ecology
tsmith | September 6, 2007While E. coli typically makes the news as a food-borne pathogen, that's only one facet of the bacterium. It can be deadly, sure, but it also helps us digest our food; it produces vitamin K for us; benign strains can even protect us from invading pathogens. It's one of the most-studied bacterial species and a "workhorse" for research in microbiology and molecular biology. We use it as a marker of fecal contamination in water, and it can even be used to produce insulin for diabetes patients. So it may come as no surprise that it may one day be a cavity fighter as well:
Imagine being able…
voltagegate | September 4, 2007Tim Caro from UC Davis and Paul Scholte from Leiden University wrote a "policy piece" , a sort of editorial in the September issue of the African Journal of Ecology, bringing up some surprising trends regarding the decline of antelope populations within national parks. We hear enough about poaching outside of the parks certainly, but this is news to me. Conservation efforts may need some tweaking.
Of late, antelope have been doggedly tracked - by air, through scat sampling, etc. - due to insufficient data in the past and their reduced numbers are revealing three anthropogenic, "proximate"…
clock | September 2, 2007Remember? Today is the Rock Flipping day!
It's so dry and hot here, it is even dry and hot under the rocks in the woods. It took my daughter and me a long time flipping rocks to detect any sign of life and then it would be just a couple of ants quickly scurrying away, too fast to take a picture. Then we went down to the pond - and nothing there either, it's THAT dry! Finally, we gave up and said, OK, just one more rock. And that's where we found this frog. My camera cannot really do the close-up photography needed for this. I hope that someone here can still be able to recognize the…
tsmith | August 31, 2007 As I mentioned in the introductory post, we know incredibly little about the very basics of Marburg virus ecology and epidemiology. The sporadic nature of outbreaks of illness, their occurrence in remote areas of Africa lacking established medical research capabilities, and often in countries experiencing governmental strife and instability, compound the difficulty of determining the ecology of this particular virus. Often, the primary case (the first person in an outbreak known to be infected, and who likely acquired the virus from its wild reservoir) died before questions could be…
voltagegate | August 18, 2007
I blogged about a study of tropical dry forests in southern Madagascar a while back where the researchers found that the rates of deforestation had dropped in recent years. The challenge was to find out exactly why.
Ecologists studying deforestation in the Amazon may have a similar challenge. The Brazilian government is claiming that new legislation and increased policing of their portion of the forest has reduced the harvest by 25 percent.
They're right about one thing. Deforestation is at its lowest since they started recording rates - only 14,000 kilometers cut down between 2005 and 2006…
voltagegate | August 16, 2007The next ESA/SER meeting is right up my alley:
Drawing from a wide range of case studies that illustrate the potential effects of climate on disease dynamics, a series of presentations to be held at the joint meeting of the Ecological Society of America and the Society for Ecological Restoration will showcase what scientists are discovering about the links between climate and disease...
John Bruno (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) will review the trends for such coral diseases as White Syndrome and Caribbean Yellow Band Syndrome. Temperature anomalies, which are predicted to…
voltagegate | August 13, 2007
I found this article on Reuters this morning that tries to spin old news into a fresh bit of controversy:
Doctors recommend a good dose of salmon or tuna in the diet because of its benefits to the heart. But is it good for the environment?
Surging demand for salmon in particular has been spurred in part by numerous studies touting the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, which are present in some kinds of fish.
A study published in June in the American Heart Association journal Circulation said a diet with liberal servings of fish, nuts and seeds rich in such nutrients can help lower a…
voltagegate | August 12, 2007James from Direction not Destination is hosting Oekologie in three days, so get your submissions in now!
We need hosts starting next February. If you're interested, shoot me an e-mail: thevoltagegate [at] gmail.com.
hrynyshyn | August 9, 2007The South Nahanni River defies description. It is one of the most spectacular lengths of runnable river in the world. It lies in the southwestern corner of Canada's Northwest Territories and offers one of the more accessible wilderness adventures in the Arctic. Canoeing the Nahanni should be on everyone's lifetime to-do list. The waterfalls at right are twice the height of Niagara. Today it's in the news because the Canadian government has, after years of dragging its feet, agreed to expand the park that encompasses it by 5,400 square kilometres, a move that will help protect the river from…
voltagegate | August 7, 2007
I found the following article on the shortnose sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum) this morning on ScienceDaily, and due to the conservation problems we're having with the endangered fish, I thought it would be a good opportunity to discuss eutrophication and hypoxia, two huge issues in marine and aquatic sciences.
Dwindling numbers of shortnose sturgeon in Georgia's blackwater Ogeechee River system have prompted an effort to quantify the causes and prioritize recovery efforts.
