Amber is Both an Object of Beauty and a Time Capsule of Ancient Flora and Fauna

 

Amber: Window to the Past – David A. Grimaldi (1996)

 

            Sunlight solidified.  That is how ancient man saw amber, initially discovered washed up on sea beds and beaches, reflecting the bright sun with its rich, often golden hues.  It must have seemed like such a magical material.  Sometimes completely transparent, sometimes opaque, this material came in a wide range of colors, from green to bright red, and possessed seemingly magical properties.  It felt warm to the touch, unlike other stones, and built-up static electricity. One of only two items used as gemstones that arise from natural, biological processes (the other being pearls), amber remains highly prized and very beautiful.  My fascination with amber has been lifelong, and because I am not fortunate enough to reside in an amber-rich location, I adore books such as this one by David A. Grimaldi, for they bring me not only a deep and considered history of the precious material itself, but also countless amazing photographs and reproductions from collections worldwide.  My jealousies abound.

            This wonderful book is divided into two sections, Amber in Nature, and Amber in Art.  The first chapter of the Amber in Nature section details exactly what is considered amber, its origins, and its properties.  True amber is very old.  Starting out as the resinous sap from a variety of trees (many of which are extinct), amber is created when this sap drips or falls to the ground and is covered by either water or oxygen-poor soil.  This allows the highly volatile chemicals found in the resins to either dissipate or break down while preserving the resin itself, sometimes for tens of millions of years.  Erosion and other factors work to bring up these deposits, oftentimes breaking off pieces and washing them away with the tide.  This is how early people found amber on beaches near ancient deposits.  In a world with very few transparent substances, it makes sense that amber was highly prized and divine.

            While prized for millennia for its gem-like qualities, in modern times the greatest value of amber lies in the inclusions found within.  Humans have always prized amber specimens with visible animals or plants trapped inside, often using these for jewelry or decoration.  Most did not know or understand how old the amber was, or the included animals and plants.  Scientists began to understand that the animals and plants in amber were sometimes tens of millions of years old, which led them to use the old amber collections for taxonomy purposes.  In even more recent times, the rise of scanning electron microscopy and other even better microscopes helped us see how much detail and preserved material was actually available within the amber itself.  Whereas most fossils found in rock strata are compressed, flattened through time and pressure, the fossils inside amber often retain their three-dimensional structure.  It has been found that the chemical composition of the amber not only sealed the specimens away from harmful oxygen, but the process of desiccation within the amber preserved many soft tissue organs, such as the brains, muscles and lungs of a hundred-million-year-old fly, all plainly visible under the microscope.  Amazing.  Even more insane is that individual mitochondria have been preserved.  These are some of the smallest constituents of any living animal’s cells.  I cannot imagine the glee and shock whenever a scientist first laid eyes on hundred-million-year-old mitochondria.  Those moments are truly singular, and are what scientist dreams are made of.

            Reading about the history of amber in art and decorative pieces was also enlightening.  While most amber is ancient, it is not an inert material.  Exposure to the atmosphere and bright lights can cause the usually shiny amber to be covered in cracks and crazed bits, rendering the outer “skin” of the amber opaque.  Because of this, many of the oldest art pieces do not glimmer or shine as they did originally.  If left alone, the amber would eventually crumble to dust.  Due to its fragility, amber was rarely used as a showpiece gemstone.  It did find much use in bead form, and as accent pieces for large, crafted items.  In fact, one of the most widespread uses for amber was in crafting rosary beads, meant to be touched one by one as prayers are recited.

            My fascination with amber has increased ten-fold due to this book.  It is a magnificent reference work and includes maps detailing the many places on Earth where amber is either found in situ or mined.  The closest location to me would be around El Paso, Texas, a 12-hour drive away.  Seeing as how I have family living there, I will someday go hunting for amber among the desert plants and animals.  If I am lucky my wife will come with me, although her loathing of dust may preclude such adventures.  Either way, this book entertained and enlightened me, and I highly recommend it to anyone seeking an expansive exploration of amber and its many uses.

(For a very informative website about Amber, click here: https://amber-fossils.com/ )

Mushroom season is coming, and this book has me HYPE!

In The Company of Mushrooms: A Biologist’s Tale – Elio Schaechter (1997)

            It is currently winter here in Houston, Texas, which means that soon the weather will warm up a bit, the rains will come, and the ground and trees will be full of mushrooms once again.  As an amateur mycologist, I am really looking forward to this next mushroom season.  While I wait for it, I find that reading cool books about mushrooms helps me to pass the time and prepare for my next hunts.

            The author of this book, Mr. Elio Schaechter, is a trained scientist, specifically in biology.  He combines his scientific knowledge with his love for the exploration and fun found in mushroom hunting.  The book is divided up into several parts, each of which focuses on one specific aspect of this fascinating hobby.  The first chapters discuss exactly what is a fungus, what is a mushroom, and how they fit into the tree of life.  Fungi are ancient, very ancient.  The organisms we class as fungi are so old that they belong to a separate kingdom of life, and have been evolving since before the advent of flowering plants and trees.  A mushroom is the fruiting body of many types of fungi whose purpose is solely to procreate.  Others do not make mushrooms, instead utilizing spherical shapes, jelly shapes, or other such creations to spread their spores.

