Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jennifer Fuller, PhD Candidate in Music, University of Sheffield

The Barbican Centre’s 2025-26 concert season, Fragile Earth: Sounds of a Living Planet, brings the connection between music and nature, and its vulnerability to climate change, to the fore.

The chamber orchestra Britten Sinfonia embraced the theme with their contribution, Nature and Rapture: Recycling Concerto, which took place on March 12 and 13. The concerto was written by Gregor A. Mayrhofer for the virtuosic percussionist Vivi Vassileva. Together, the pair have collected and tuned an enormous battery of percussion from repurposed rubbish.

The stage presented a striking array of litter, including an enormous plastic bottle marimba, a wall of tuned glass bottles, discarded flower pots, cooking pans and a washing machine drum.

The first movement, The Happy Tsunami of Wealth, emerged with the crackling and rustling of plastic bags as Vassileva threw them across the stage. She then, with astonishing accuracy, used makeshift single-use beaters such as corks, plastic lids and coffee capsules, throwing them at the traditional tuned percussion and leaving them discarded on the floor. The music built to a dense sound, described by Mayrhofer as “an insurmountable pile of acoustic rubbish”.

In the second movement, Meltdown Meltup, the mood of the piece moves from joy and abandon into reflection, recycling music from the first movement. It also references the theme from Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question as recognition that we don’t have the answers yet, but we can’t just sit back and let this assault on our planet continue.

In the Plastic Bottle Cadenza, Vassileva performed a virtuosic cadenza with just two plastic drinking bottles that changed pitch as she released air from them. Mayrhofer and Vassileva have made something quite stunning out of rubbish. The beautiful sounds of the unique instruments provide quite the juxtaposition to the pile of used bottles, pans and pieces of non-descript metal with which they started.

In the final movement, Recycling Music, Mayrhofer continues to recycle existing themes within the composition. Several of these are taken from the advertising jingles of some of the biggest polluting corporations in the world – think soft drinks, fast food, coffee and communications companies. These themes weave into the performance like a musical naming and shaming.

The orchestra, soloist and conductor brought the performance to a peaceful close, quoting again The Unanswered Question, ankle deep in plastic bags, discarded lids and other rubbish. It was a visually and aurally striking end to a moving plea to take more care of our environment.

From the noise of pollution to the sounds of nature

The second half of the evening opened with a breathtaking performance of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra. Rautavaara combines recordings of birdsong, recorded in the Arctic Circle and the marshlands of Limnika, with the orchestra, creating an immersive experience of music and nature combined.

The first movement, The Bog, opens with two flutes calling and answering to one another. They’re soon joined by a recording of marsh birds. The movement evolves with instruments mimicking the birdsong.

I was completely absorbed by the sound-world, often unable to differentiate between true birdsong and the orchestral imitations.

Movement two, Melancholy, begins with the call of the shorelark, but transposed down two octaves, described by the composer as a “ghost bird”. This is accompanied by a chorale-like structure, first in strings only until it builds to a full orchestral sound that is almost overwhelming for a short time before quickly fading back to nothing.

The final movement, Swans Migrating, features the call of the whooper swan which builds to a cacophony of music and birdsong, fading in the final few moments of the piece. It is a beautiful expression of nature that was a striking contrast to the first half of the concert.

The concert closed with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 Pastoral, which is truly evocative of the environment. The five movements describe the countryside while portraying Beethoven’s emotional connection to nature.

I left the concert on a musical high, but also feeling reflective. To hear the sounds of nature as experienced by Beethoven, an early 19th-century nature enthusiast, in the same programme as the Recycling Concerto was extremely thought-provoking.

Musicians are increasingly using their craft to communicate the climate crisis. This potential to influence audiences in their attitudes to the environment is currently a subject of research, for example at the Influencing Environmental Values Through Music research group at the University of Sheffield.

In the orchestral music sphere, intentional programming to address the climate crisis is starting to become more common. Ensembles like the Orchestra for the Earth aim to inspire audiences to connect with and care for the natural world. Julie’s Bicycle is an international non-profit supporting creative organisations to take climate action in their practices, and in terms of engaging their audiences, and the Association of British Orchestras offers guidance to help orchestras operate sustainably.

