Choosing a species for study

Now I am trying to choose a species of Pacific intertidal gastropod for my own study of phenotypic plasticity.  This will be my first independent field research project, and I only have the 15 weeks remaining in the semester to complete it, so it cannot aspire to anything beyond the cursory or preliminary.  Yet I do not under any circumstances want my research to be redundant, and therefore merely for the sake of field experience.

Do I want to pick an animal that we know a lot about already, or a little-studied animal whose habits either remain largely a mystery to science or are so banal as not to be thought to merit any study?  If I pick a species familiar to Science, then any observsations I make can be substantiated by the literature.  Any hypotheses I make can be either supported or shot down with further reading.  On the other hand, if I pick a species that has not been widely studied, I will have the opportunity to propose and follow up on deeper investigations tailored specifically to my observations and my research.

The biggest problem is that I am so unfamiliar with the field, and with field research, that I can barely even pretend to anticipate what sort of data I need to collect.  No, the biggest problem is that there are so so so many variables on both sides of the equation that even if I do choose a species, and appropriate characters for study, and I do collect good data, and I am able to find some kind of trend, the validity of any explanation I might possibly come up with for this hypothetical trend will be so frail and questionable as to be basically arbitrary and worthless.  But hey… that’s ecology!

Response to “Phenotypic Plasticity in the Interactions and Evolution of Species” by Anurag A. Agarwal _Science_, Vol 294, no. 5541. (Oct. 12, 2001), pp. 321-326

In this article, Agarwal addresses the possibility that phenotypic plasticity, itself being an evolved trait, may in turn be an important factor in enabling sympatric speciation and true genetic differentiation.  One obstacle to testing this hypothesis is that we do not know the mechanism of phenotypic plasticity: what physiological pathways are necessary for a gene to be expressed platicly?  To this I would add, are those pathways capable of fixing unique genotypes to express various traits that were previously expressed plasticly from a single genotype, or do they aid divergence merely by the ultimate effect they have on phenotypes of restricting gene flow?  In that case, will plasticity be lost once speciation has occured?  Lost or just unexpressed?

And, is the physiological machinery of plasticity a convergent or homologous trait? Perhaps more importantly, is plasticity an accidental (and self-organized?) by-product of the dynamic genetic system that was selected for and “pressed into the service of adaptive function” (Smith, 1998) or were those pathways evolved entirely through selective pressures?

Smith, Maynard.  _Shaping life: genes, embryos, and evolution_.  London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1998.

A question about Enlightenment

I was told it is bad form to talk about one’s enlightenment experiences, so I hope I am not offending anyone when I ask: Do people who have reached enlightenment still have dreams?

The ability to silence conceptual thought would be a huge gift.  But where do we draw the line between learning about our lives and obsessing over our circumstances?  Where do dreams fall?

Welcome Back!

Despite the inefficable ignominy of several huge Ws on my transcript from the last time I enrolled at Theadora University, the Administration has decided to let me give it another shot, this time with a revised course of study: Vegetables!

I have taken over the vegetable beds in  the back corner of my parents’ yard.  It has been well over a year since anyone has tended to them.  The soil is packed down hard and sprouting weeds, covered in a mat of dry leaves and blossoms from several seasons of lonliness.  The only plants still growing are a stand of brussels sprouts, towering over 6 feet high, the woody stems sporting sprout buds from the ground all the way up to the eerie cabbage-like blooms at the crown of the plant.  I cut them down with an axe, dug up the roots, chopped them up and put them all in the composter.  There were also two scraggly rosemary bushes in the shade, one of which I potted on what is going to be the herb wall.  The other I dug up and put in the composter.  Additionally, a heap of a tomato plant, with several blossoms and tomatoes of varying degrees of ripeness caught my eye and I composted that one too.  In february!  This is going to be a lot easier than it was in Chicago.

I worked all afternoon until it was too dark to see any more, listening to the new Beirut EP and good old Aeroplane Over the Sea on the stereo.  I think I went entire minutes without conceptual thought, simply lifting or digging or cleaning according to what was needed.  I’ll be going back to Warner-sensei’s sitting on saturday for sure if I can get myself to sit in private at least once this week.  My experience in the garden was an auspicious indication.