[FRIAM] Trees as wind farms.

Tue Jun 27 17:12:00 EDT 2023

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, <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> <thompnickson2 at 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-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2023 1:29 PM
> To: friam at 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? And I am just too ill educated to know it.
>>    Nick
> 
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