Thanks, Eric. It never occured to me that plants weren't energy limited. This is what i Love about Friam.
nick On Tue, Jun 27, 2023 at 5:12 PM David Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> wrote: > My guess would be that plants are not energy-limited. > > At the scale of a leaf on a tree in a forest, or a fiber in a tassel on a > wheat-blade in a field, the delivery rate for wind energy is some tiny > number — I won’t try to give it here, because I will surely get it wrong — > in contrast to light-harvesting, which is capturing and trying to hang onto > little hand grenades. (The energy in any visible photon is about 10x the > bond energy of the strongest C-C bonds, so just catching these things and > not breaking the molecule is one of biology’s major innovations.) So it > may be that the complexity of using wind is large enough, and the reward > for the energy any given mechanism might harvest small enough, that it just > never takes. > > One could go into a long harangue about the various evidences that plants > are not energy-limited, just because they are a delightful enlightening > window on the biology around us, but it doesn’t really add to the main > point in the last paragraph (the way plants have moved everything onto > sugar chemistry because they are nitrogen limited, the ways C4 plants > concentrate carbonates because they are water-limited, or the fact that > green is blue in NM because they already have more light than they can use > at the water levels of high desert and mountains). > > Interestingly, the chemical free energy that wind delivers by evaporating > water and then moving it away from the leaf surface is probably larger than > the mechanical energy of twirling the leaf, though again I should provide > numbers if I want to make this guess. Or maybe you are already right: that > the twirling of the leaf is an evolved property somehow using the > mechanical energy, and we just don’t know the literature well enough to > know if this observation has been developed. > > I know the above isn’t a great argument, as it is reasonable to harvest > big energy packages to do big jobs, and small energy packages to do smaller > jobs, within the same system. But maybe (?) we would have to go outside > energy as a simple currency to understand what is or what is not captured? > I do think your example of water pumping is a compelling one, since we know > the problem is hard and plants need a solution, and we know from things > like leg-contractions to pump blood in mammals, that other organisms > capture mechanical energy sometimes when it is available. > > Eric > > > > On Jun 28, 2023, at 5:53 AM, <thompnicks...@gmail.com> < > thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Thanks Glen, > > I have no problem with agency in plants if you have no problem with > agency in humans. Plants even have intentionality, meaning that a world > can be described relevant to a plant's needs, an umwelt, if you will. I > like Barry's idea that trees are bad collectors energy, but why? Poplar > leaves twirl in the wind; at the nano-scopic level, there are all sorts of > rotors and turbines. The poplar doesn't have to collect energy if it can > focus it locally, say on bud growth at the bud next to the leave stem. > > > > N > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen > > Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2023 1:29 PM > > To: friam@redfish.com > > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Trees as wind farms. > > > > "make use of" imputes agency on the trees. A better way to phrase it > would be how/whether trees benefit from wind. But, if I'm a little more > generous, maybe you're asking if there are any transduction or energy > storage mechanisms triggered by the wind. > > > > https://bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3732/ajb.93.10.1466 > > "Touch, wind, and wounding all induced increased lipoxygenase (LOX) mRNA > transcription in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) seedlings (Mauch et al., > 1997). The mechanical stress induced response occurred within 1 h after > treatment, and the amount of transcript was reported to be strongly > dose-dependent. LOXs are involved or implicated in a number of metabolic > pathways associated with plant growth and development, ABA biosynthesis, > senescence, mobilization of lipid reserves, wound responses, resistance to > pathogens, formation of fatty acid hydroperoxides, and synthesis of > jasmonic acid and traumatic acid (for review, see Mauch et al., 1997)." > > > > Maybe? > > > > On 6/27/23 09:19, Barry MacKichan wrote: > >> I would think the energy is too dispersed to be collectable. At risk of > bending this infant thread … you reminded me of John Muir: > >> > >> It has been said that trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their > imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem so to me. I never > saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and > though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering > forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, > traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space > heaven knows how fast and far! > >> > >> —Barry > >> > >> On 27 Jun 2023, at 11:38, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > >> > >> Sitting here at the farm, watching the Normandy poplars bend in the > Southeast wind, I am led to wonder why trees don’t make use of wind energy. > There must be a tangible amount of heat generated by the bending of > branches. Is there no way to use that heat for, for instance, convection of > fluids within the tree? > >> > >> Or do they? 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