If music can convey the message of environmentalism to audiences, as research suggests, then cultural organisations could be said to have a duty to take action. There is research that shows audiences for classical music are in decline and lack diversity. Further research explores the motivations of audiences attending cultural events: sustainability messaging could be a way to reach out to a new audience for whom this is an important issue.

Britten Sinfonia, with its innovative approach to programming and public engagement, is well placed to lead the way.

The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

Jennifer Fuller receives funding from the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.

– ref. A concerto played with trash: Barbican offers a masterclass in thought-provoking classical programming – https://theconversation.com/a-concerto-played-with-trash-barbican-offers-a-masterclass-in-thought-provoking-classical-programming-278482

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew Moscrop, Primary Care Researcher, University of Oxford

British children are not getting shorter, despite claims to the contrary. In fact, they are getting taller.

But this is not good news. When my colleagues and I analysed national data on child height, we found that the trend is largely explained by rising childhood obesity and widening inequalities.

Claims that British children are becoming shorter than their European peers have circulated widely in recent years. These concerns were often linked to suggestions that poor diet and food insecurity were harming children’s growth. But when we examined the available data, we found that many of these claims relied on incomplete or misinterpreted evidence.

To understand what was really happening, we analysed height data from the child measurement programmes that operate across Britain. These programmes measure the height and weight of children in their first year of state school and again in their final year of primary education. In England alone, around 600,000 children aged four to five are measured each year. Children aged ten to 11 are also measured – another 600,000 pupils annually.

Together, these programmes create an unusually rich dataset. The annual measurement of more than a million children provides one of the most comprehensive sources of child growth data anywhere in the world. Using freedom of information requests and official releases, my colleagues and I obtained all available height data from these programmes.

The pandemic effect

When we analysed the data we found two surprising results.

First, child height increased dramatically during the COVID pandemic. At first we suspected this might be a quirk of the data. School closures disrupted measurement programmes, meaning children were often measured later than usual – and therefore at slightly older ages.

But even after correcting for the children’s ages at measurement, the increase remained. The rise in height during COVID was seen among boys and girls, across levels of deprivation and most ethnic groups and localities.

Average height of 11-year-olds in England

Why did child height increase during COVID? The answer appears to be obesity. Obesity causes hormonal changes that accelerate child growth, meaning that obese children often grow taller faster than their healthy-weight peers.

Lockdowns are already known to have led to a surge in childhood obesity. Our analysis suggests they also led to a surge in child height. Among girls aged 11 in England, average height increased from 146.6cm to 148cm between the 2019–20 and 2020–21 school years, while the proportion of overweight or obese children in this group rose from 35.2% to 40.9%.

The second surprising finding was that even before COVID, average child height in Britain had been gradually increasing. At first this appeared encouraging – particularly because the largest increases were seen among children living in deprived areas.

But again the explanation appears to be obesity.

In England’s most deprived areas, the average height of 11-year-old boys increased by 1.7cm – from 144.4cm to 146.1cm – between 2009–10 and 2023–24. Over the same period, the proportion of children who were overweight or obese increased from 37.7% to 43.3%.

Similar patterns can be seen in Scotland. Childhood obesity rates have increased in deprived areas while declining in more affluent ones, widening the health gap between them.

Height gains linked to childhood obesity do not signal better health. Obese children often enter puberty earlier and stop growing sooner, and they face increased risks of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease later in life.

The role of inequality

These trends reflect deeper inequalities. While everyone’s access to outdoor spaces was restricted during the COVID lockdowns, poorer families face many other pressures that drive weight gain – and those don’t go away.

Children in deprived areas are more exposed to unhealthy food outlets and have fewer healthy food sources. They often have less access to safe outdoor spaces where they can play and exercise safely, and children’s services have been cut back – most severely in the areas that need them most.

British children may not be shrinking, but their growth is not good news.

