ecology
retrospectacle | April 9, 2007This is really upsetting, especially to someone who used to study manatees: Florida has been toying with the idea of down-grading manatees' "endangered" status and relaxing the amount of protection they receive. Protective laws include (and consist mostly of) laws which force boaters to slow down in areas where manatees live and breed. Given that the number one killer of manatees (perhaps really the *only* one) is collisions with boat propellers, these laws have been largely responsible for the up-swing in their numbers over the past 20 years. However, now that the laws have proven successful…
clock | April 8, 2007Talking about the hermetic cabal of scientists who never let any outsiders in....
Climate change fruitful for fungi:
A remarkable father-and-son research project has revealed how rising temperatures are affecting fungi in southern England.
Fungus enthusiast Edward Gange amassed 52,000 sightings of mushroom and toadstools during walks around Salisbury over a 50-year period.
Analysis by his son Alan, published in the journal Science, shows some fungi have started to fruit twice a year.
It is among the first studies to show a biological impact of warming in autumn.
"My father was a stonemason,…
voltagegate | April 7, 2007The ESA blog posted a thoughtful contribution about the philosophy of and a possible solution to "diagnosing" the ecology of endangered species, the author presenting his own work with the endangered Marbled Murrelet as an example:
It's a simple question that I often get asked about an endangered species: "What caused it to decline?" but I find it to be one of the hardest to answer without giving a hand-waiving response. Determining causes of decline for a species based on data-driven conclusions rather than informed opinion is challenging because it first requires figuring out which…
chaoticutopia | April 6, 2007While here in Colorado, freezing rain and snow is drizzling from the skies, spring is sweeping across the northern hemisphere. In celebration, I designed this petal-like Julia set and laid it on top a wavy Mandelbrot set, creating this arousing union. (What can I say? It's spring!)
In creating the fractal, I used the colors from this native Colorado wildflower, which will be blooming here, very shortly:
Bell's Twinpod (Physaria bellii)
These pretty little blooms are only found in Colorado, and even then only in certain areas. Specifically, the plant grows in sandstone or shale formations (…
hrynyshyn | April 4, 2007Remember Chrissy Hynde? Maybe if you're old enough to have some Pretenders CDs in your collection. Otherwise, probably not. But she has enough name recognition to convince the editors of Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper to let her weigh in on that most inevitable sign of spring, the rhetorical war over the seal hunt that dominates the news on the country's east coast. You might think that op-ed essayists for a major daily newspaper, even those relegated to web-only contributor status, would bring something more than musical fame to the subject. You would be wrong.
Hynde brings precisely no…
clock | March 30, 2007In today's issue of Science, there is a study showing that hunting of sharks, by eliminating the main predator of rays, leads to a decline in the ray's - and ours - food: the scallops:
A team of Canadian and American ecologists, led by world-renowned fisheries biologist Ransom Myers at Dalhousie University, has found that overfishing the largest predatory sharks, such as the bull, great white, dusky, and hammerhead sharks, along the Atlantic Coast of the United States has led to an explosion of their ray, skate, and small shark prey species.
"With fewer sharks around, the species they prey…
voltagegate | March 27, 2007From the University of Minnesota:
The reduction in species diversity occurs because increasing the amounts of limiting resources, such as nitrogen and water, makes an ecosystem more homogeneous and consequently reduces the number of opportunities for competing species to coexist. Put another way, it reduces the number of niches, allowing a few species to dominate.
[...] "In essence, the data in the article strongly supports a new explanation for why the world contains so many species," said Tilman. "It shows that plant diversity is directly related to the number of limiting factors (such as…
clock | March 26, 2007During the National Wildlife Week (April 21th - 29th), if you can, please participate in the First Annual Blogger Bioblitz:
Pick a neat little area that you are relatively familiar with and is small enough that you or the group can handle - a small thicket, a pond, a section of stream, or even your backyard - and bring along some taxonomic keys or an Audubon guide, or if you're lucky enough, an expert in local flora and fauna. Set a time limit. Try to identify the different species of organisms that you find as well as the number of each species that you find. Take pictures if you have a…
voltagegate | March 24, 2007From a human perspective, deserts, like tundras, seem barren and desolate, inhabited by organismal oddities, pressed into their respective niches by patch of bad luck, or a salt flat, as it were. But thinking beyond our prejudice, seeing through the eyes of a camel or transpiring through the stomata of a saguaro cactus, some conception of deserts as biologically viable and diverse regions of the planet can be gained. Life may not be particularly abundant in most of these areas, but it is varied, unique and beautiful.
