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"Once medical researchers begin to understand controlled coherent ultraviolet, visible, and infra red wavelengths in living systems, many diseases will be overcome using coherent resonance"Philip S. Callahan, PhD., 1987 |
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Everyone loves butterflies. They grace our planet with their beautiful colours, flutter into our view with ephemeral, glowing rushes of seemingly haphazard flight, as if drunk with the summer sunshine or intoxicated by the lightest air. They harm no one, even if they do occasionally like a little cabbage. They drink the nectar of our buddleia, congregate on beds of nettles, or hover among above tall grasses, epitomising deep summer and evoking the easeful serenity of bygone ages. A world devoid of butterflies would be a poorer place. Curious creatures. Why do they fly so zigzaggedly? So unlike the purposeful drone bee, noisily making his "bee-line" for the nearest source of honey, or purposefully returning, heavy-laden, to the hive. Virgil the great Latin poet, devoted a whole book of his treatise on farming The Georgics, to bee keeping, remarking that "when the golden sun drives winter underground and refills the sky with summer light they continually sift the woods and fields, gathering from the purple flowers and drinking from the rivulets..". In their sifting of the meadows bees use probably use their very short antennae. But those long twin antennae in front of the butterfly, what are they really for? Professor E.B. Ford’s classic reference work on butterflies, first published in 1945 and now in the Collins’ New Naturalist series, is one of the few which addresses the biology of butterflies, though their identification goes back to the seventeenth century. By 1710 some 48 British butterflies had been recorded in John Ray’s Historia Insectorum, shortly followed by his friend James Petiver’s Papilionum Britanniae in 1717, nearly four decades before the great Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae. Butterflies have always been special. When one considers that more than half the known 750,000 -1,000,000 species of animals are insects, very few boast the splendour of the Papilionina superfamily of which the Swallowtail is a creditable member. There are some 80,000 species in the Order lepidoptera ("scale-winged creatures") where butterflies and moths are found, but the moths occupy by far the largest proportion. Professor Ford lists just 63 British species, but comments that several species have become totally extinct since the beginning of the 19th Century, and a few very much rarer, blaming the collectors, the destruction of woodlands, and "the awful change from deciduous trees to conifers" as the prime reasons. By and large however, he feels that the butterfly has more than held its own in our increasingly industrialised environment, and many have extended their geographical range. Among those gone are the Large Copper (1848), the Wood White (1905), The Black-veined White (c.1900), the Mazarine Blue (1880), and possibly the Arran Brown. By contrast, one of the few benefits of global warming is that butterflies appear earlier in the season and further North than usual. One distinguishing feature of the butterfly is that they fold they wings above the body so that the brightly coloured side is invisible when at rest. Another unusual feature is the clubbed antenna, rare in other lepidoptera. "A notable feature of insects, well seen in butterflies", remarks Professor Ford, "is the pair of sensory feelers, or antennae". His view is that "The sense of smell is undoubtedly located in the antennae", but the support for this is not as robust as one might have expected, since "These insects are not capable of such surprising olfactory feats as the moth. Numerous experiments have been conducted on amputating the antennae but, chiefly on moths. However it is at least known that the scent perception of butterflies also resides in these organs. They seem in addition to provide the sense of balance and direction: a butterfly deprived of its antennae usually flies straight up into the air, as if it has lost its powers of orientation". This last observation is not lost on those interested in bioelectromagnetic interactions, indeed the very word antenna is that used for RF signalling and reception. Small yachtsmen will also know of its use in direction finding. Probably the entomologist most knowledgeable on this subject is Philip Callahan, whose heterodox ideas have earned him a maverick reputation. Callahan, previously a professor of entomology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, worked at the US Dept. of Agriculture but in 1965 proposed a remarkable heresy of how moths communicate which abandoned the idea of pheromones. Since then he has published several books including "Soul of the ghost moth" and "Tuning in to Nature". This last title was used as a chapter head by Christopher Bird in his co-authored work "The Secrets of the Soil", and I only wish I had space to reproduce that chapter in entirety here. Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins also wrote the famous Secret Life of Plants, mentioned in another chapter. Sadly Christopher has now passed on. He was an important man, and I remember with affection his gravelly voice in our many conversations deep into the evening on the Caribbean island of Nevis some years before. They told me,. Heraclitus, They told me you were dead. They brought me bitter news to hear, And bitter tears to shed. How often Heraclitus, how often you and I Would tire the sun with talking And send him down the sky. In The Secrets of the Soil Bird gave an account of his own meeting with Callahan at the curious open air laboratory near Wichita, Kansas funded by Olive Garvey where he was conducting experiments inside a geodesic dome to monitor infra red wavelengths broadcast by molecules. Bird reminds us that infra red was first discovered in 1865 by the astronomer Sir William Herschel by measuring the temperature of the rainbow colours emitted by a prism: though yellow was brightest colour, red was the hottest. When Herschel moved his thermometer beyond the red he was amazed to find that it became even hotter. Ever since then infra red has been associated mainly with heat, but it also has all the other properties of electromagnetic waves. You operate your remote-controlled TV using infra red, for example. Of course the notion that lepidoptera might communicate by means of infra red radiation (say 7-15 microns) is not new, because the lampyrids (lightning bugs, and other insects such as glow worms, and fireflies) clearly do at visible light frequencies, which have a wavelength of 0.5 to 0.7 microns. But Callahan’s 1965 paper suggested in the Annals of the US Entomological Society that the corn earworm moth used its own wing beats to heat up its carapace to a precise temperature which then gave off infra-red radiation in the range around 7 microns. This far infra-red region has both the characteristics of light and of radar. The radiation was received by the antenna of the male, who homed in to the IR signal, according to Callahan. Microscopic inspection of the moth’s antenna gave him further support: the hundreds of sensory spines of the Senilla chaetica and trichodea arrayed down the antenna were attached to cavities which, according to Grant (1948) would resonate at 6.5 microns. Grant’s calculations were actually for Hymenoptera (ants bees, wasps, sawflies etc., of which more anon). This was also supported by Callahan’s calculations that the resonant E mode at 34.8 GHz. of these cavities compared well with the calculated emission of the moth at 30.8 GHz. (The E mode of a cylindrical cavity has a resonant frequency that is dependent on only one dimension, that of the radius, the other two dimensions not being required to fit any half or whole wave configuration). Callahan makes the further point that there is a frequency "window" in our atmosphere between 7-14 microns, which permits transmissions at that bandwidth. He points out that the chances of a chemical molecule landing on the antenna are far less than the chances of the antenna passing through the electromagnetic field emitted by the specialised chemical, which could also have a specific resonant frequency in the same FIR bandwidth.. Do butterflies also use electromagnetic radiation outside the visible spectrum for signalling, just as they use the visible for the specific markings of their wings? Are they homing in to signals which they can detect only by moving from side to side off the beam in order, like returning fighter pilots, to establish the correct track? This very question was asked in 1949 by E. Hardy. His speculations would find weak support from the experiments which send the poor creatures skywards when their antennae are amputated because they would be directionless, as Ford observes. At present there are few artificial MW sources as high as 34GHz., but with the desperate drive for extra telecommunication channels, it may not be long before even these high frequencies are pressed into use. At that time we may be in danger of losing our butterflies and moths, and who knows what other insects as they can no longer find their mate and propagate their species. Moths around the flame are attracted there by the light, according to received opinion. But those same candles also emit far infra red frequencies. The sensitivity of the blind termite For almost his whole life time Gunther Becker studied one of nature’s most social insects, the termite, in his laboratory at Berlin-Dahlem, Germany. Termites are from the order Isoptera and they vary in the numbers of individuals in a colony from several hundreds to several millions, but Becker studied mainly a species of the Rhinotermitidae family, the Heterotermes indicola from Northern India. which can be kept separately in groups of around 500. These termites, like many others of their family, when leaving their nest or the substrate in which they live, build tunnel-shaped galleries from dust, faeces, and their own excretions, to protect them against ants, birds, from drying out, and most importantly from light. Most of the termites are blind and shun the light which they can still sense through their skin. Some of the colony have eyes (imagines and neotenics), but