Child height can no longer be assumed to signal good health. In Britain today, rising average height among children reflects rising childhood obesity and deepening inequality. If we want children to grow up healthy, we need to address child poverty, inequality and the environments children grow up in.

Andrew Moscrop does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. British children are getting taller – and obesity may be the cause – https://theconversation.com/british-children-are-getting-taller-and-obesity-may-be-the-cause-277917

Source: The Conversation – UK – By William Garbett, PhD Candidate in History, Lancaster University

A tall, well-built man saunters past a band and onto the stage. He is handsome and slick, the parody of an American talk show host. Magnanimously he interviews the band, only to cut off one guitarist, patronise another and upstage the saxophonist with a mimed solo. And so, Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård opened the 1,000th episode of the American sketch show Saturday Night Live (or SNL) on January 31.

SNL is essentially a variety show, with sketches, a bit of stand-up and live music from bestselling artists. Although streaming has revolutionised how we consume television, almost as many American viewers are tuning in to SNL as they were ten years ago. The programme – which has run on the US commercial TV channel NBC since 1975 – clearly has staying power.

Clips from SNL have long been available to British audiences on YouTube, and full episodes are often available on streaming services. But on March 21, Sky will broadcast a British adaptation of the programme. The received wisdom is that British and American humour mixes poorly, and the decision to adapt SNL for the British market has been met with some derision.

British comedy is sometimes judged too “acerbic” for American tastes. When adapted word-for-word for the American market, it can be disastrous (think the 2005 US Peep Show pilot, featuring Johnny Galecki, or the 2012 US adaptation of The Inbetweeners). Often, these adaptations require changes in tone to be successful. In the US version of TV comedy series The Office, Steve Carrel’s Michael Scott is much more likeable than Ricky Gervais’ David Brent.

Some American comedies are popular in Britain, and repeats of sitcoms like The Simpsons and Brooklyn Nine-Nine dominate E4’s afternoon scheduling. But, American programmes (and SNL sketches) can leave British audiences bemused, or even offended, as happened with a recent sketch making fun of the Mancunian White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood’s teeth. In my opinion, there are no good examples of an American comedy successfully adapted for a British audience.

No laughing matter

The format of SNL – which will presumably be the format of SNL UK – isn’t the problem. It is reminiscent of the British “alternative cabaret” scene of the 1970s and 1980s (in part inspired by a Los Angeles club called the Comedy Store) that featured young, political comedians and alternative music. It launched the careers of the likes of English comedians Alexei Sayle and Dawn French.

This movement ( which is covered in depth in the book Alternative Comedy by Oliver Double) inspired a British television show much like SNL called Saturday Live (1986-88). It made comedians including Ben Elton and Harry Enfield household names.

It is the glamour and the tone of American comedy that might make the transition to British television difficult, however. In Britain, there is nothing quite like the sometimes-comfortable American relationship between entertainment, politics and satire.

Many of SNL’s hosts – like Skarsgård – are celebrities rather than comedians, with Timothée Chalamet, Scarlett Johansson and Ariana Grande hosting in recent years. More intriguingly, politicians occasionally host SNL. The most notable example of this is Donald Trump, who hosted during the run-up to the Republican primaries in the autumn of 2015. But Hilary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have also appeared.

British comedies are less sympathetic towards those with political or cultural power. In 1997 and 2001, Chris Morris’s mockumentary, Brass Eye lured politicians and celebrities into lending their credibility to public information campaigns around fake but plausible moral panics. This resulted in the late MP David Amess earnestly raising a question about an invented drug in parliament and in football pundit Gary Lineker reading out some bizarre fake paedophile slang. In the last few years, Diane Morgan’s satirical Netlix show Philomena Cunk has confronted academics with the absurdity of their expertise.

Some British politicians appear on panel shows – it is one way to raise their profile or to humanise themselves – but it is hard to say whether this has ever translated into political success in the short term. A notable exception to the rule could be Boris Johnson, who appeared seven times on the BBC’s long-running satirical panel show Have I Got News for you between 1998 and 2006.

