Biodiversity
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2008
Lunch being had we crowd into a new room to hear Stephen Peck, a biologist from Brigham Young University down the road a ways in Provo. Stephen is talking about ecological boundaries.
A group of ecologists set up seven different ecosystem groups for agroecosystem studies. They debated how to define an ecosystem, and it simply got harder. They needed a biological indicator to determine the state of the ecosystem and couldn't even get to defining the latter. Over fifteen years, he hasn't been able to figure it out.
Properties of ecosystem boundaries:
Fuzzy
Non-regulated -> Highly…
evolvingthoughts | March 10, 2008
John Lynch took me to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum yesterday, and made me walk. Naturally I forgot my camera, so I can't show you the really cool hummingbirds, or the cougar/puma (it has a split personality) or the bighorn sheep, let alone the amazing diversity of plant life (until I came here I though "cactus" was a single species - just kidding), but you can see all that at the Museum's website and digital library.
I forgive John for making me walk - he was not to know that silverbacks, especially albino silverbacks, are lazy fat buggers. But the provision of ice cream and slushy…
evolvingthoughts | March 6, 2008
After a three day workshop on the future and nature of taxonomy (or systematics; I'm still unconvinced there's a difference) I am exhausted and enthused. The former because of the massive amounts of beer we drank, and the latter, well, because of the massive amounts of beer we drank, and the conversations that followed.
In particular I am very impressed by Quentin Wheeler's International Institute for Species Exploration, and the outreach program, "Planet Bob", both of which stress the vital need to identify, describe and study the planet's biodiversity in detail before it is all gone (and…
evolvingthoughts | February 13, 2008
Biology does normativity all the time. There are things that are the "normal" type of state of a species, an organism, an ecosystem, and so on, and things that are abnormal. But the puzzling thing is that all philosophers know, since David Hume, that normativity doesn't develop out of facts. So no amount of factual statements about species, organisms and ecosystems will give a definition of what is normal.
A suitably abstract introduction to the Seed Masters' Imperative: "Tell us what a disease is", right? Hey, I'm a philosopher. What did you expect?
One of the normative words of…
evolvingthoughts | January 24, 2008
In 1972, David Raup published an influential paper on taxonomic diversity during the Phanerozoic. In that paper, he estimated extinction rates based on the number of fossil families and genera for the period and before and after. The idea was to estimate the "kill rate" of major disruptions in earth's history.
A new paper by Sarda Sahney and Michael J. Benton attempts to do this for the Permian extinction, arguably the biggest of all time. They attempt to reconstruct the "guilds", or ecological roles communities, of the Permian, and assess the biological diversity in terms of taxonomic…
evolvingthoughts | December 27, 2007
Greg Laden is reporting that Rwanda is taxing companies that use gorillas in their advertising, in order to pay for their conservation. Unfortunately, or fortunately if you are an albino silverback in Australia, this only applies to Rwandan companies. Or maybe I would happily pay a tax to the Rwandan government for the use of my avatar if asked. It depends on whether I have enough money for beer that month.
awild | December 12, 2007
Technomyrmex fisheri Bolton 2007
Madagascar, line drawing by Barry Bolton
Last month, British myrmecologist Barry Bolton published the first ever global synthesis of the ant genus Technomyrmex. The tome describes 37 new species, including Technomyrmex fisheri from Madagascar, named after Brian Fisher of Antweb. I'm always keen to try out new taxonomic keys, so I tested Bolton's out on several unidentified African and Australian species in my collection. As is nearly always the case with Bolton's meticulous work, the key worked flawlessly. I only wish I had more Technomyrmex to key.…
awild | December 4, 2007
Idioneurula donegani Huertas & Arias 2007
Huertas, B. and J. J. Arias. 2007. A new butterfly species from the Colombian Andes and a review of the taxonomy of the genera Idioneurula Strand, 1932 and Tamania Pyrcz, 1995 (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae: Satyrinae). Zootaxa 1652: 27-40.
The online journal Zootaxa has hosted the publication of 6723 new animal species since its inception in 2001, averaging over 2.8 new species per day. And that's just a single journal- there are scores of taxonomy journals out there. Taxonomy is an old science, but it remains on the frontiers of biological…
awild | December 2, 2007
Mystrium maren Bihn & Verhaagh 2007
Discoveries of new species on our little-known planet continue apace. The two known specimens of the impressively toothy Mystrium maren were collected in 2001 in Indonesia, and Jochen Bihn and Manfred Verhaagh just published a paper in Zootaxa describing this ant and another new species, M.leonie.
Source: J. H. Bihn & M. Verhaagh, 2007. A review of the genus Mystrium (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in the Indo-Australian region. Zootaxa 1642: 1-12.