the larvae, workers, and soldier "castes" do not, and rely on tactile and chemical communication. Or do they? Gunther Becker’s careful and painstaking experiments over many years demonstrated that the termites also communicate electromagnetically. The way he did it has been little recognised by the scientific community, and his name is scarcely known in the bioelectromagnetics research community, but the contribution he made to our understanding of some of nature’s deepest secrets is long overdue for recognition. Some species of African termite build large edifices several metres high. They do so by starting from two separate mounds which gradually ascend into the sky. This incredible engineering feat is completed when the two quite separate towers are brought exactly to meet at one apex, even though the termites are completely blind. So how do they do it? Becker’s work provides us with important clues to the answer. To follow the responses of H. indicola to magnetic and electric fields, Becker constructed rectangular polystyrene containers and filled them with vermiculite and distilled water for the termites to build their galleries, together with pine sapwood in the centre for their food. He put separate containers together and noticed that even though they were separated the termites still only tended to construct galleries at the outside of the container, which would be natural since the galleries are for external pathways. Becker was able to eliminate any possible effects of temperature, chemical release, vibration and sounds, and by placing a glass plate between two sets of five containers oriented at right angles to the gradient of an alternating magnetic field to eliminate any chemical effects, he then showed that the termites clearly built their galleries as far from the field as possible, i.e. on the other side of the glass from the magnetic field source. When however an aluminium plate 5mm thick was interposed it caused complete disruption of this pattern, and Becker concluded that the blind termites were communicating based on either electric or electromagnetic fields produced by the insects (Becker, 1989). Since it is unlikely he thought, that they are able to produce electromagnetic waves, he supposed that the termites were producing alternating electric fields, and pointed to Warnke’s findings that this means was also used by honey bees (Warnke, 1989). Becker used a 50Hz, frequency and an intensity of 100V/m to produce a reaction among the termites with the same directional tendency. He found that when a colony was 750 strong the fields it emitted were sufficient to offset the influence of an air conditioner’s field in the corner of the same room. If the colony was less than 400 and the distance from the air conditioner less than 2 metres, however, their fields did not compensate, as demonstrated by gallery building disruption. The blind insects normally build galleries in a direction centrifugal to the source of the fields, in other words, away from the centre of their nest. They also align the gallery horizontally along the geomagnetic field, and when at rest themselves tend to adopt a position along the field axis. Becker wondered if they were not only sensitive to artificial EM field sources but also to the fields emitted by other isopteran termite species, and found they reacted to all other families of isoptera, depending on the size of the colonies and activity. When he put young cockroaches near them however there was no reaction. Activity was stimulated by the field strength of an artificial source: the stronger it was the more the gallery building activity. Moreover, although feeding activity did not correlate with gallery building, it did correlate with the 28 day rotation period of the sun, and is related thereby to the fluctuating level of the earth’s own geomagnetic field. An increase in the geomagnetic field disturbances reduces the termites’ feeding activity and vice versa. There were exceptions, explained when Becker found that feeding activity was especially high or low when the Z component (the vertical component) of the geomagnetic field was disturbed. Another termite researcher was Eugene Marais whose classic book "The Soul of the White Ant" was echoed in Callahan’s own ghost moth book title. Marais described how a female termite, after finding a suitable spot, would come to rest on her forefeet and lift three quarters of her hindbody into the air, remaining as still and stationary in this position as if a statue. "What is she doing" asked Marais, and suggested that "she is sending a wireless SOS into the infinite". The means by which insects find their mate has been a furiously controversial subject, with one particularly savage confrontation between Dr. E.R. Laithwaite of London’s Imperial College and Dr. H.D.B. Kettlewell, the first to discover that females lure males by emitting clouds of pheromones. Pheromones (from the Greek words pherein to carry and hormain to excite) can only do this if detected among the molecules of the air. Classical physics says that there is a number (Avogadro’s number) about 10 to the 24th power, when the dilution of any molecule is so great that no single