Last year, the leader of the Liberal Democrats Sir Ed Davey appeared on Have I Got News for You, but was taken to task over his failure to investigate the Post Office scandal while serving as minister for postal affairs in the 2010-15 coalition government.

SNL regularly attracts high-profile politicians, and Americans are used to seeing people in power on satirical television. In 2004, the progressive senator John Edwards chose to launch his (unsuccessful) presidential bid on John Stewart’s The Daily Show, while in 2008 Senator Hilary Clinton chose to appear on Stewart’s programme on the eve of the Ohio and Texas primaries (which she won – but she did not win the Democrat nomination).

American comedy is more glamorous, and while spectacle has little relationship to success, there is perhaps a little more deference for politicians on American TV. As former president Barack Obama neared the end of his second term in 2016, he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, delivering his thoughts on his presidency and that year’s election over a live band.

British politics is less spectacular than its American counterpart. It is difficult to imagine Keir Starmer (or even Boris Johnson) delivering an opening monologue to musical accompaniment. And, it is even more difficult to imagine British voters rewarding it, especially at a time when our politics is already saturated with viral moments and attempts at forced authenticity.

As a tried and tested format SNL UK will hopefully raise the profile of young comedians, but is it going to be able to thread the needle of American spectacle and British cynicism? We’ll have to tune in to see.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

William Garbett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Saturday Night Live has thrived in the US for 50 years – but a British SNL faces an uphill battle – https://theconversation.com/saturday-night-live-has-thrived-in-the-us-for-50-years-but-a-british-snl-faces-an-uphill-battle-277286

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lowri Sian Wilkie, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Psychology, Swansea University

With the Senedd (Welsh parliament) election due in May, Wales faces a test of whether long-term thinking can survive short-term political pressure.

In 2015, Wales made a bold move. Through the Well-being of Future Generations Act prevention was written into Welsh law, requiring public bodies to consider how today’s decisions shape the wellbeing of future generations.

It requires them to set wellbeing objectives, work across organisational boundaries and prioritise prevention over short-term reaction. Success is measured not only through economic growth but through health, equality, environmental resilience and strong communities.

Take Sian, aged 41, who lives in Swansea and was one of the participants in our recent study. She works full time, has two children, doesn’t sleep enough and had stopped exercising. After rising blood pressure and a health scare, she was introduced to a local community coordinator.

They met for coffee, then walked to a small Sunday sea swim. The first time, the coordinator went into the water with her. Sian was hooked. Through the group she met other women. She now helps organise the swims, and her children go to the beach in all weathers. What began as a referral became part of her life and community.

What shifted was not just her blood pressure, but her connection to movement, people and place. Our research on local area coordination suggests this relationship-centred support can strengthen wellbeing, confidence and social ties before problems escalate into crises.

If this type of preventive work is scaled back, crises may become more frequent and costs may rise, leading to further pressure on hospitals and social care. Health and social care already consume more than half of the Welsh government’s budget. With services stretched and more people living longer with complex needs, that path is not sustainable.

Politically fragile

Passing a law is one thing. Changing how an entire system behaves is another. Politics naturally pulls towards the immediate. Election cycles are short and budgets are set year by year. Members of the Senedd must respond to urgent concerns from voters. Visible problems demand visible progress.

Prevention, by contrast, produces quieter results that often emerge slowly and may not appear within a single parliamentary term. Implementation is also hard. Frontline services and staff are stretched. Legislation can set direction, but embedding change in strained organisations requires sustained backing, culture change and investment.

Public attention follows the same pattern. When uncertainty rises, attention narrows. Waiting lists, rising living costs and visible migration are immediate and emotionally charged. Policies designed to reduce future risk can feel abstract by comparison.

Psychological research helps explain this. Studies suggest that when people feel under threat, they look for stories that explain what is happening and who is responsible. These narratives can restore a sense of control, but they may also simplify complex problems into clear lines of blame.

For a policy built around prevention, this creates a difficult political environment. Polarised debate tends to reward immediate fixes and simple villains rather than the slower work of building the conditions that allow people to stay well.

