ecology
clock | November 26, 2007That is, if you are a shrew and do not want to be just a dead data-point for some ingenious young ecologists....who at least clean up the tricky trash left by drunk drivers.
voltagegate | November 9, 2007I had to do it. With the red panda (Ailurus fulgens) at the top of my favorite animals list, I had to know exactly how many folks share enough interest in the firefox to name their toon after its genus name.
So how many Ailuruses are there out there? Seven on the North American servers and three on the European; appropriately, six of them are druids (cat/bear forms). The highest level (and she's leveled in the past few days, so is active) is a 68 feral druid who must have just recently snagged her Staff of Beasts from the Ring of Blood quest series in Nagrand.
If you've kept up with TVG,…
tsmith | November 8, 2007 Both Mike and Revere have new posts up documenting swine as a new threat to human health (beyond the pork chops and bacon), via carriage of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in these animals. Several papers have been published recently documenting high rates of MRSA carriage in swine in the Netherlands, and also have documented transmission of this bacterium from swine to humans. However, even more worrisome to me than the Dutch publications is a new one out in Veterinary Microbiology, showing high rates of MRSA in Canadian swine--and guess where we import about 9 million hogs…
laelaps | November 7, 2007
The whole of natural history fascinates me, but everyone has their own favorite topics, and one of the most intriguing subject areas (to me, at least) is predator/prey interactions. Herbivores are interesting in their own right, surely, but for me it is the predators that are the most thought-provoking and impressive. Given this proclivity to ponder carnivory , I've chosen to write up my term paper for a seminar course I'm currently taking (Topics in African Prehistory) on the entrance of hominins into the "Carnivore Guild," especially in terms of hunting small prey in forests, scavenging…
tsmith | November 6, 2007 I've written a post or two (or a dozen) discussing science journalism--the good, the bad, and, mostly (because they're the most fun), the ugly. There was this story about how blondes "evolved to win cavemen's hearts." Or this one that completely omitted the name of the pathogen they were writing about. Or this one, where a missing "of" completely changed the results being discussed.
I ran across another glaring example yesterday, dealing interestingly enough with one of my favorite topics: chocolate, and bringing in an "omics" prospective to it.
The news story covered a recent…
voltagegate | November 2, 2007In Part I we looked at the eastern hemlock's northwestern progression after the last ice age,
and the frequency of the hemlock along a slope-oriented moisture gradient:
The distribution pictured above is almost exactly the case in the Laurel Hill old growth stand. The hemlocks are dense at the moist valley bottom, surrounding and shading Laurel Hill Creek and At the different levels of the gradient, not only does the abundance of trees differ, but the composition of the ecosystem. There is a "no-man's land" of sorts between each level that ecologists called ecotones.
Ecotones are imaginary…
voltagegate | October 31, 2007Catch up on all of your fall foliage science with Carl at The Loom. He has all the links you need, even one to his interview on ABC News.
voltagegate | October 29, 2007About 16,000 years ago, glaciation from the last ice age finally began to retreat after millennia of occupation. As the glaciers melted and filled scrapes in the landscape with fresh water, the animals and plants followed, once only able to live in the temperate climes of southern North America.
The eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadenis) was one of these pioneers, albeit a slow, steady one. Spreading north at about 100 - 400 meters per year (incidentally about the same rate of large ungulates like elk), the hemlocks wouldn't reach the extent of their expansion, around the glacier-crafted Great…
voltagegate | October 29, 2007This seems to be a more sensible theory regarding leaf color change in autumn:
By taking careful stock and laboratory analyses of the autumn foliage of sweetgum and red maple trees along transects from floodplains to ridge-tops in a nature preserve in Charlotte, N.C., former University of North Carolina at Charlotte graduate student Emily M. Habinck found that in places where the soil was relatively low in nitrogen and other essential elements, trees produced more red pigments known as anthocyanins.
Habinck's discovery supports a 2003 hypothesis put forward to explain why trees bother to make…
laelaps | October 24, 2007I was planning on putting up one of my patented mega-posts this evening, but unfortunately I just don't have it in me at the moment. It's based on a presentation I made today involving scavenging and early hominids, and while I'm sure some of you will be able to make the right connections (especially if you're familiar with the work of a certain Rutgers alum) here's a video of a certain behavior exhibited by one of my most favorite big cats, the Leopard (Panthera pardus), that'll prominently figure in tomorrow's discussion;
voltagegate | October 24, 2007Island ecology may have been popularized by tropical climes, but it certainly isn't limited to them. Michigan's Isle Royale National Park, a chilly 50 mile by 8 mile island in the corner of Lake Superior an important benchmark in the island's important research history is being celebrated.