molecule would still exist among them. Consider that insects can apparently find their mates some two miles downwind, and it becomes clear that the pheromone hypothesis has serious drawbacks. Perhaps the answer is a compromise: the pheromones themselves may be radiating at specific frequencies to which the male is tuned by evolution. These discoveries are very much in line with the better-known experiments of Frank Brown with oysters which when taken inland, still correlate their opening times with the moon’s phases, hence the tidal flows by their native shore. With a colleague F.H.Barnwell in 1964 Brown also reported that mud snails at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory Massachusetts turned away from a bar magnet when emerging from their enclosure, and followed a set turning pattern linked to the time of day. When they tried the same sort of test with planarians, which are far removed phyletically from the snail, they found a similar effect: at full moon they turned 10 percent to the left and at new 10 percent to the right. The mud snails’ metabolic rate was also influenced by the geomagnetic field, with a lowered oxygen uptake at times of high magnetic activity (Barnwell & Brown, 1964). It is clear from experiments like these that many creatures in our natural world are affected and indeed regulate their vital activities and intercommunication by electromagnetic fields. It is equally clear that their normal life styles are disrupted by them, to no beneficial end. Whilst one may not at first think this important, ecologists and chaos theorists alike are only too aware, from many examples, how very small but persistent changes in ecosystems can have sudden great catastrophic effects. Perhaps you don’t much care for or about the continued existence of this insignificant small termite Heterotermes indicola. After all it isn’t going to cause great calamity if the entire species disappears. But Gunther Becker made one final worrisome observation. Since the amount of wood consumed by a termite colony on any one day can vary by as much as twenty times, he was able to monitor their feeding extent very accurately on a daily basis: "A most remarkable fact was the correlation - including the exceptions caused by the Z component’s fluctuations - between the feeding activity of the termites and the daily human mortality rate in the city of Berlin (West). Figure 12 (not shown here) demonstrates the inverse correlation in time of maxima and minima in the period. It is therefore evident that the fluctuations of the geomagnetic field and its components may exert a decisive influence on organisms in general". The Bees’ knees Probably the most bioelectromagnetically researched insect after Drosophila melanogaster is the honey bee. Cultivated throughout antiquity for its honey, Apis malefic is renowned for its characteresque busy nature and industry, and for its kamikaze sting. Whereas worms and spiders cause many to recoil in horror, the bee is regarded by humankind with some affection. Ulrich Warnke has studied honey bees for over a quarter century, reporting their electric field interactions as early as 1971. He first points out that insects in flight, as well as birds, inevitably become electrostatically charged. For pollen-seeking insects this means that pollen yields are increased by attraction between the positively-charged insect and the negatively-charged pollen. In birds and mammals the electrostatic charge influences heat regulation too, because the individual downy feathers or whiskers are charged negatively as they rub against the outer plumage, and then, being of the same polarity, are mutually repellent. They thus fill the layer so effectively that air convection virtually comes to a standstill, and so the animal’s body heat is retained. In a clever experiment he immersed a bee as a negative electrode in a container containing carbon tetrachloride in which fine acetate filaments were suspended. When a voltage was applied the filaments aligned themselves along the field lines, showing concentrations of the field in the antenna, wingtips, and microtips. The high resistance sclerites accumulate charges on insects during flight, and any mechano-sensillae between these and low resistance membranes will be stimulated. As every honey bee arrives in front of its hive carrying its positive charge of several hundred millivolts from contact with the atmosphere, it adds to the internal charge inside the hive. Since every electrostatically charged body produces a defined alternating electric field when moving relative to a fixed point, then the possibility of information transfer also exists. In honey bees Warnke showed that when they are given charged sugars to drink, they attract a good deal of attention from other hive members. Such information may well be transferred by mutual antenna contact for by rhythmical movements of the animal’s body. The remarkable sun-dance of the honey bee reported by on Fritsch in 1973, where bees can describe the whereabouts of new honey sources by a tailwagging vertical giratory dance, may therefore also include an element of electric field informational transfer. According to an early Polish