The Wales the Act imagines

The wellbeing approach takes a broader view of health. Rather than seeing health solely as an individual responsibility, it recognises that wellbeing is shaped by social and environmental conditions. In other words, safe neighbourhoods, strong communities and access to nature.

International evidence suggests that investing earlier in community support can reduce pressure on crisis services. Wales is now exploring a similar redesign, but it will require leadership support and investment.

Research published in 2023 that had followed Welsh communities over a decade found better mental health in greener neighbourhoods, particularly in more deprived areas. Access to nature improves wellbeing directly and can also strengthen people’s sense of connection to the environment, which in turn encourages more sustainable behaviour.

These insights are already influencing local initiatives. Our work has embedded neurorehabilitation – support for people recovering from brain injury or neurological illness – into everyday community life through partnerships between health services and local organisations.

Ecotherapy programmes have been developed through relationships with locally valued initiatives, including community farms and a surfing charity that works with the coastline as part of recovery.

The aim is a shift from simply fixing what is “wrong” to rebuilding agency, purpose and connection. These are all factors linked to resilience and reduced demand on services over time.

Read more:
A decade on, six things the world can learn from Wales’ innovative future generations law

Our work also incorporates “biophilic” design – architecture that integrates greenery, natural light and outdoor spaces into buildings – into social housing developments. This work is re-imagining preventive health by bringing nature into our cities, offering residents an opportunity to reconnect to nature, tend to community gardens and grow their own food.

The goal is what we refer to as “sustainable wellbeing”, which means improving health while also nurturing the skills and mindsets needed for a more sustainable future.

Wales is making decisions amid overlapping crises, including widening inequality, rising chronic illness and the accelerating effects of climate change. In this context, the Well-being of Future Generations Act is either a framework for building more resilient systems, or a piece of legislation that is often praised but rarely followed.

Governments ultimately decide whether prevention is protected when finances tighten. But voters shape those choices too. A question facing this Senedd election is whether the Act continues to guide party manifestos, budgets and service design, or slips behind the pressure for immediate solutions.

On May 7, Wales will not only choose its representatives. It will also decide whether the wellbeing of people – and the planet they depend on – remains at the heart of public decision-making.

Lowri Wilkie is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Psychology at Swansea University. She is funded by the Welsh Graduate School for the Social Sciences.

Andrew H. Kemp has previously received funding from Health and Care Research Wales and currently receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, including support for research on biophilic living, sustainable wellbeing and wellbeing policy. He is Professor of Psychology at Swansea University and holds an honorary clinical research appointment with Swansea Bay University Health Board. He is a member of the Green Party of England and Wales in a personal capacity.

Zoe Fisher has previously received funding from Health Care Research Wales. She is employed by Swansea Bay University Health board and seconded to the West Glamorgan Regional Partnership Board. She also holds an Associate Professor role at Swansea University.

– ref. Can Wales’ wellbeing law survive the pressures of the next Senedd election? – https://theconversation.com/can-wales-wellbeing-law-survive-the-pressures-of-the-next-senedd-election-276121

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Andrew McInnes, Reader in Romanticisms, Edge Hill University

When Lizzy Bennet, the witty sister in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), asks: “What are men to rocks and mountains?” she is thinking about ways of understanding self and world through the notion of the sublime.

The sublime was one of the key 18th-century philosophical ideas of Romanticism, balancing our physical insignificance next to something majestic like a mountain, with our imaginative capacity to conceptualise it. Lizzy is trying to get over her own and her sister Jane’s heartbreak by thinking beyond herself to the wider world of nature around her.

The philosopher Sianne Ngai claims that the notion of the sublime no longer holds any force. Instead, today’s culture replaces the idea with concepts that have a weaker emotional impact on us, such as the “zany”, the “cute” and the “interesting”.

For big hits, social media demands zany personalities and cute images. And to say something is “interesting” might actually indicate that you find the topic boring. In her book Our Aesthetic Categories, Ngai basically argues that 21st-century capitalist society has no time for the ecstatic experience of the sublime.