Yetta Jager and colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are conducting a population viability analysis, which…
clock | August 1, 2007The textbook example of commensalism was always the interaction between trees and the birds who make nests in those trees - it was always assumed that the birds gain from this relationships, while the trees are not in any way affected by it.
Now, a new study came out, demonstrating (for the first time, as far as I know - is that correct?), that the relationship between at least some trees and some birds is actually mutualism, i.e., both partners profit from the relationship:
Chickadees, nuthatches and warblers foraging their way through forests have been shown to spur the growth of pine…
voltagegate | August 1, 2007PLoS One has an overload of ecology centered articles I want to read and review from the past few weeks. I'm hoping I get to some of them in the next week:
Climate Change, Genetics or Human Choice: Why Were the Shells of Mankind's Earliest Ornament Larger in the Pleistocene Than in the Holocene?
[Abstract] The southern African tick shell, Nassariuskraussianus (Dunker, 1846), has been identified as being the earliest known ornamental object used by human beings. Shell beads dated from ,75,000 years ago (Pleistocene era) were found in a cave located on South Africa's south coast. Beads made…
voltagegate | July 31, 2007
Millenia ago, Brian from Laelaps presented The Voltage Gate with the Thinking Blogger Award, and I have finally found some time to pass it on to blogs that make me think. It's difficult to siphon the 50 or so blogs I peruse and only choose five, but I'll do my best.
Jen, The Infinite Sphere: Jen's original blog, Studying Biology and Environmental Science (I think the URL has been swiped unfortunately), was one of the first science blogs I ever read. I was immediately drawn in because of our shared experience as nontrad biology students and her posts about her studies and hobbies (like…
voltagegate | July 31, 2007
Twelve years ago, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a 70 year absence due to over hunting (and outright slaughter). Beyond the pure principle of reintroduction, an added bonus was cutting the elk population in the area, and subsequently reducing the pressure on riparian Aspen saplings. Researchers at Oregon State have been following this trend for a while now, and just published a paper on the revitalization of the Aspen population in Yellowstone:
The findings... show that a process called "the ecology of fear" is at work, a balance has been restored to an important…
voltagegate | July 30, 2007Paleoecologist Margaret Davis' work has become legend among ecologists. She analyzed layer upon layer of pollen buried in lake sediments in the Appalachian Mountains to determine the natural history of trees in the area.
She found an interesting pattern:
Spruce (Picea) pollen dominated the area 12,000 years ago. Beech (specifically Fagus grandifolia) pollen appears 8,000 years ago.
The American Chestnut pollen did not show up in the sediment record until 2,000 years ago; it quickly vanished around 1920.
Cryphonectria parasitica, a type of blight (type of fungus), was transported to North…
voltagegate | July 27, 2007"For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal."
-Thomas Jefferson
voltagegate | July 27, 2007I finally got around to reading this study from PLoS One, another paper trying to address socioeconomic influences on ecology and biodiversity. The researchers explored a possible correlation between economic inequality - the distribution of wealth - and biodiversity in the US (state by state) and several other countries.
They used the Gini coefficient for measuring economic inequality. Gini coefficients are expressed in a scale from 0 to 1.0, with 0 being an area in which all families/households earn exactly the same income (perfect equality) and 1.0 being an area in which one family earns…
hrynyshyn | July 25, 2007Among the most common questions that follow my presentations of Al Gore's climate change slide show is "What about vegetarianism?" I usually respond that eating less meat will probably be a consequence of climate change, due to the enormous water and energy costs associated with raising livestock, rather than a significant mitigation strategy. But I'm going to reconsider the situation, in the light of this paper in Animal Science Journal.
"Evaluating environmental impacts of the Japanese beef cow-calf system by the life cycle assessment method" (doi: 10.1111/j.1740-0929.2007.00457.x) takes a…
mikethemadbiologist | July 19, 2007The Boston Globe reports that the Charles River swim race might be canceled because of cyanobacterial blooms. Again. So why is this happening? Phosphorous levels are too high:
Blue-green algae are not true algae, but cyanobacteria. They are usually present in amounts so small they are harmless, but can undergo exponential growth spurts when exposed to nutrients contained in contaminants such as lawn fertilizer and Canada goose droppings that wash into waterways.
State and federal environmental officials suspect that this year's bloom is occurring now because of optimal conditions for growth…
hrynyshyn | July 19, 2007Before you read anything else about the Chilean sea bass served Al Gore at his daughter's wedding rehearsal party, read Deltoid's thoroughly researched review of how lazy journalists and bloggers once again did their best to undermine the world most popular climate change campaigner, and a guy who's just trying to be nice. Given how much unfair grief Gore received recently over his electricity bill, shouldn't we all be bit more careful before casting aspersions on his sincerity?
The bottom line is this: Gore was attending a private function, at which his future in-laws served him a dish that…