SCT: Another Design Word to Know: Phenology

Organisms must adapt to
seasonal change. They come well
equipped for year-round living.

Reprinted from Science & Culture Today

Phenology: The Science of Seasonal Adaptation
by David Coppedge
Science & Culture Today, May 20, 2024

Some sciences, like ecology, deal with relationships between things instead of objects. Groups as diverse as a biofilm, a biome, and a biosphere can qualify as ecosystems. Some sciences, like phenology (the subject of this article), deal with organisms’ responses to environmental cycles.

In Current Biology, Kirsty H. Macphie and Albert B. Phillimore gave a primer on phenology. It’s an unfamiliar science, but one we all know by experience. Basically, it’s the Farmer’s Almanac with scientific rigor.

Flowers blooming, fungi fruiting, insects biting, fish spawning, geese migrating, deer calving; our consciousness is steeped in a seasonal calendar of nature’s events. Phenology is the study of these recurring, seasonal life-history events, though nowadays this term is widely applied to the events themselves. From Shakespeare’s sonnet 98, “From you I have been absent in the spring”, to the appearance of seasonal events and migratory species in the oral traditions of Native Americans, interest in phenology is long-standing and transcends cultures. [Emphasis added.]

Living on a Planet

The life we know survives not on a flat map, but on a globe, rotating daily, revolving around the sun annually. Our ever-cycling globe, with its grid of latitudes and longitudes, subjects organisms to periodic changes in living conditions, sometimes drastic. Added to those motions are the sun’s declination cycle (height above the horizon) and the phases of the moon. How do organisms respond? Do they migrate, like birds and eels? Do they shed their leaves, like deciduous trees? Do they change their clocks twice a year, like some unlucky humans? Let’s examine phenology, considering what insights it might contribute to intelligent design.

Phenology intersects with ecology by adding a time axis. Macphie and Phillimore explain:

Across the planet, certain times of the year are more favourable for life than others. Toward the poles we see this in the extreme, with a stark contrast between snow and ice and long nights in the winter versus warmer conditions and long days in the summer. Moving to temperate latitudes, the annual oscillation in temperature (Figure 1A) and the duration of daylight is pronounced but less extreme. Then, moving into the tropics….

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Snowflakes, by Illustra Media. Click photo to view their short film on these “Jewels of Winter.”