Protea caffra subsp. caffra flowerhead towards the end of its cycle

After the spectacular event of blooming, the slightly sad and sorry remains of a Protea caffra subsp. caffra flowerhead have much important work still to do. This stage in proceedings is less ostentatious, but vital for the future of the species. The involucre now holds on firmly to its achievement, the treasure of developing fruits, particularly the seeds. Each fruit is a style holding on to the hairy ovary housing one developing seed. This is the actual prize, the hoard of seeds for potential new trees that may grow one day, maybe not terribly far from this parent plant if all goes well.

In real life not all seeds grow, but nature produces a glut for ensuring success for some. Life in nature is about keeping species alive. Therefore, some most procreate, the others are expendable surplus, still very necessary but their dying young serves the bigger objective, for something to be alive when all of the current generation is gone. The selection process favours the best placed for serving the overall purpose, the challenges overcoming the unsuccessful being the selection device.

South Africans sometimes think the proteas to be unique to their plant world heritage. The variety of proteas and other members of the Proteaceae family found in Australia, New Zealand, South America and elsewhere is, however, huge. This confirms the existence of the ancestors of today's Protea genus as far back as the time of Gondwanaland. When that vast land mass split, allowing the new, smaller continents to drift apart, whatever lived upon the separated parts of them continued to evolve separately, no longer in relation to their geographically lost relatives. The Proteaceae family thus constitutes a shared botanical heritage across continents. Within each land area, isolated from each other by oceans, evolution of all the living species found there continued and is continuing, now in new groupings of species threatening and supporting each other.

The absence of procreative contact among species allows for increasing the differences conjured within each of these now discrete ecologies. Species evolving over time in response to challenges change more and in different ways when dependent for some help upon other species also evolving. These interaction effects multiply when all the living member species in the total ecology change in relation to all the others, albeit in responsive subclusters.

Multiple mutuality comes to mind, to be gradually unravelled if data processing in multivariate contexts could crunch the numbers of measuring higher order interactions. This is one of the fun things we can’t (yet) do on as big a scale as interest might want to go. The distances among different sciences are bridged in multidisciplinary ventures.

Plants pollinated by differently evolved insects, birds and other animals, nurtured by organic materials derived from sources becoming continually more complex in groupings and separations, can make the biological universe expand enormously on just our planet earth; the only one where we know something about the life forms in existence. This might still be true although most evolutionary options remain dead ends, the unsuccessful directions attributes of newborns take die off before they can reproduce.

If humanity doesn't kill the biodiversity on earth, this process can expand astronomically, given the time and no more global extinction events. Diversity may explode in complexity, similarly to what is happening at increasing speed among the countless galaxies of the expanding universe where life may be doing its thing in untold ways, or not. Selfish genes can't be denied as long as conditions remain at all viable (Manning, 2009; Coates Palgrave, 2002; Rebelo, 1995; Rourke, 1980; iNaturalist).