ecology
awild | February 28, 2009Those of you who were into ants in the early '90s might remember SimAnt, a simulation game where you control the decisions your ants make to steer a colony to dominance over a competing species in a suburban lawn.
The game is based, in part, on the optimality equations summarized in Oster & Wilson's 1978 text "Caste and Ecology in the Social Insects". The book lays out mathematical foundations for determining the investments a colony should place in workers, queens, and males in order to optimize Darwinian fitness over a range of ecological conditions. If you knew the equations,…
edyong | February 28, 2009Conspiracy theories, TV thrillers and airport novels are full of the idea that the world is secretly run by a hidden society. We have come up with many names for this shadowy cabal of puppet-masters - the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and more. But a better name would be 'parasites'.
Every animal and plant is afflicted by parasites. The vast majority are simple, degenerate creatures, small in size and limited in intelligence. They affect our health and development, and even our behaviour and culture. And by pulling the strings of key species, parasites can change the face of entire habitats.In…
clock | February 24, 2009Genetic Manipulation of Pest Species: Ecological and Social Challenges:
In the past 10 years major advances have been made in our ability to build transgenic pest strains that are conditionally sterile, harbor selfish genetic elements, and express anti-pathogen genes. Strategies are being developed that involve release into the environment of transgenic pest strains with such characteristics. These releases could provide more environmentally benign pest management and save endangered species, but steps must be taken to insure that this is the case and that there are no significant health or…
edyong | February 24, 2009In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Gonzalo Mucientes has discovered an invisible line in the sea that separates male mako sharks from females. The line runs from north to south with the Pitcairn Islands to its west and Easter Island to its east. On the western side, a fisherman that snags a mako will most probably have caught a male. Travel 10 degrees of longitude east and odds are they'd catch a female. This is a shark that takes segregation of the sexes to new heights.
Mucientes and colleagues from Spain, Portugal and the UK spent four months aboard a Spanish longline fishing vessel. …
awild | February 23, 2009From my inbox, a postdoctoral job announcement:
The Department of Botany, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia seeks to appoint a Postdoctoral Fellow to conduct research in Invasion Biology on Christmas Island. Over the last decade, supercolonies of the invasive yellow crazy ant Anoplolepis gracilipes have spread across island rainforest and caused a variety of significant impacts. High ant densities are consistently associated with high densities of exotic honeydew-secreting scale insects. This project will determine the dependence of ant supercolonies on associated scale insects…
edyong | February 23, 2009In late 2007, seabirds off the coast of California began to die in record numbers. The waterproof nature of their feathers and been wrecked, and they were soaked to the skin. Without an insulating layer of air trapped within their plumage, the damp birds were suffering from extreme cold. These are exactly the type of problems that seabirds face when they blunder into oil spills, but in this case, not a drop of petroleum had entered the water. The problem was a biological one.
At the same time, Monterey Bay in California was plagued by a massive "red tide" - a bloom of microscopic algae…
razib | February 19, 2009Sheril's post, Chimpanzees Are NOT Pets!, is good. She notes:
1 Chimpanzees are wild animals. Animals that make good PETS like dogs and cats, have been domesticated for [thousands] of years. There has been selection on them against aggression, which is why a dog, unlike a wolf, will not automatically tear you to pieces. Anyone who has a pet chimpanzee for long enough will eventually no longer be able to control them and will either get a body part bitten off or will have to use extreme force to control them. Chimps live to be 50 years old and grow almost as big as a human male. They have…
awild | February 10, 2009 There's been a debate simmering among Argentine Ant researchers about the difference between the ant's ecology in its native South America and in the introduced populations. The heart of the disagreement is this: is the introduced Argentine ant dominant because its biology changed during introduction, or because the ecologies of the native and introduced ranges are different?
Like most scientific debates, some aspects are factual in nature while others are semantic. Sometimes the semantic and the factual become confused in a way that makes it difficult to tease the arguments apart…
grrlscientist | February 8, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
awild | February 7, 2009
Formica francoeuri tending larvae of the copper butterfly, Lycaena xanthoides. Southern California
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D
ISO 100, 1/250 sec, f/13, flash diffused through tracing paper
jwhitfield | February 6, 2009Back when I started this, I remarked that one of the reasons I hadn't read the Origin was that I couldn't imagine it being essential to a grasp of contemporary science. Regarding evolution, I think you could still make a case for this. But in other ways, that statement shows that you really shouldn't opine on topics you know nothing about.