study different swarms have different internal resistances and they may thereby be able to distinguish between swarms by means of the internal voltage drop (Galuszka & Lisiecki, 1969). No clearer example of bees’ EM field sensitivity exists than their dreadful response to alternating electric fields. These appear to damage their information channels so that they can no longer recognise each other. This assumption is partly supported by Warnke’s 1973 report of aggression among bees when there is increased atmospheric activity in the 10-20kHz. range . On such days the return rate to the hive is also sharply reduced, even when the weather is otherwise completely calm. In 1976 Warnke reported his famous study of the effects on hives exposed to 50Hz. electric fields. The bees became very restless at about 11kV/m and the swarm temperature rose sharply. Defense of social territory was intensified to such an extent that members of the same swarm attacked one another. After a few days of the field’s influence the bees tore their brood out of the cells, and no more fresh broods were established. Similarly honey and pollen were used up and no more was collected. Bees that had been placed in their hives only shortly before the beginning of the experiment left the hive again regularly during the period of exposure. On the other hand bees which had already become used to their hives before the experiment began to seal up all crevices and holes with propolis (a substance used for Apia immune protection, and even adopted for use by human beings) including the hive entrance. Lack of oxygen subsequently led to the death of the incarcerated creatures (Warnke, 1976). Highly sensitive swarms already showed measurable signs of reaction when exposed to a 100V/m electric field (such as might be found near many domestic electric appliance), claimed Warnke. More importantly, he saw that bees actually need an electrostatic charge, not only for pollen collection, but possibly also for communicative reasons. When they are deprived of charge they begun wing-fluttering in a desperate attempt to recharge themselves through friction with the air, an activity which stops immediately they are supplied with an ion-rich aerosol concentration. The same concept was extended and verified by Warnke in his studies of birds. The response of the power utilities to these somewhat disturbing discoveries has not been entirely nonchalant. In 1995 the UK National Grid funded one £46,000 study at Birmingham University’s School of Biological Sciences to investigate electromagnetic field effects on dipteran larvae out of a total projects spend of £700,000 over several years (this excludes their contribution to human cancer research studies). Before their privatisation by 1989 their predecessor the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) had accepted that "A variety of effects, of uncertain significance, have been observed in cells, tissues and animals exposed to electric fields in the laboratory". In one of their first documents as a privatised company the National Grid in 1990 altered this text and made the further admission that "A variety of effects have been observed in cells, tissues, and animals and even in people exposed to a wide range of electric and magnetic field strengths in the laboratory. Some of these effects are useful to animals, helping them navigate or detect their prey, for example". By 1993 a press release from the National Grid was reporting a "Mystery Plague threatens Waterside trees", indicating that the alder trees Alnus glutinosa next to one of their largest substations in Canterbury were dying, their tips dying back and the previous year’s fruit still hanging from leafless twigs. It would be foolish to suggest that there is any causal connection between the substation and the death of the trees. But one speculation suggested that there may have been a change in the soil bacterial relationship with the trees at the site, since alders are one of the few nitrogen-fixing trees, and a food plant for a number of specific moths. With the bees’ angry response to electric fields still in my mind, I remembered a letter I had received in June 1992 from a prisoner in one of Her Majesty’s Prisons. It read as follows: "Dear Mr. Coghill, I’m trying to find out more details of the effects of high voltage powerlines on the human mind. I am presently serving a life sentence for the murder of my wife. I am in the process of appealing against the sentence. I feel I will have little problem in showing that the forensic evidence against me is false or in some way distorted. I had lived on a farm for 6 months prior to the death of my wife. The farm has 400kV powerlines on it quite close to the farm and I would often be working under or around them. The barn also had power cables over it but much lower voltage. I’d like to know if these magnetic fields could affect my rational thought, and make me more reckless, especially if already under severe strain.?" . The letter arrived while I was attending the annual June meeting of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, but . I replied in July that there do exist studies showing depressive illness and