Today’s date, 5/8/13, is mathematically very interesting… did you notice?

These three numbers are a part of the Fibonacci series! In the Fibonacci series, each number is the sum of the two previous ones: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 and so on… The ratio between a Fibonacci number and the previous one gets closer and closer to φ, the “golden number”. The properties of φ makes it appear in many contexts in nature…

A young Sitka spruce lateral shoot… also subject of the rule. Count the spirals and watch the videos!

To see how pine cones, terminal buds, flowers and other natural shapes are related to the Fibonacci series, have a look at this set of videos, they are great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOIP_Z_-0Hs

…Happy Fibona-day!

There’s a new paper in Ecology Letters on tree migration rates by Ordonez & Williams. Jacquelyn Gill has a nice write-up with some background that discusses the McLachlan paper we refer back to so often in the Aitken lab.

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_{Ordonez, A., Williams, J. W. (2013), Climatic and biotic velocities for woody taxa distributions over the last 16 000 years in eastern North America. Ecology Letters. doi: 10.1111/ele.12110}

_{Jason S. McLachlan, James S. Clark, and Paul S. Manos 2005. MOLECULAR INDICATORS OF TREE MIGRATION CAPACITY UNDER RAPID CLIMATE CHANGE. Ecology 86:2088–2098. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/04-1036}

And here are the same trees, a little less that two weeks later. Funny weather at Saturna this morning, it was warm (guessing 20 C) when I left in the morning and then the fog on the ocean slowly lifted and then more quickly, and more quickly, started to whip up the hills. I was freezing by 9 am. But it was still gorgeous. A small sampling of some of the species in flower now below:

And, for now, over and out.