[FRIAM] Trees as wind farms.

Tue Jun 27 21:00:39 EDT 2023

Thanks, Eric.  It never occured to me that plants weren't energy limited.

This is what i Love about Friam.

nick

On Tue, Jun 27, 2023 at 5:12 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu>
wrote:

> 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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