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BIOMASS allocation of living things on this planet is a funny way to describe a cartoon of planet earth. But if I told you that my zoo inhabitants were 4,000,000 kgs of species A, 1,500,000 kgs of species B, and 8,000 of species C, you would really be none the wiser. This is the Sumo wrestler argument. Better to say I had 13 great apes, 3 ruminants, and 100 smaller monkeys. Counting noses seems to make more sense. View in LinkedIn

BY WEIGHT. "The biomass of plants on land has been estimated to be around 1,000 times that of animals." Autotrophs who derive their energy from the sun win by sheer weight. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150211-whats-the-most-dominant-life-form View in LinkedIn

THE PROPORTION OF AUTOTROPHS is part of the answer to the question of whether the fundamental fact of life is that "life eats life". There are some who like to count the accumulated weight of each group. And others who like to count noses. View in LinkedIn

"AGING evolved first to promote demographic stability." https://lnkd.in/du2zdbF View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend with a consideration of "nature red in tooth and claw", which is the ubiquitous -- and tiresome -- media message on any nature broadcast. This out-dated viewpoint needs to be modified to bring it in line with current research thinking. It also has social Darwinism influences, which are also rather past their sell-by-date. Time to refresh the message. View in LinkedIn

DARK DRIVER OF EVOLUTION. "Evolution advances by means of death (as opposed to the survival of the "fit")? That's a dark spin on Darwinian theory that I didn't expect to come across." All creatures die. Death is a synonym for natural selection. No evolution without death. No fresh genes without death. And even genes have life cycles. Even genes die. https://lnkd.in/ddsS3VH View in LinkedIn

RARE AND SUBTLE. "Thus, despite some undeniable empirical examples, the quantitative evidence from this meta-analysis suggests that this form of adaptive plasticity may be quite rare in natural systems, that the effect is much more subtle than typically assumed or that it is common yet existing studies have failed to demonstrate its existence." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12212/full View in LinkedIn

SPECTRAL INTERACTIONS. "The models of May represent communities with random types of interactions (predator–prey, competition, facilitation, mutualism, commensalism) with random strength of the interactions." Not just eating one another. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12080-016-0292-1 View in LinkedIn

DATA THIN. "Of the 58 studies included in this paper, only seven provided data or cited papers with data that demonstrated environmental autocorrelation between generations. Thus, the extent to which the parental phenotype is likely to provide a cue is surprisingly poorly understood in the maternal effects literature, which substantially weakens inference of adaptive function." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.12212/full View in LinkedIn

CONNECTANCE. "Robert May "showed that aspects of biological complexity, i.e., the number of species and the frequency of interactions among the species (“connectance”), constrains stability. The apparent contradiction between the notion of MacArthur and the model results of May has been a central focus of ecology ever since." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12080-016-0292-1 View in LinkedIn