Volume 1, Issue 4 · June 2025

Summer 2025

Organisms doing things they are not supposed to be able to do. A tree that profits from being struck by lightning, a fish that gets physically shorter to survive a heatwave, and a desert lizard that crossed eight thousand kilometres of open Pacific on a raft of weeds.

6 articles, in the order the club meant them to be read.

1. 1

   Original ResearchSummer 2025

   Spots, Stripes and the Two Chemicals That Might Explain Both

   In 1952 Alan Turing proposed that two substances reacting and diffusing at different rates could turn a uniform sheet into a patterned one with no template anywhere. We tested the mechanism by integrating the Gray-Scott system on a periodic 256 256 grid, and nothing here was observed in an organism or a beaker, because the club has no laboratory and the computation is the experiment. We derived the Turing conditions

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2. 2

   Original ResearchSummer 2025

   Why Frost, Coral and Copper Deposits All Grow the Same Shape

   Branched, feathery growth turns up in places that share almost no physics, and the club wanted to know whether the family resemblance survives being measured rather than merely admired. We implemented diffusion-limited aggregation on a square lattice and grew six independent clusters of 50,000 particles , plus 192,000 further particles in a sticking-probability sweep and an algorithmic control, for 492,000 particles

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3. 3

   ReplicationSummer 2025

   A Planet of Daisies That Regulates Its Own Temperature

   In 1983 Andrew Watson and James Lovelock published a planet made of black and white daisies, to answer the charge that Gaia required the biosphere to plan ahead [3]. We re-implemented their model, swept the solar luminosity from 0.6 to 1.6 times present in 501 steps, integrated to steady state at each, and observed nothing whatever, since the computation is the experiment and no planet, daisy, or physical measurement

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4. 4

   Paper AnalysisTropical Ecology

   The Tree That Wants to Be Struck by Lightning

   For a century, lightning has been filed under damage . In March 2025 a team working in central Panama filed it under strategy . A custom lightning-location array pinned down 93 struck trees , and the crews then went and looked at every one of them, which is how ten strikes on Dipteryx oleifera , the tonka bean, came to be recorded as doing negligible damage while 64% of struck trees of other species were dead within

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5. 5

   Paper AnalysisMarine Physiology

   Clownfish Shrink to Survive Heatwaves, Actually Shorter, Not Just Thinner

   A bony vertebrate is supposed to get longer, or hold still. Reversing is not on the menu. During the marine heatwave that hit Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea in 2023, Melissa Versteeg and colleagues measured 134 wild clown anemonefish six times over five lunar months. A hundred of them got shorter. Shrinking raised an individual's survival probability by as much as 78 percent . Pairs where both partners shrank did better

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6. 6

   Paper AnalysisBiogeography

   Eight Thousand Kilometres on a Raft of Weeds: How Iguanas Reached Fiji

   Fiji has iguanas. Nothing else in the Pacific does, and the family is otherwise an American one, so for a century the four Fijian species were explained away as leftovers from a vanished southern supercontinent or as the end of a long chain of island hops from South America. In March 2025 a team led by Simon Scarpetta sequenced more than four thousand genetic loci and found the closest living relative of the Fijian i

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