For the most part, deserts occur in a consistent band at 30 degrees north…
voltagegate | March 24, 2007"I do not yet want to form a hypothesis to test, because as soon as you make a hypothesis, you become prejudiced. Your mind slides into a groove, and once it is in that groove, has difficulty noticing anything outside of it. During this time, my sense must be sharp; that is the main thing... to be sharp, yet open."
-Bernd Heinrich
voltagegate | March 23, 2007In Kaziranga National Park in India, four endangered one-horned rhinos (Rhinceros unicornis) have been found dead in the past few weeks, while our own legislators battle over measures to curb the spread of brucellosis from bison to cattle.
In Indian myth, the one- horned rhino is a divine beast, often depicted carrying the universe on its back in the form of the preserver god, Vishnu. Many historians believe that it was also responsible for the ancient fairy tales of the unicorn. So why were the rhinos shot? Mysticism, ironically, under the guise of "traditional medicine."
Their horns -- made…
voltagegate | March 22, 2007According to a recent international assessment, overfishing has brought 20 of the world's 162 species of grouper - a culinary delight around the world - to close to extinction for comfort:
Eight species previously were listed by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as under extinction threat, and the new assessment proposes adding 12 more.
A panel of 20 experts from 10 nations determined the extinction threat facing groupers, which are the basis of the multimillion-dollar live reef food fish trade based in Hong Kong and comprise one of the most valuable groups of commercial fishes in chilled…
chaoticutopia | March 20, 2007Looking at the rhythmic repetition of forms in nature, it is easy to imagine the influence of some creator, a poet who fixes each line with exact meter and measure. Yet, upon closer examination, we can see how these forms are self-creating, born from simplicity. Nature writes its own poetry.
Take, for instance, the tendency of water to form branching veins.
We begin with an aspen leaf, which landed on a bed of new fallen snow. Weeks of gentle sun warmed the dark leaf and melted the surrounding snow. In that tiny pool of water, the softer parts of the leaf began to decay, revealing an…
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2007There's an interesting news story about antibiotic resistance in wild chimpanzee populations that claims to have found transfer of resistant Escherichia coli from humans to wild animals.
According to the article:
To do the study, the UI researchers, working with colleagues from Makerere University in Uganda and McGill University in Canada , examined 2 of the communities of chimpanzees living in the Kibale park. One of them has been under study by scientists for more than 2 decades. The other is visited regularly by ranger guides who shepherd tourists in the park. The researchers collected…
voltagegate | March 18, 2007A cheetah crouches, shoulders hunched, barely visible through golden stems. The antelope on the edge of the herd has stopped chewing, and scans the horizon with a nervous eye. As it takes a step forward to rejoin the safety of the group, the cheetah makes her move, bounding with impossibly huge leaps towards her prey. The entire herd is on the move with her first step, but the stray is dangerously lagging behind. It flies only for a few seconds before the cheetah leaps one final time, clinging to the young antelope's rump with all her strength, pulling the animal to the ground for the coup de…
voltagegate | March 18, 2007"Everybody knows that the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead."
-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
voltagegate | March 18, 2007This month Conservation magazine published an article rehashing the "built landscape" hypothesis of Amazonia, which basically says that the incredible biodiversity seen in the South American rainforest is largely due to a skilled agricultural society of millions that possessed the capacity to simultaneously promote successful agriculture while maintaining biodiversity; the hypothesis states that they managed and cultivated most of the Amazon rainforest, and the region's apparent virginity is only an illusion.
This idea is popularized by Charles Mann's book, 1491: New Revelations of the…
tsmith | March 15, 2007 When we think of the spread of antibiotic resistance between animals and humans, we tend to think of it going from Them to Us. For example, much of the research over the past 20 years on the sub-clinical use of antibiotics in animal feed has looked how this use of antibiotics as a growth promotant breeds resistant organisms in animals, which can then enter the human population via the food we eat. Along a similar line, I just mentioned Burt's post post on cephalosporin use in cattle and the evolution of antibiotic resistance, where the worry is that use of these broad-spectrum antibiotics…
clock | March 14, 2007Today is a big day on Plos-Biology for the Oceanic Microbial Diversity Genomics. Last night they published not one, not two, but three big papers chockfull of data.
Accompani\ying them are not one, not two, not three, not even four, but five editorial articles about different aspects of this work.
James has already homed in on one important part of the discovery: the preponderance and diversity of proteorhodopsins - microbial photopigments that are capable of capturing solar energy in a manner different from photosynthesis. As always, light-sensitive molecules are thought to be tightly…