Week 10: Diversity

Diversity of Species

As I look around my house, here's what I see, or see evidence of:

Four humans
one dog
hopefully no rats under the house, but we used to have them
house plants
daddy long legs in the tub
fish
yeast in the fridge
hopefully solely beneficial bacteria in our bodies
dust mites (my husband is allergic so I know they are here)

Outside the window, there are:
monterey pine tree
various bushes, all evergreen
blossoming tree (don't know what kind)
blossoming fruit trees: apples, nectarines, oranges, grape vine, lemon
ivy everywhere (ugh)
flowers
myrtle, which has another name here
rolie polie bugs
squirrels
birds
at night, I hear an owl
no bees right now
bacteria in the pool (probably, as I learned below)
spider web


Cell Links
I really learned a lot from the one entitled Bacterial cell structure. I liked the graphic and the narrative that goes along with it. I thought it was particulalry interesting that some bacteria live in super salty pools, and in boiling water!!! I thought it was practically a God-given tenet that boiling water had no bacteria in it. I guess it doesn't hurt you.

I recently read an article about microbes and their incredible diversity. There are so many more of them than there are of all other species combined. Here's a beautiful quote:

In the poetic conclusion to his 1994 autobiography, Naturalist, the great sociobiologist and Pellegrino University Professor emeritus E.O. Wilson mused on what he would do, “[i]f I could do it all over again and relive my vision in the twenty-first century. I would be a microbial ecologist...,” he wrote. “Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs. All this, and I need venture no farther than ten paces outside my laboratory building. The jaguars, ants, and orchids would still occupy distant forests in all their splendor, but now they would be joined by an even stranger and vastly more complex living world virtually without end.”



If you want to read more, here's the link:
http://harvardmagazine.com/2007/11/the-undiscovered-planet.html