Weathering climate: telescoping change

As the scientific distinction between climate and weather suggests, knowledge about climate is supposed to be beyond indigenous peoples’ everyday experience of the environment in that it requires a long-term record. On the basis of ethnographic work among geoscientists in Scotland and West Greenland, I show that practitioners of this discipline have mastered the craft of turning ‘visible’ what is ‘invisible’ to the senses by playing with shorter time-scales. In thinking and communicating about the past, geoscientists would compress and accelerate long-term environmental processes, often at the cost of dissociating them from processes occurring at shorter time-scales, particularly the adaptation of living organisms. Attending to the historical circumstances around the development of this skill, I argue that it relates to an ideal of objectivity in science that corresponds to an optical understanding of time, inspired by the image of the telescope. Challenging the distinction between climate and weather, and the epistemic distance on which it rests, I discuss recent approaches in environmental anthropology that have uncritically adopted this distinction to distinguish indigenous knowledge of the environment from climate science. In conclusion, informed by research with indigenous peoples of the Arctic, I speculate on alternative ways of understanding climate knowledge, beyond the climate-weather distinction.     

Inquiring into the causes of depressed folivory in a fragmented temperate forest

Folivory is lower in forest fragments of the Maulino forest than in continuous stands. We experimentally assessed whether depressed folivory is related to a reduction in foliar palatability caused by the more xeric microclimate of forest fragments. We compared leaf anatomy at fragments and continuous forest for four tree species (Aristotelia chilensis, Cryptocarya alba, Nothofagus glauca and Gevuina avellana), and evaluated consumption of leaves of the two different habitats by insect species (Sericoides viridis and Ormiscodes rufosignata).Anatomy of leaves of fragments differs from that from continuous forest in at least one of the traits, for all the plant species. However, not all species exhibit more sclerophyllous traits in forest fragments. A. chilensis exhibits the greatest number of changes, being more sclerophyllous in fragments. In palatability trials, there were no differences in the consumption of leaves of fragments versus leaves of continuous forest. Therefore, depressed folivory levels in forest remnants of the Maulino forest do not seem to be attributable to reduced foliar palatability, suggesting that changes in the insect assemblage, and not palatability, account for reduced herbivory in fragmented forests.     

The role of diet in the metabolism of daidzein by human faecal microbiota sampled from Italian volunteers

The intestinal microbial transformation of daidzein into equol is subject to a wide inter-individual variability. The aim of this study was to investigate in vitro this transformation and to evaluate possible correlations between individual diet and equol production. The transformation of daidzein was investigated in anaerobic batch cultures inoculated with mixed fecal bacteria from 90 volunteers. The daidzein metabolism was monitored by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, and a chiral column was used to distinguish equol and dihydrodaidzein enantiomers. The obtained results show that daidzein was unchanged (≈27%) or degraded to equol (≈28%), O-desmethylangolensin (≈12%) or dihydrodaidzein (≈31%). Furthermore, some subjects (≈2%) are able to produce both equol and O-desmethylangolensin. Bacteria represent sub-dominant populations (10⁵–10⁹ cell/g wet faeces) in “slow” equol producers, while higher counts of equol-producing microorganisms (10¹⁰–10¹¹ cell/g wet faeces) were found in “quick” equol producers. The in vitro test to evaluate equol-producing status is quick and not invasive, and the obtained results are comparable with those reported in vivo. Indeed, the only enantiomer present in the batch cultures containing equol was the S-form. No significant correlations between equol production, BMI, age and sex were found. It seems that the equol-producer group consumed less fibre, vegetables and cereals, and more lipids from animal sources.     

Depressed Pollination of Lapageria rosea Ruiz et Pav. (Philesiaceae) in the Fragmented Temperate Rainforest of Southern South America

We studied the pollination and reproductive success in continuous and fragmented populations of Lapageria rosea, a self-compatible plant endemic to temperate forests of Chile. Pollinator abundance, visitation rates, flower abundance, nectar volume and concentration, pollen germination and fruit and seed production, were compared between continuous forest of 145 ha and four forest fragments of 6, 3, 3, and 1 ha respectively, surrounded by mature pine plantations of Pinus radiata. Flower abundance was lower in three out of four forest fragments relative to continuous forest. Nectar volume and sugar concentration did not differ between flowers in the two habitats. Pollinators of L. rosea, the hummingbird Sephanoides sephaniodes and bumblebee Bombus dahlbomii were less abundant and visited flowers of L. rosea at lower rates in fragments than in continuous forest. In addition, in vitro rates of pollen germination were lower for flowers in forest fragments. The number of seeds per fruit was also lower in forest fragments. We suggest that fragmentation affects the reproductive success of L. rosea, lowering the total numbers of seeds produced and possibly compromising long term persistence of fragmented populations.     

Biocatalysed synthesis of sn-1,3-diacylglycerol oil from extra virgin olive oil

Enzymatic synthesis of sn-1,3-diacylglycerols (sn-1,3-DAG) in two steps without isolation of the intermediates was investigated. Firstly ethanolysis of extra virgin olive oil (EVO) using immobilized non-regiospecific lipase from Candida antarctica (Novozym 435) was carried out to obtain glycerol (Gly) and fatty acid ethyl esters (FAEE). In the second step the ethanolysis products have been re-esterificated testing different sn-1,3-regiospecific lipases, both immobilized and non-immobilized, in different reaction media, that is in the presence of solvents or in a solvent-free system, for different times, at different temperatures (12, 25 and 40 °C). The lipase from Rhizomucor miehei (Lipozyme IM) has been the most effective among the sn-1,3-specific lipases screened.