The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World

by Mark Spitznagel

The Chiltern-Mt. Pilot National Park in northwestern Victoria, Australia, is home to a diverse mix of wildlife. What drew botany researchers to the park, from 2004 to 2010, was the opportunity to test the slow-seedling hypothesis in a unique laboratory-like environment with two distinct samples: a control group of conifers in a largely homogeneous stand and another comingled group of conifers and angiosperms seeded together. Specifically, botanists studied the interaction between a type of conifer known as callitris, related to cypress trees, and eucalyptus, the angiosperm that populates the park’s extensive forests, both of which had reseeded in the park after a high-intensity fire in 2003. In areas in which seedlings from both species mixed, the callitris clearly lost to its faster-growing eucalyptus neighbors. Callitris seedlings were, on average, shorter and less healthy than the eucalyptus. In addition, seed cones were absent on the shorter callitris seedlings, preventing any propagation. In fact, seed cones were produced by only the tallest callitris, which grew most abundantly where the population was largely uniform, in patches of virtually all conifers except for a few angiosperms.