            Another chapter in this great book details the use of mushrooms throughout history, and yet another explains the rise of mushroom hunting clubs and organizations.  These are some of the best parts of the book, as they detail the fun and camaraderie found by people whose shared interests in mushrooms bring them together to learn and eat and have fun.  As the world of mycology is largely one composed of self-starters and amateur hunters working alone, these mushroom/mycology clubs are a great resource for information exchange and education.  I myself have joined the Gulf States Mycological Society, and hope to head to a foray at one of the massive state parks here in Texas, as soon as the weather allows.

            One of the topics that Mr. Schaechter returns to is that of the traditional mushroom hunters in Europe and Asia, and why this has not taken hold in places like the UK, or the USA, where mushrooms are seen as dangerous and eating wild foraged mushrooms especially so.  This bias is a shame, as mushrooms are a very good food source when sourced intelligently.  The area I live in, near Houston, TX, is estimated to have 5,000-6,000 species of fungi, of which just over 1,000 are identified.  The climate is moist and there are lots of places for the mushrooms to grow.  Being in the middle of the continent, mushrooms from the East coast grow here as well as mushrooms from the West coast.  This hobby, which takes you into nature, allows for education and fun, and if lucky, results in delicious mushrooms for your table, is one that can be enjoyed by a great many people.  I hope to do my part by sharing my mushroom adventures and spreading the fungal love.

(This book can be purchased here:  IN THE COMPANY OF MUSHROOMS )

J.B.S. Haldane had ideas as to what the Future would hold.

Daedalus: or, Science & The Future – J.B.S. Haldane (1924)

This is yet another great recommendation by the one and only Rudy Rucker.  Whereas my previous review was of a large compendium of philosophy relating to the topic of panpsychism, this is a short and tight book, complied from the speech given by noted English scientist J.B.S. Haldane to an audience at Cambridge University.

The year was 1924, the Great War was over, and scientists had been grappling with new advanced discoveries in physics, biology, and medicine.  Mr. Haldane used his platform at this Cambridge meeting of scientists to deliver a predictive talk.  In the course of this short book, Haldane discusses so many possible outcomes for the study of science.  A few were bound to be wrong.  Just as many of them were correct.  He was the first man to utilize the prediction that England’s coal and petrol reserves would not last  beyond a few hundred years, and provide alternative methods by which energy could be harnessed, and the soot and smoke of coal and petrol fires be banished forever.  His idea was that in the future, England would be dotted with giant metal wind turbines, which would rotate, create electricity, and then be stored to be used in breaking the atomic bonds of water, creating vast amounts of oxygen and hydrogen.  Hydrogen is the most efficient energy storage material there is.  Petroleum, gas, and even nuclear fuel, are not as efficient in creating heat and energy.  J.B.S. Haldane would have been excited to drive through the deserts of west Texas, seeing the thousands of non-polluting wind turbines creating electricity through renewable resources.

He discusses the vast difference in life expectancy that the medicine at his time had achieved.  Just a hundred years before his birth, a man was lucky to live to age 40.  He stated how this life expectancy shaped so much of the world in England.  A man, upon his death, would pass on his lands to his eldest son.  When a man lives to 40 or so, his oldest son will be around 20, and will have no experience of anything other than running the family estate/business/farm.  However, when life expectancy increased, men lived to 80 years old, dying and leaving their estates to men who were in their 60’s, had fully developed personal lives and families, and would likely not know anything about how to run the family enterprise, having had to make a living outside of it for 30-40 years.  These seemingly small things, such as vaccination, pasteurization, and hygiene, have massive effects on the world we live in.

J.B.S. Haldane continues on to describe possible future outcomes based on the expected progress of scientific achievement.  He discusses so many things, in such a short amount of text, that it is truly an amazing speech.  It should have blown away anyone who heard it at Cambridge back in 1924.  He even describes his use of Daedalus as his theme, for he saw Daedalus as the first truly modern human in myth, unconcerned with the will of gods, or the whims of fate, but instead using his mind and reason to make sense of the world around him and to control it.  Too often, his story is told solely based on the myth of his son Icarus flying too close to the Sun, and plummeting to his death as a result.  However, Daedalus was an engineer, an architect, a biologist, a surgeon, and so much more.  It is a cool reminder that myths are valuable because of the richness of meaning found within, and not just solely for moral lessons.  This would be a cool book for young researchers and scientists to read.  I think it would help focus their goals to the betterment of humanity.  It would also help them understand that, while we stand on the shoulders of giants, we ourselves are the giants that the next generations will be standing upon.

