, and can explain some of the subtle differences already seen between marine and terrestrial species (see for example recent papers by Sunday et al., Burrows et al.).

One of John’s major insights was that physical and biological processes were typically more closely coupled in space and time in marine than in terrestrial systems. This stemmed from his strong background in physical oceanography. Indeed, in our recent correspondence he confessed “I have no systematic training in biology”; rather he epitomised the interdisciplinary nature of fisheries science, in which connections between the physical environment and biological resources have always been recognised in a way that terrestrial ecologists have only relatively recently accepted. Despite this lack of formal training, his ecological insight was astute, as apparent throughout his 1974 book The Structure of Marine Ecosystems, from which, incidentally, I took the opening quote for the Royal Society Research Fellowship application which currently supports me: “The first impression one forms of any community is usually of the diversity of species present, and of the differences in numbers, with some species abundant and others scarce”. That book has some interesting parallels with Alec MacCall’s later Dynamic Geography of Marine Fish Populations, in that it’s ecological content (MacCall’s book is, in my view, an excellent primer on macroecology, though the word is not used) was destined to be overlooked by most ecologists because the word ‘marine’ appears in the title.

This has inevitably only scratched the surface of John’s work. What drove him, I think, to return time and again to the marine-terrestrial comparative idea is summed up best in the abstract of the Journal of Theoretical Biology piece: “It is proposed that theories developed in one sector can be tested most critically in the other, with potential for greater generality.” This idea has guided my own research, and was constantly in mind while writing several papers, for example this one which begins with a Steele quote (“I argue that we should attempt to address the question of [ecological] generalizations capable of crossing the land-to-sea boundary”) and, in particular, this opinion piece I published last year. A piece which, I was delighted to discover, John had seen: “I had read your recent TREE paper with interest, and of course, appreciated your references to my cry in the wilderness two decades ago.” I hope that in continuing this search for generality, and performing critical tests of theory, I might send up one or two small flares of my own which - even if they don’t light the path all that brightly - might at least lead others to John’s more illuminating beacons.