*update* Lead author Jochen Bihn writes about the…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2007
The African apes don't get much good news these days. But the Congo has just announced they are setting up a preserve to protect the bonobo. The size of the Sankuru Nature Reserve is 11,803 square miles (in real money, 30 569.629 square kilometers), which makes it nearly half the size of Tasmania, or bigger than Massachusetts or Hawai'i.
This is a cooperative venture between a partnership involving American and Congolese conservation groups and government agencies, and they are addressing the local practices of hunting bonobos as well. All bonobos in the wild live in the Congo.
Hat tip…
evolvingthoughts | November 11, 2007
Following on from my previous post "Are species theoretical objects", I want now to discuss what the status of species as phenomenal objects is.
Some recent papers by Ingo Brigandt and Paul Griffiths (see refs), a view has been developed for some core concepts of biology - gene and homology - in which the theoretical status of these ideas is challenged. This view treats the concepts as referring to either obervational or operational objects or properties, just as I have suggested that species does. Brigandt has suggested that these objects or concepts are "units of explanation", and he and…
evolvingthoughts | November 10, 2007
When people visit Australia, we locals like to play up the dangers, like the most poisonous snakes and spiders, poisonous jellyfish, sharks, the drop bears, and of course the crocs. Very few of these are actually dangerous, in that with a bit of sensible precaution and awareness, you can avoid them pretty easily.
Unless you are drunk. A new report suggests that even just a bit of alcohol on board lessens people's risk awareness, particularly with saltwater crocodiles. So, don't drink and share space with crocs near briny water. Don't walk in the water, gut fish on the shore, or take active…
evolvingthoughts | November 6, 2007
So, I was browsing through the CBD site, and idly wondered which countries have not signed on to this attempt to reduce the loss of biodiversity worldwide. The answer?
Iraq
Somalia
Brunei
The Holy See
The United States of America
evolvingthoughts | October 30, 2007
Here is an article in Harvard Magazine on bacteria and other wee beasties that make up the bulk of the living world, that is worth reading. It's called "The Undiscovered Planet". Hat tip to Jason Grossman.
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2007
The estimable Drs David Williams and Malte Ebach have started a blog on Systematics and Biogeography, which supports a recent book they haven't sent me a free copy of yet. Expect much puncturing of pretensions and orthodoxies.
evolvingthoughts | October 12, 2007
The International Herald Tribune worries that Gore's receiving the Peace Prize is going to denigrate the award because it "strays from traditional Nobel definitions of peace work". Huh. As Tom Lehrer said, when Henry Kissinger can win the Peace Prize, the time for political satire is long past. If anything, this improves the standing of the prize.
What could be more concerning to the peace of the world than dealing with climate change? Gore's raising awareness and bringing climate change out of the Rethuglican spin cycle will do more to promote peace than any number of activists on…
evolvingthoughts | October 5, 2007
On Monday night last, Jason Grossman, a philosopher form the Australian National University rang me with an idea. He was coming to my university to give a talk entitled "How to Feyerabend", arguing that Feyerabend was a dadaist rather than an anarchist. I'd tell you more about his talk, but I can't, for reasons that will become obvious.
He wanted to do the talk as a dadaist performance. How can I help? I enquired. That was my mistake.
Well, he said, I want us to give a simultaneous presentation. What, in turn? I asked. No, at the same time. With music. And Allison (his partner) folding…
evolvingthoughts | September 24, 2007
This is a nice post by Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms, a kiwi studying spider systematics (and what's not to love about that; cephalopods be buggered!) on the species of moas that used to live in New Zealand. I didn't realise they'd be forest dwellers. It's a worthwhile blog to get the feed for.
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2007
One of the things I have previously discussed (see the "Best of ET" tab) is microbial species concepts. Two new papers have come out on this, and it seems to be a hot research topic right now.
Eppley, et al., in the journal Genetics, argue that the claim that I happened to make in my as-yet unpublished paper in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, that microbial species are clusters of genomes maintained by, among other things, homologous recombination of genes, is supported by experimental evidence based on genomic data of two microbial species of Archae bacteria, of the genus…
evolvingthoughts | September 16, 2007
All the strangers look like familyAll the family looks so strangeThe only constant I am sure ofIs this accelerating rate of change— Peter Gabriel, Downside-Up, from the Ovo Album
Creek Running North has a delightful rumination on the lack of a balance of nature, in which he notes that
The sheer fecundity of the world conceals its vulnerability to change.
and
There is no balance of nature. Or if there is, it is the balance of a teetering rock on a pedestal stable enough to hold it for the moment.
This instability of the world bothers many people, or they ignore it and hold fast to…