elevated suicide incidence in homes with high ELF EM field exposures. I suppose that no one has thought of measuring the field strengths in the home of the Dunblane massacrer. Fluttering the heart of a daphnia Far from The United Kingdom, a hundred kilometres south of Moscow lies the once bustling complex which is home of the Institutes of Biology of the former Russia at Puschino. Today it is a shadow of its former self, with empty laboratories, broken unusable toilet facilities, and a feeling of sad decay for the dwindling number of fine scientists still there, entrapped by family commitments or age from joining the exodus of their younger colleagues. Despite these depressing difficulties no visitor can help but marvel at the technical excellence of the place, and the high quality of the work still being done there. Oleg Kolomytkin, Dr Marie Kondrashova and her colleagues working on mitochondrial effects, the world status muscle physiologist Valeri Lednev, and brilliant physicist Mikhael Zhadin were some of my hosts when I visited the place in May 1995 in the pleasant company of Abe Liboff from Oakland University and Frank Barnes from Colorado. Breakfast cost 10p. as I recall, for the rouble had not long before collapsed to one tenth of its previous value. Here in 1991 at the Institute of Cell Biophysics two colleagues N.K.Cheneris and V.G. Safronova were examining the effects of alternating magnetic fields on a water flea, Daphnia magna, which belongs to the suborder of Crustaceans. Like so many of the Puschino output their results were reported in English version of Biofizika (not to be confused with Biophysics journal). The heart’s pumping action of any creature is controlled by its own endogenous electric fields. The daphnia was placed in a conical glass tube one end of which was too small for it to pass through, and the live animal was held there by a gentle stream of the same aquarium water in which it normally lived. Through the optical inspection system it was possible to see its tiny heart beating quite clearly, just as one can see the individual blood cells flowing through the veins and arteries of a tadpole’s diaphanous tail. By positioning a photodiode at the right point of a 20x lens system the daphnia heart’s regular fluctuations could be monitored. In a steady 21microtesla magnetic field the heart showed no tendency to fluctuations in its period of cardiac contraction during ten minutes of observation. When a 16Hz. field of 140microtesla was superimposed, however, and a Fast Fourier Transform analysis of the data made, the exposed heart was seen to be rising and falling as a result of the imposed field. The unexposed heart showed no such fluctuation. After two hours the heart fluctuations returned to normal, showing evidence of some kind of adaptive response (Chemeris & Safronova, 1993). So even one of nature’s tiniest creatures is affected by alternating magnetic fields. HIV: Nature’s roaming radar antenna? Even tinier without doubt is the virus associated with AIDS. Philip Callahan was among the first to remark that this virus looks very much like a certain kind of antenna, and that maybe this fact might be taken into account in devising a novel stratagem to eliminate it. I still have to see any real evidence that this virus, unusually in biology named after its alleged function rather than its simple description, is actually a causal factor rather than merely an associated concomitant of human immunodeficiency, but that is addressed in another part of this book. What intrigued and shocked Callahan, who is an expert on antenna design as well as an entomologist, was a picture of the HIV virus in a 1987 Scientific American article by Robert Gallo. From its globular surface at regular 13 degree intervals throughout the plasma membrane of its structure protrude glycoprotein rods (GP 41) with large spherical structures (GP120) at their extremities. This strongly reminded Callahan of a top-hat dipole antenna, as laid out in a VOR Doppler aircraft navigation system used at (e.g.) Atlanta airport.. The first oscillating transmitter designed by Heinrich Hertz was composed of two wires each connected to an adjustable sphere at one end, with the spark gap formed at the proximity of their other ends. The function of these spheres was to collect and bunch up the waves to create standing waves along the wire. By measuring the distance between the standing waves Hertz could determine the velocity of the wave. When many such antennae are embedded in a surface with a low dielectric constant (say 2-4) they create a dielectric antenna, which can receive signals from one or more directions, thereby identifying the spatial source of the signal. A dielectric antenna is quite different from the di-pole or mono-pole aerials we see used for radio transmission or reception. Almost all biological materials have low dielectric constants and therefore are suitable for high frequency signal reception and transmission The blood vessels with their steady stream of blood flowing along them, are ideally adapted for use as waveguides, just as a stream of water can bend a ray of light passing down its length: the light follows the narrow jet. Since