(This speech can be read in full here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/haldane/works/1920s/daedalus.htm )

We may in fact owe all of our planet's life to the magnificent Fungi

Fungal Biology in the Origin and Emergence of Life –David Moore (2013)

      One of my life’s passions is that I love mushrooms.  Actually, I love fungi of all types.  I seek them out after spring rains.  I keep my eye on the ground as I walk around the campus where I work.  I also keep careful notes in my head about what mushrooms are delicious and safe to eat.  I photograph almost every mushroom, slime mold, or lichen I find.  The variability is amazing, and many of them are outright beautiful to look at, but I think part of the thrill is that mushrooms are unpredictable.  They do not grow in orderly ways like plants do.  Finding a patch of delicious chanterelle mushrooms is great, but it is no guarantee that they will be there again next week, or month, or even at the same time next year.  Mushrooms are ephemeral in their way.  It is amazing to think that these overlooked organisms may very well have been the very first self-contained life to evolve in our world.  This story is the subject of Fungal Biology, by David Moore.

      Moore is a biologist, having recently retired from working on genetics and mycology.  If any human has the ability to understand the many threads that point to fungi as the initial role-player in the web of life it is Mr. Moore.  His explanations are sensible, even to someone with a limited background in mathematical or genetic knowledge.  The first part of this book details the properties of modern-day fungi, and how their cellular features differentiate fungal life from vegetable life or animal life.  This background is very important to understanding the rest of this book.  I learned quite a great deal just from the first chapter alone.

      In following chapters, David Moore explores the scientific consensus regarding the state of the Earth in the early days.  As he describes it, a habitat must have been created before the processes began which lead to multi-cellular life.  This habitat was a very different place than the green and blue orb we all live on currently.  Not only were there no plants or animals on Earth about 3.7 billion years ago, there were no cells of any type, or even oxygen in the air!  Only with the arrival of single-celled, photosynthetic proto-algae did our world’s atmosphere begin to be oxygenated.  In fact, most of this early oxygen “fixed” itself to the massive quantities of Iron atoms dissolved in the primordial oceans, raining down a silt of iron oxide molecules that created the world-wide layers of iron ore we have been mining for the past 1000+ years.  It was not until the flourishing of single celled plants in the oceans that the atmospheric oxygen actually rose to the super high levels that allowed the massive proliferation of land-plants, and the animals that lived on those plants.  This took well over 2.5 billion years to occur, a magnificently ridiculous expanse of time.  (For comparison, Dinosaurs lived around 100 million years ago, and the genus Homo has been running around the Earth for maybe 600,000 years.  Our whole current civilization is barely older than 10,000 years, a trifle in comparison)

      Before plants and animals came to dominate the Earth it was fungi that ruled.  They ruled for over 2 billion years!  They did not spring wholesale out of the ground though.  David Moore describes through several chapters what he sees as the mechanism by which life arose.  Many scientists have claimed that the first cellular life that we would recognize as such arose in inhospitable places, such as underwater thermal vents, deep caves, or volcanic fissures.  We find very hardy microorganisms in these habitats now, and call them Archaea, but these creatures are actually quite late-comers compared to other fungi, bacteria, and algae.  Moore posits that much of the chemicals for life existed in the vast aerosols that covered much of our atmosphere.  Aerosols are just particles so small that they stay aloft as they are buffeted by the molecules of the atmospheric gases. Each of these tiny aerosol droplets was a laboratory, mixing up pre-living enzymes, amino acids, lipid molecules, etc.  It only takes one of these billions to manage putting together a self-replicating molecule.  These aerosols and organic molecules would have ended up dispersing this material all over the Earth, resulting in a landscape we would never recognize, of rocks and gravels covered in a thin bio-film.  It is the materials in this worldwide bio-film that served as the food source for our OG organism, allowing it to grow, replicate, compete, and evolve.  I can only summarize what is covered in much more proper detail in this book.

      By the time plants arose, so many fungi existed that today 90% of all plant life has some sort of relationship with it.  Many plants are in symbiosis with fungi.  The fungus provides rare minerals to the plant through the connection of roots and mycelium fibers (hyphae), and the plant provides the fungi with simple sugars that it needs to grow.  Some fungi are predators of plants, and work more like parasites.  Still other examples see plants that parasite the fungus, where the plants receive the benefit but provide none for the fungus involved.  As far as animals are concerned, almost no herbivore animals exist that do not have a colony or colonies of primitive fungi/bacteria living in their digestive tract.  The very first herbivores ate tons of fungi unknowingly, and in many cases this became a deep symbiosis.  Without the fungus in a cow’s gut, the cow would not be able to extract nutrition from the cellulose that makes up most of what it eats.  All plant and animal life owe their existence to fungi.

      To this day the kingdom of fungi is overlooked.  Humans place undue value on animals, for we are animals.  We value plants, because so many of them are needed for our survival.  I think we should start to praise and love fungi as well.  We are here because they were here.  They broke the inhospitable Earth for us plants and animals.  Without them nothing in our vast web of life would exist, and our world would be just one giant layer of biofilms, exuding tar and other waste products.  I cannot begin to describe the amount of information provided here by David Moore, but I am very glad I ran across this cool and seminal work.  I hope it brings mycology to the forefront and helps shape the conversation for decades to come.  Now to go outside and look for some more mushrooms!

(This book can be purchased here: FUNGAL BIOLOGY IN THE ORIGIN AND EMERGENCE OF LIFE  )