nature of odds

Courtesy a stranger, its beginning to intrigue me no extent to see numbers manifesting forms and shapes, acting like recurring patterns to fit form to function.

the recent visit to the Bor wildlife sanctuary, and  my recent exploration of numbers coincided and everything that our eyes spotted, searched for numerical phenomenons breathing beneath. Well, agreed, when i say number in nature, Geometry gets automatically applied.

To briefly tell you about this forest, which has got nothing to do with my latest fetish, is one of the least explored forests in the southwestern range of Satpura ranges, located at Hingni in Wardha, Maharashtra.

It covers a modest area of 61 sq km. Covered with southern mixed dry deciduous forest, thickly fencing a widespread lake. An aerial view of this place will be no less than that of the Christmas door wreath, and quite metaphorically made of the greens, to symbolize strength, as the perennial lake lasts even throughout the harshest summer of Vidharbh region.

Tigers, Leopards, blue bulls, spotted deer, sambars, peacocks, barking deers, langurs, wild boars, bears and wild dogs are all in their most naturally expressed selves. Green pastures on the banks of the lake are like a platter of feast for the 12 tigers inhabiting here. In many ways, Bor is like the little sister of Tadoba and you got to visit her to believe me.

Meanwhile, let me see, how best can i introduce you to this forest, through numbers and geometry. We explored the forest cover for mapping transects and pugmark pads. Until now, numbers that i came across, were seen less in wilderness, but more in our gadgets, was amazed to see the live functioning of a GPS and what a fantastic tool AKA blessing it is for foresters. We in no time could create a very resourceful map of and for the sanctuary.

To begin with Birds. we sighted multiples of approx. 79 species of birds across three days. Not bad at all. Interestingly, on every safari, we often sighted same winged individuals, at same location and in exactly same posture, followed to the very same clicks of our camera, like some Déjà vu.
A deeper look at all that i spotted, from colours of birds to shapes of leaves, structure of seeds, stripes of tigers, spots of cheetals, barks of trees, cones of pine, spirals of antlers, nodes of twigs, phew. its almost breathless. It all displayed only patterns- beneath inbuilt geometry - beneath evolutionary mathematics, which seemed to have worked for eons, after a whole lot of trial and error. now functioning almost as a cosmic sigma.

This forest is brimming with diversity, each of it individually is encased in series of numbers, to manifest beautiful shapes, all of which fits perfectly for what is required to perform, individually at macro level and ecologically at micro level. Look at the photo on to your rights and lefts

The thing that is common in all these, is in their arrangement of their leaves, flowers, seeds and in some cases even barks.

Why do these arrangements occur? The reason for seeds seems to be that this arrangement forms an optimal packing of the seeds so that, no matter how large the seed head, they are uniformly packed at any stage, all the seeds being the same size, no crowding in the centre and not too sparse at the edges.

In the case of leaf arrangement, or phyllotaxis, some of the cases may be related to maximizing the space for each leaf, or the average amount of light falling on each one. When new leaves grow from a plant, they grow in a spiral around the plant's stem. Nature spaces the leaves in this way so that higher leaves do not shade the lower leaves too much from sunlight.

The number of turns in the spiral (from leaf to leaf) and the number of leaves that exist in the pattern in all cases express a Fibonacci fraction and therefore a Fibonacci ratio.

The same pattern repeats again and again as the plant grows. In the case of close-packed leaves in cabbages and succulents the correct arrangement may be crucial for availability of space. So nature isn't trying to use the Fibonacci numbers: they are appearing as a by-product of a deeper physical process.

That is why the spirals are imperfect. The plant is responding to physical constraints, not to a mathematical rule. hmm. that explains a lot!