the HIV virus is carried in blood and only transmitted via blood or other body fluids, Callahan reasoned that its specific communications system allows it to home in on lymphocytes, though whether the lymphocyte is also emitting a homing signal, hence acting as an omni transmitter for the virus, is not clear. Callahan conducted some experiments with models of a top hat antenna which suggested that the HIV virion when still outside the lymphocyte is transmitting to the lymphocyte, and not the other way around. Based on this, he proposed that one way to deal with the virus would be to jam its signal. Given the dimensions of the antenna components which have been well characterised, a signal in the IR frequency range would fit the bill, and this was borne out by a 1985 paper in the Lancet which reported how heat (which is in the IR frequency range) could inactivate the HIV virus (Spire, Dormont et al., 1985). Because the temperature increase would be more than one could endure, Callahan recommended that an operation to rid blood of HIV would have to be treated by means of extracorporeal dialysis. A similar conclusion was reached by another maverick scientist, Robert Strecher who declaimed in his video Memorandum that the HIV was deliberately engineered by US Government agencies. The same idea was adopted by another clinician William Logan, with apparently good though expensive results. Hulda Clark reported in her book The Cure for All Diseases that she has successfully extended the same principle to many other bacteria and viruses, but zaps them at very specific frequencies much lower than IR. Unfortunately she does not get into the detail of the mechanism or how these specific frequencies relate to the viral or bacterial resonances. The frequencies, mainly in the KHz. bandwidth, seem too low to be the resonant frequencies for microbes. Nature’s choral symphotony I’m not sure that the word symphotony exists. What I want it to mean is the visible light equivalent of symphony. And why I want to use it is to describe the incredible synchrony of flashes achieved by the certain members of the two thousand strong Lampyridae family. The familiar fireflies flitting over our evening lawns fantastical are cousins to Asian species mostly of the genus Pteroptyx, according to a Scientific American article in 1976, which have learned to flash in unison. Sixty years ago an American biologist Hugh Smith recorded his impressions of the sight he had witnessed in Thailand: "Imagine a tree thirty-five to forty feet high thickly covered with small ovate leaves, apparently with a firefly on every leaf and all the fireflies flashing in perfect unison at the rate of two to three times a second, the tree being in complete darkness between flashes...Imagine a tenth of a mile of river bank with an unbroken line of mangrove trees with fireflies on every leaf flashing in synchronism, the insects on the trees at the ends of the line acting in perfect unison with those in between...Then if one’s imagination is sufficiently vivid, he may form some conception of this amazing spectacle". As the authors of the Scientific American article ask: "What has been irresistible to naturalist and layman alike are the questions of how and why". They point out that synchronies are rarely seen in nature: such group repetitions are confined to man, a few kinds of crickets, the occasional bullfrog, and these fireflies, whose habitat lies far from the powerlines of civilisation (Buck & Buck, 1976). Authorities on bioluminescence argue over the answers to both questions, but all agree it is not simply an imagined synchrony, fashioned by the human brain’s tendency to group stimuli. The evidence is on film thanks it an ingenious technique of using high speed film with an open shutter camera. This bright idea of Jean Marie Bassot and Ivan Polunin of the University of Singapore proved that the flashes were synchronised with an accuracy of 20 milliseconds. It is also established that only the males flash, and they maintain a respectful distance from each other, for if one comes too close it is repelled by the others. Depending on the species the flashes vary: for the Thailand Pteroptyx malaccae it is 560 milliseconds, whereas P. cribellata flashes at about one second. But they can be entrained by artificial signals too, this taking only one or two cycles to achieve, and ceasing after the stimulus is stopped, when the animals revert to their normal frequency. So what is going on here? Answers in terms of electrical models are difficult to avoid: the effect is so like the recharging and discharging of a capacitor that one is tempted to look around these animals’ physiology to find out not if but where the mechanism lies. So far the answer has eluded biologists and bioelectromagnetics scientists have scarcely heard of the phenomenon. That different species flash at different rates may be an indicator of which light the female should head for, and which avoid. In general though, for once we do not have any answers. The observation that insects are communicating in a very sophisticated way, for some unknown reason, and by means of ULF electromagnetic signals is almost an answer in itself. |