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Local politics, the county, and the world, as viewed by Tammy Maygra Tammy’s views are her own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Bill Eagle, his pastor, Tammy’s neighbors, Brady Preheim, Wayne Mayo, Brian Stout, Former & Future President Trump, Henry Heimuller, Joe Biden, Tim Walz, Jerry Falwell Jr., Mike Johnson, J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, Kamala Harris, Trump’s MAGA followers, or my neighbor’s dogs. This Tammy’s Take (with the exception of this disclaimer) is not paid for or written by, or even reviewed by anyone but Tammy and she refuses to be bullied by anyone. See Bill’s Standard Disclaimer
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Healthy Coral Reefs
Healthy coral reefs are colorful and full of life. And under usual conditions, corals and algae depend on one another. The corals offer the algae protection and the photosynthesizing algae provide the coral with the components they need to make proteins and sugars. As waters warm, corals bleach, which means they eject their algae and they die. Then the area is void of all life. There is a clam like mussel that will still live in void areas and it is called a heart cockle because of the shape of its shell. These little creatures are a little bit tougher than corals. he structure of the heart cockle's shell operates as its own kind of fiber optic cables to channel light to the algae living inside it. It's a finding that may have both engineering and conservation implications. In a lot of shells, there are tiny little triangles where the light passes through. In some of the shells, it looks more like big zebra stripes. Some of the shells, they look like stained glass windows. So there's material there but light gets through. The makeup of the cockle shells have little windows in them, they stream more than twice as much useful sunlight into their interiors for their algal tenants than harmful UV radiation. Thus, they are able to survive where corals do not. Some cockle shells have mineral lenses beneath their little windows. What they do is shrink light into a beam so that it's illuminating more deeply into the algae-rich tissue that's doing all the photosynthesis. The lens also spread the light out so they don’t burn their algae or have too much light concentration. Scientists found that the mineral structure of the heart cockle shell, the calcium carbonate crystals were organized into long, super narrow fibers that were all oriented the same direction as the direction that sunlight needs to travel to get into the shell. Nature’s way in a natural organism that is guiding light basically thru its own fiber optic bundles to really help its symbionts attach sunlight. Some think that the structure could inspire tiny cameras with miniscule lenses or even improve fiber optic cable technology. So they are now studying them closely. How heart cockles manage the light environment for their algae and maybe spur from that to engineer new algae or new corals a little bit more resilient, a little bit more robust and save the coral reefs with the onset of climate change. This little creature evolved using solar energy in an effective way, better than science does today, we can learn from these heart shaped mussels. And maybe advance our technology in a shorter time frame, that of which evolution has taken the mussels to achieve over millions of years. The wonders of nature comes in many different forms, yet humans are still trying to kill off the planet with chemicals and greed. When we can learn from the other life which lives with us on the Big Blue Marble, we need to embrace all the wonders of nature, and coexist with them.
Tammy
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