A GLIMPSE AT THE FUTURE

How quantum computers may help us recognize and build more perfect ecologies

- JEFF COX

IN 2025, WE'VE LOOKED at keystone plants that support the ecologies in several regions of North America. As shown by Dr. Doug Tallamy, keystone plants host moths and butterflies whose caterpillars are food for other participants in the web of life, especially birds, so they're the foundation of a healthy ecosystem.

What if we now ask this: Given the many thousands of plants to choose from, which plants, put together in a garden or landscape, would support an optimally healthy and strong association leading to a climax ecology?

AN ENORMOUS TASK

To answer that question, we could start by listing the 557 species of moths and butterflies hosted by our native oaks (Quercus), and then start plowing through the list to see what other life forms are directly affected by each one—other insects, birds, reptiles, worms, vertebrates, protozoans and so on. This exercise would probably yield many thousands, if not millions, of associations. We’d have to rank their direct influences on a scale from very beneficial to very detrimental.

And that’s just for oaks! We’d have to do this for every plant and its associated animals in each ecoregion, of which there are 11. And that would just be direct effects. All the plants and animals would also have many layers of indirect effects. For instance, white oaks (Q. alba) in the Eastern United States provide food for the caterpillars of white-M hair-streak moths (Parrhasius m-album). The caterpillars in turn are food for black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus). Adult chickadees enjoy eating spiders, slugs and centipedes, among other arthropods and mollusks. And each of these small critters has indirect effects on their food plants and animal prey. And so the indirect effects expand exponentially into the entire flora and fauna that constitutes the ecology—unto the billions.