On Flattening the Coronavirus Curve

ON FLATTENING THE CORNAVIRUS CURVE...

NatureCITE hopes everyone is staying safe out there in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. As medical professionals have advised, wash your hands often and avoid crowds.

This situation offers many lessons about biological and ecological phenomena. Here is a video about different rates of spread. Interestingly, this phenomenon is not restricted to infectious disease, but is a driving principle of physics, chemistry, biology, ecology and more---even the formation of the universe itself!

Essentially, it is basic diffusion, which we tend to look at as rate of spread over relatively short periods of time. But the larger the scale at which the phenomenon is occurring, the larger the time variable.

This illustrates the relativity of these interactions. Molecules in your cells diffuse (minus cytoplasmic streaming) rapidly, but species over geologic time and large landscapes spread over millennia. In the latter case, rate of spread over time is often the biggest difference between an invasive species, a naturalizing species, and a species that is attuned to the dynamics of the system. Invasive species spread quickly. If it took Bush Honeysuckle 10,000 years to spread across the Midwest, it would be subject to natural selection pressures that would change it over time and it would "naturalize" before it dominated. It is a problem, not so much because it spreads, but because of how quickly it spreads.

Taking this a step further provides even more insight into ecological systems. When we damage ecological systems, we are essentially destroying the "diffusion over time" dynamics of those species that have evolutionary histories and dependencies which define stable, non-weedy, complex systems. Species go extinct because they don't have time to recover after damage, because damage is so extensive they cannot reassemble what they need to persist, or both. Ancient and complex ecological systems, the ones that matter most, are naturally slow systems, for reasons that I won't go into here.

In essence, ecological damage speeds the system up to the point that it favors the simple, non-community forming, short-term colonization dynamics of weeds and invasive species rather than the long-term colonization and persistence dynamics of sensitive, community-engaged, ecologically dynamic species. In order to get back to stable, complex, non-weedy systems we have to restore and maintain the historically relevant dimension of time.

In short, for the same reason that slowing the rate of coronavirus is important (so societies can have time to deal with it) we must understand, honor, and protect the speed at which natural systems heal in nature. We slow coronavirus by slowing ourselves. It is a great lesson, that goes far beyond coronavirus.

Stay safe, and take it slow.

Justin