Specifically, I'm talking about ecology (by which, just to be clear, I mean the study of the interactions of living things with each other and their environment, rather than 'nature' or 'environmentalism'). It's been said that all European philosophy is a…
awild | February 6, 2009As if butterflies weren't flamboyant enough already, it seems that some of them actively impersonate queens.
Queen ants, that is. A report by Francesca Barbero et al in today's issue of Science documents a clever strategy employed by a European butterfly, the Mountain Alcon Blue Maculinea rebeli, to infiltrate nests of Myrmica schencki. The immature stages of the butterfly are parasites of ant colonies, and it seems the secret to their success is acoustic mimicry. The larvae and pupae squeak like queens, eliciting preferential treatment from the workers. Here's the abstract:
Ants…
jwhitfield | February 4, 2009When the Origin was published, the idea that species were not fixed entities had been in the air for some time, thanks to Lamarck, Robert Chambers, anonymous author of the best-selling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus.
But unlike those men, Darwin put all the different pieces together into a coherent whole. How was that? Chapter 11 of the Origin, 'Geographical distribution', gives some hints.
First there's the nurture. In the age of long-haul flights and wildlife documentaries, it's easy to forget how difficult it was to see different…
grrlscientist | February 1, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
awild | January 29, 2009Pheidole moerens, major worker, Louisiana
Pheidole moerens is a small, barely noticeable insect that travels about with human commerce, arriving without announcement and slipping quietly into the leaf litter and potted plants about town.  As introduced ants go, P. moerens is timid and innocuous- it's certainly no fire ant. The species is now present in the southeastern United States, a few places along the west coast, and Hawaii. Conventional wisdom suggests that P. moerens originated in the Greater Antilles, but even though the ant was first described from Puerto Rico a century ago…
awild | January 27, 2009Widow spider and harvester ants. Hallelujah Junction, California
This young black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) set up shop above the nest entrance of a colony of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet, allowing the spider nearly unlimited pickings as the ants come and go.
The spider's mottled coloration is typical of young widows; they don't acquire the striking black and red warning garb until maturity.
photo details: Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens on a Canon EOS D60
ISO 100, 1/200 sec, f/11, MT-24EX twin flash
grrlscientist | January 25, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
edyong | January 17, 2009
Bee hives, with their regularly arranged honeycombs and permanently busy workers may seem like the picture of order. But look closer, and hives are often abuzz with secret codes, eavesdropping spies and deadly alliances.
African honeybees are victimised by the parasitic small hive beetle. The beetles move through beehives eating combs, stealing honey and generally making a mess. But at worst, they are a minor pest, for the bees have a way of dealing with them.
They imprison the intruders in the bowels of the hive and carefully remove any eggs they find. In turn, the beetle sometimes fools…
clock | January 13, 2009Did you know that the largest desert on Earth is Antarctica? And the second largest is Arctic? And only then comes Sahara!
Well, I knew that because Hal Heathwole taught a Desert Ecology course that many of my buddies in grad school took. But if you don't believe me, check out the Wikipedia page about deserts.
And then, don't stop at that. Do you have a blog? If not, start one. If yes, sit down and write a post about a desert. Then send it to the very first edition of the Carnival of the Arid:
Submissions should have something to do with a desert somewhere in the world. (If you're not…
edyong | January 13, 2009As a species, our unflinching obsession with size is just as apparent in our dealings with other animals as it is in our personal lives. Fishermen prize the biggest catches and they're are obliged to throw the smallest specimens back in. Hunters also value the biggest kills; they provide the most food and make the flashiest trophies. This fixation isn't just a harmless one - by acting as a size-obsessed super-predator, humans are reshaping the bodies of the species we hunt, at a remarkable pace and to a dramatic degree.
Predators already put a lot of pressure on their prey to evolve new ways…