Capturing energy

With very few exceptions this energy is the radiation given off by our solar system's sun.

While we may enjoy its warmth, cold-blooded creatures like reptiles and amphibians rely on basking in its warmth to soak up the heat their bodies need to operate. There is only one type of life on earth which is capable of actually capturing this energy - plants.

They have the unique ability to trap the direct radiation of the sun within their metabolism.

This chemical process is known as photosynthesis and occurs within specialist cells in the plants' leaves.

These cells are known as chloroplasts and they combine carbon dioxide from the air and water with the aid of the sun's energy to produce simple sugars.

The plants may then use these to fuel the activities of other cells, for example to aid growth or store it up to use in leaner times.

Back in the mists of time, when life was barely a spark on earth, an important division occurred. Some simple life-forms evolved which found it was more efficient to just take the sugars made by others, rather than put the effort into making their own. It is from these life-forms that animals evolved.

Over the several hundred million years which followed, many millions of different sorts of plants and animals evolved through the process of competition between each other.

When walking across Puxton Marsh the other day this is what was playing on my mind.

There was such a diversity of plants, many of which specialised to the marsh environment but were from really diverse evolutionary backgrounds.

Ancient horse tails which dominated the forests of the early dinosaurs are growing next to the huge typhus reeds which are themselves evolved from grasses which did not start appearing until the time of the dinosaurs was past.

Feeding on both of these were molluscs first seen hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs, and other herbivores from much more recent branches of the evolutionary tree.

Of course, animals found they could not just steal life-giving sugars from plants, but from other animals as well.

From this, complex food chains developed with herbivorous animals being preyed upon by carnivores and these by other carnivores.

The energy first trapped by a plant may travel through many different life forms before being used up.

All this makes a natural place such as Puxton just so amazing.

It is mind-boggling to think just how complex this system is for an area like Puxton Marsh.

However, try I must, as it is my job to try to give these systems some resemblance of stability which will protect the natural balance which has evolved over the millennia.

The rapid changes man can now bring to the natural world can have quite catastrophic results for the ecology of an area like Puxton Marsh.