Although the new BBC TV series The Other Bennet Sister – adapted from Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel – is a development and continuation of Austen’s novel, the programme steers clear of the sublime and the beautiful and focuses especially on the “cute”.

The Other Bennet Sister starts where Pride and Prejudice also begins. The local grand house Netherfield Park is being let at last, causing much excitement over the identity of the new tenant and the potential opportunities for socialising they may provide.

Focusing on Mary Bennet, the mousy pedantic sister who remains unmarried at the end of Austen’s novel, the TV drama quickly dispatches with the plot of Pride and Prejudice in the first two episodes. Mary is left standing with her mother and father as the rest of her sisters get married.

But Mr Bennet (Richard E. Grant) dies and the sisters’ cousin Mr Collins (Ryan Sampson) and his wife descend on Longbourn to claim the Bennet family home as their own. So Mary is sent to London to stay with her aunt and uncle, the kindly Gardiners in Gracechurch Street.

In London, Mary begins to to enjoy herself and have her own adventures, and crucially, find out who she is – if she’s not the witty one (Lizzy), the beautiful one (Jane), the good-humoured one (Kitty), or the lively one (Lydia). In this BBC incarnation, Mary is the cute, endearing one.

A different perspective

The first episode rewrites Austen’s novel from Mary’s perspective, with her cutting a lonely and drab figure next to the pastel couples of Lizzy and Jane, and Kitty and Lydia. Ruth Jones’s Mrs Bennet is transformed from a character beset by nerves to a woman with nerves of steel. She forbids Mary a cute romance with her optician, or from flirting with Mr Collins as the formidable matriarch has set her sights on him marrying Lizzy (who, of course, will not have the pompous bore).

The Other Bennet Sister makes Mary’s sisters seem distant and shallow, and focuses on her struggles with self-esteem in response to their lack of notice. Like Hill, the Bennet servant you can tell likes Mary best, you just want to give her a hug. In a neat twist, Hill is played by Lucy Briers, who played Mary herself in the BBC’s famous 1995 Pride and Prejudice series.

In London, Mary starts to overcome her awkwardness and self-consciousness under the care of the Mr and Mrs Gardiner, played with verve by Richard Coyle and Indira Varma. She nervously begins a romance with Mr Tom Hayward (Dónal Finn) only to discover he is already engaged.

The show hints heavily that this engagement has faded in intensity like Sense and Sensibility’s Edward Ferrars with Lucy Steele, though Amy Baxter, played by Doctor Who’s Varada Sethu, is far nicer than the two-faced Lucy. By the end of the fifth episode, before she is called away to look after her ailing mother, Mary has found herself in a love triangle.

Throughout the series, Mary wonders just who she is. The audience, along with sensitive characters like Mrs Gardiner, already know: she is kind, funny, caring and thoughtful. In today’s parlance, she’s cute.

There is a sublime moment when Tom tries to cheer Mary up from one of her bouts of self-doubt. He arranges for Mr and Mrs Gardiner and Mary to enter a secret garden, where he reads Wordsworth’s poem Composed Upon Westminster Bridge:

Earth has not any thing to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Mary is moved to tears and it is clear to the audience, if not Mary or even Tom, that when he uses Wordsworth’s words to describe London, he is also describing Mary. Again, for the viewer, this is cute.

It’s clear The Other Bennet Sister is shaping up to be a classic reimagining of Pride and Prejudice, transforming the overlooked Mary Bennet into something and somebody else: as bright and glittering as the Thames in Wordsworth’s poem.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org; if you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Andrew McInnes received funding from AHRC for the Early Career Researcher Leadership Fellow project, ‘The Romantic Ridiculous, running from 2020-2022, and thinking about the funny side of Romantic Studies.

– ref. The Other Bennet Sister: this fresh take on Pride and Prejudice transforms the overlooked Mary – https://theconversation.com/the-other-bennet-sister-this-fresh-take-on-pride-and-prejudice-transforms-the-overlooked-mary-278555

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jamie Thompson, Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology, University of Reading

This question of why some branches of the tree of life explode into thousands of species, while others remain small, has shaped evolutionary biology since Charles Darwin.