For nearly 50 years scientists have been studying the interaction of wolves and moose on the island and their effects on the forest, the longest running predator-prey study in the world. Naturally, such a long term study has naturally opened up other, broader areas of research on the island.
The wolves and…
tsmith | October 23, 2007It's only taken 30 years, but information about Ebola in nature is finally starting to snowball. First, after almost 15 years of disappearing from the human population, Ebola returned with a vengeance in the mid 1990s, causing illness in 6 separate outbreaks in Gabon, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and South Africa (imported case) between 1994 and 1996. As doctors and scientists rushed in to contain the outbreaks, they were also able to collect viral samples, and trap animals and insects in the area, searching for a reservoir for the virus. In this decade, there have been…
voltagegate | October 22, 2007The coal industry has always been a big provider in Western Maryland. Right across the street from my apartment complex is a winding road up the mountain to several active blast sites. There are still old mine tunnels under the campus.
Acid mine drainage is a huge problem up here. Many of the streams are nearly decimated, so clogged with iron and sulfur that only the most hardy of algae can survive.
Last year, my ecology class surveyed about eight miles of George's Creek, from the Hoffman drainage tunnel (also called a blow, where water flows through excavated mine areas due to changes in…
hrynyshyn | October 22, 2007Jon Gertner's feature in the current Sunday New York Times magazine is a timely reminder of 1) why the Nobel Committee is giving peace prizes to environmentalists and climatologists, and 2) why (as if we needed another reason) Bjorn Lomborg is wrong when he argues mitigating climate change is a poor use of money.
Gertner begins by pointing out that while sea level rise tends to get all the attention from the long list of bad things that come with a warmer planet, the threat posed by declining freshwater supplies in places like the western half of the United States is at least as troubling.
As…
hrynyshyn | October 21, 2007I've just come across a wonderful concept thanks to Grist. I have no idea if it will work, but it seems worth trying: Run by the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, and the Ecology Center, Catalog Choice can, they claim, "put a stop to all those unwanted catalogs clogging your mailbox."
Since its debut last week, some 20,000 people have signed up for the service, already halting over 50,000 unwanted catalogs. That's a small fraction of the 19 billion catalogs mailed in the U.S. each year (made out of 53 million trees), but it's a start. Did we mention it's free?…
voltagegate | October 20, 2007I picked up a couple of shifts catering homecoming this weekend, which is why things have been dead the past couple of days. I did, however, finish a couple of Jack Vance books which I want to discuss next week, specifically the social/lingual aspects of them. I also found a great paper about habitat fragmentation which opens the door for me to go into edge effects (the resulting edge of clearing a natural habitat and imposing another - ex: forest/farm land) and a new theory regarding its variability.
The next couple of months should be very interesting. We're moving at the end of November,…
chaoticutopia | October 18, 2007
How do we study our environment? Is it too complex a thing to quantitatively describe, and thus too complex to exhibit predictable behavior? I’ve been performing a thought experiment over the past few days, tossing around such questions. I’m not sure I can really adequately describe these thoughts with words or images. Still, I’m going to try.
Individual scientific experiments tend to be specific. We look at a certain property and try to explain it with a hypothesis, then test that hypothesis repeatedly under various conditions to show if it is valid or not. If it isn’t, we head back to…
laelaps | October 15, 2007Welcome to the 10th edition of Oekologie, the best of what the blogosphere has to offer when it comes to the eponymous area of natural science. This edition is particularly special, however, in that it falls on Blog Action Day, so be sure to visit the event's main page to peruse the best of today's environmentally-focused posts.
Agriculture
Diversity is not only important to natural ecosystems, but it can be invaluable to agriculture as well. Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog fills us in on why it's better to encourage variety when you're growing rice.
If you're interested in organic growing…
voltagegate | October 12, 2007Over the past few billion years, life has persisted through countless geologic, atmospheric and extraterrestrial disturbances through its ability to change with the environment. Ecosystems exist in their present state because they have evolved to be as such. It took trillions of events - biotic and abiotic - for these complex systems to weave their thick web of dependence.
One way for ecologists to define and correlate these varied environments is by categorizing these areas by the types of plants that inhabit them. These categories are called biomes. Categorizing each biome by plant life is…
voltagegate | October 10, 2007Ecology is a study of interactions or relationships between organisms and the environment; the connectedness between living systems and non-living systems on the Earth. Ecology is, in a sense, a historical field, founded upon the Earth's far reaching and ever evolving natural history.
The term ecology comes from the Greek root words oikos logos, literally "the study of household," first combined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Haeckel was referring to the interactions within the house of nature, and we have used the word ecology (translated from the German Oekologie or Ãkologie) to describe complex…