Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices

Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices is a speculative endeavor asking how we may represent, relay, and read worlds differently by seeing other species as protagonists in their own rights. What other stories are to be invented and told from within those many-tongued chatters of multispecies collectives? Could such stories teach us how to become human otherwise? Often, the human is defined as the sole creature who holds language, and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. And yet, the world is made and remade by ongoing and many-tongued conversations between various organisms reverberating with sound, movement, gestures, hormones, and electrical signals. Everywhere, life is making itself known, heard, and understood in a wide variety of media and modalities. Some of these registers are available to our human senses, while some are not. Facing a not-so-distant future catastrophe, which in many ways and for many of us is already here, it is becoming painstakingly clear that our imaginaries are in dire need of corrections and replacements. How do we cultivate and share other kinds of stories and visions of the world that may hold promises of modest, yet radical hope? If we keep reproducing the same kind of languages, the same kinds of scientific gatekeeping, the same kinds of stories about “our” place in nature, we remain numb in the face of collapse. Multispecies Storytelling in Intermedial Practices offers steps toward a (self)critical multispecies philosophy which interrogates and qualifies the broad and seemingly neutral concept of humanity utilized in and around conversations grounded within Western science and academia. Artists, activists, writers, and scientists give a myriad of different interpretations of how to tell our worlds using different media – and possibly gives hints as to how to change it, too

Photosynthesis in reproductive structures:costs and benefits

© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology. The role of photosynthesis by reproductive structures during grain-filling has important implications for cereal breeding, but the methods for assessing the contribution by reproductive structures to grain-filling are invasive and prone to compensatory changes elsewhere in the plant. A technique analysing the natural abundance of stable carbon isotopes in soluble carbohydrates has significant promise. However, it depends crucially on there being no more than two sources of organic carbon (leaf and ear/awn), with significantly different13C:12C ratios and no secondary fractionation during grain-filling. The role of additional peduncle carbohydrate reserves represents a potential means for N remobilization, as well as for hydraulic continuity during grain-filling. The natural abundance of the stable isotopes of carbon and oxygen are also useful for exploring the influence of reproduction on whole plant carbon and water relations and have been used to examine the resource costs of reproduction in females and males of dioecious plants. Photosynthesis in reproductive structures is widespread among oxygenic photosynthetic organisms, including many clades of algae and embryophytes of different levels of complexity. The possible evolutionary benefits of photosynthesis in reproductive structures include decreasing the carbon cost of reproduction and 'use' of transpiratory loss of water to deliver phloem-immobile calcium Ca2+ and silicon [Si(OH)4] via the xylem. The possible costs of photosynthesis in reproductive structures are increasing damage to DNA from photosynthetically active, and hence UV-B, radiation and the production of reactive oxygen species