Last night, four Honors students and I (and Lily) went to the meeting of the Paleontological Society of Washington for Richard Bambach's talk on Charles Darwin's geological perspective.

One thing I liked about the talk was the suggestion by Darwin that "The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen." (Notebook B, page 25). This strikes me as quite apt: trees are alive not only at the tips of their branches, but also all along the branches, down to the trunk and the roots. Corals, on the other hand, grow atop a pile of dead material, representing those individuals and species which are in the past. I like it.

PS - While I was Googling up the exact quote, I came across this intriguing looking article about the history of the "tree of life" analogy. Wish I had time to read it...

Labels: analogies, corals, evolution, meetings

NPR ran a story this morning about the destruction of Oculina deep-water coral reefs off of Florida. Thanks to a bunch (~70,000) photographs taken of the reefs in the 1970s, we can compare before and after imagery of the strange deep-water ecosystem. John Reed, of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, published a study on the reefs' destruction in the Bulletin of Marine Science. The area was trawled heavily for shrimp in the interim, and most of the coral structures have been smashed to pieces. Listen to the full story here.

Labels: corals, reefs