My colleague and I have published a new study of cactus flowers which may help explain the conundrum.

For more than a century, scientists have seen flowers that are specialised to a particular pollinator or environment as drivers of the evolution of new diversity. Our new research challenges that idea, which could change how scientists think about the forces that create biodiversity across the plant world.

The cactus family, exceptionally diverse and among the most threatened plant groups worldwide, offers a striking example of how some evolutionary lineages thrive while others struggle.

Cacti are icons of slow growth. A towering saguaro may take a decade to reach an inch tall and the psychedelic peyote takes decades to mature. Yet the cactus family is one of the fastest-evolving plant groups on Earth. Over the past 20 to 35 million years, around 1,850 cacti species have come into existence. Although this sounds slow, in geological time it is the blink of an eye. By comparison, about a quarter of the 415 other flowering plant families have five or fewer species. These plant families never branched rapidly like cacti did.

Deserts are often imagined as unchanging and unforgiving landscapes, yet they can be arenas of rapid evolutionary innovation.

Scientists have linked the large number of cactus species with pollinator specialisation, where cactus flowers adapt to particular pollinators, such as bees, moths or hummingbirds. Another idea attributes the evolutionary success of cacti to the expansion of deserts over the last 30 million years, as much of the Americas became drier and more open.

Read more:
Cacti are surprisingly fragile – and five other intriguing facts about these spiky wonders

Cacti seemed to fit this idea perfectly. Their flowers vary from small, understated blooms to large, night-opening blossoms. Some are pollinated by bees, others by hummingbirds, moths or bats.

Cactus flowers are fleeting and beautiful, often lasting only days, and are eagerly anticipated by devoted “plant parents”. Shorter flowers are typically linked to bee pollination, while longer, tubular forms have evolved repeatedly for bats, hummingbirds and moths.

However, my 2024 study which sampled many more species than previous studies, found that neither aridity nor pollination – the two main hypotheses for cactus diversity – was a strong explanation. This challenged a long-standing idea dating back to Darwin, who suggested that specialised flowers could promote the formation of new plant species.

My colleagues and I recently published the Cactus Ecological Database (CactEcoDB), which provides trait data and family trees for cacti, to help researchers understand their origins and future. When we analysed this data in a recent article in the journal Biology Letters, we found an unexpected pattern. We compiled flower length data for more than 750 cacti species, revealing an extraordinary range, from two millimetre blooms to flowers the size of a large dinner plate. This variation reflects adaptation to very different pollinators.

When we analysed the cactus family tree, we found that the speed at which flower size evolves drives the formation of new species, across both recent and deep evolutionary timescales. Natural selection does not seem to favour any particular flower size. Nevertheless it caused repeated bursts of rapid change across the cactus evolutionary tree towards different sizes.

What this means is simple but powerful. It is not the presence of a particular flower type or pollinator that drives cactus evolution. It is the speed at which the evolution of flower types occurs, regardless of the outcome. Species with smaller and larger flowers can quickly split into new species, as long as they changed quickly throughout their evolution.

Why this matters

This insight has implications for conservation. Our study suggests that a plant’s capacity for evolutionary change, important for surviving periods of environmental change and extinctions – like the one Earth is currently experiencing – matters more than any specific adaptation.

Protecting biodiversity is not just about saving the species we see today, but also about preserving the evolutionary potential that allows new species to arise. Some species may seem stable or unremarkable now, yet hold great future potential.

Nearly a third of cactus species are threatened with extinction. This is among the highest proportions for any plant group and we risk losing entire evolutionary lineages of cacti, not just species.

Protecting cacti, and nature more widely, means protecting an ongoing evolutionary process, one that allows life to thrive in some of the harshest environments on Earth.

Jamie Thompson receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

– ref. Cacti may help explain a centuries-old mystery of evolution – https://theconversation.com/cacti-may-help-explain-a-centuries-old-mystery-of-evolution-278227