Alien Worlds ep 3 Live Review - Excerpts

The original livestream was amputated by copyright bots, so I made a video with all the interesting tidbits and minimal copyright-protected contents. The amputated video has been unlisted, but you can still see what's left of it and read the original comments here: • Live Review of Alien W...
Watch the full version here: utreon.com/v/q...
I have been doing a livestream where I will attempt to take a closer look at the NetFlix series: Alien Worlds LIVE while keeping an eye on your comments in the chat. This will be on episode 3 (Eden) and to avoid copyright blocks I created a re-rendering of the interesting bits of the episodes using still frames, text-to-speech and public domain music.

[@ashenen2278]

I think the idea of a benefit of having seasons may be based on intermediate disturbance. There is just so much regular disturbance, so not just a few species establish themselves that are very effective in using the resources. That there is also some additional temporal niche partitioning. But it goes the same for other things like wildfires or tides. And still, there are ecological systems without annual seasons like the coral reefs or the rain forests

[@shaughnessyneal9426]

Since you asked, seasons produce K-strategic biomes in circumpolar and high elevation climes because they introduce periodicity to the annual cycle, such that low time preference/K-strategy is selected for in seasonally regulated ecosystems. Cyclical scarcity produces an adaptation that selects for the hoarding of food over winter months. No such annual capacity-strategic selective pressures exist in areas that don't experience a significant iterated flux in energy availability. Because the deep seas are also thermally regulated environments with little cyclicality in energetic flux, deep sea creatures are preferentially rate-strategic, like circumequatorial creatures tend to be, even though they're cold environments, which, in normal circumstances, tend to produce K-strategic populations. Some circumpolar deep sea sharks, which are not seasonally migratory, undergo a form of torpor over the winter, similar to circumpolar bears hibernating, so as to slow down their metabolisms while food supplies are low. You'll know this, presumably, from your understanding of the "metabolic theory of ecology," and of 'cold winters theory,' which is just a proxy for r/K selection theory. Also, where the ecology is vast, spanning relatively hot and relatively cold climates at different times of the year, such as it is for migratory birds and migratory whales, migratory plankton, migratory humans, etc., the K-strategic prerogatives that arise from seasonal thermal flux are, ceteris paribus, obviated.

[@shaughnessyneal9426]

This is basic ecology. You can read about it in Stephen Gould's "Ontogeny and Phylogeny."

[@Aethuviel]

It's a shame you had to censor the images even, but I think the mushroom-tree you speak of at 5:50 is a tree that looks just like a Socotra tree, I noticed it in the episode. On Socotra island, there are some interesting trees with an incredibly dense, mushroom-like crown. They look that way specifically because of their dry environment, so the dense crown helps water not evaporate, but sink down into the ground, to their roots. So I thought just straight up putting that design in a rich forest was a strange choice.

[@deathbyseatoast8854]

glad to hear from you again