ecology
laelaps | April 14, 2008Spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) have a bad reputation; they look strange, they have an unnerving repertoire of yips and yowls, the females have a pseudo-penis, and they are often portrayed as ruthless scavengers. I actually like hyenas quite a bit, and although not much can be done about their looks, they are not simply mangy scavengers that steal kills from the more "noble" lions (Panthera leo). Alone or in groups, hyenas are effective hunters, and lions try to steal hyena kills just as hyenas will compete for lion kills (the relationship between the two carnivores varies from place to place…
clock | April 13, 2008Since I am not an ecologist, when I teach the ecology lecture I 'go by the book' and trust that the textbook will be reasonably accurate. But now, perhaps I should rethink the way I teach about ecological succession...What do my ecological readers think?
awild | April 13, 2008
The Argentine Ant (Linepithema humile), a small brown ant about 2-3mm long, is one of the world's most damaging insects. This pernicious ant is spreading to warmer regions around the world from its natal habitat along South America's Paraná River. Linepithema humile can drive native arthropods to extinction, instigating changes that ripple through ecosystems. In California, horned lizard populations plummet. In South Africa, plant reproduction is disrupted. Worldwide, the Argentine ant is a persistent house and crop pest. This is not a good ant.
My Ph.D. dissertation, completed a few…
voltagegate | April 9, 2008Tara has a great post up about infectious diseases and landscape ecology, and being able to reconcile, if you will, very big picture (landscape ecology) with the very small (microbiology).
tsmith | April 8, 2008I spent all day yesterday in Madison, Wisconsin, at a conference on Landscape Ecology and infectious disease. I'll discuss a few of the talks and issues below, but I wanted to start out with a bit of an introduction and explain just what landscape ecology (LE) is.
The introductory talk, which covered this ground, was presented by Dr. Michael Wimberly of South Dakota State University. He noted that defining LE wasn't an easy task. At its most basic, of course, it's a field looking at ecology from a landscape perspective--taking a big picture view, if you will. However, what one means by a…
laelaps | April 8, 2008In honor of the centennial anniversary of 1908 Conference of Governors, governors from around the country are going to meet at Yale on April 18 for a conference on global climate change, the group hoping to solidify local and federal initiatives to combat global warming. Among those present will be Jon Corzine (Governor of New Jersey), Chet Culver (Governor of Iowa), Jim Doyle (Governor of Wisconsin), Deval Patrick (Governor of Massachusetts), Jodi Rell (Governor of Connecticut), Arnold Schwarzenegger (Governor of California), and Kathleen Sebelius (Governor of Kansas). More information can…
voltagegate | April 8, 2008It has been claimed in the past that birdfeeders were bad for the environment, and now a couple of researchers are looking into published literature on whether or not birdfeeders significantly disrupt the ecology and future evolution of birds.
The PR from SD is basically highlights of the researchers' survey, including indications that birds may get "trapped" in inhospitable areas by the surplus of food or that birdfeeders can disrupt a bird's natural breeding/feeding cycle throughout the year.
This review seems to be a jumping off point for more research:
"Changing the natural dynamics of…
tsmith | April 3, 2008Early this week, grant application; yesterday and today, IRB and IACUC for another project. But once again, fellow Sbers are keeping me busy reading about stories I'd like to be writing on; see yet again Mike on E. coli O157:H7--everything old is new again; Ed on a new study showing yet again how amazing bacteria are; and DrugMonkey discussing heroin addiction as a family legacy, and notes that this sad story again shows that Narcan saves lives.
laelaps | April 2, 2008I love fieldwork, I really do. Even though I do enjoy sitting at my desk with stacks of books, sifting through the text to soak in the technical literature, there's nothing like getting out into the field to study organisms (or the remains of them) whenever I have the chance. I've only been able to go fossil hunting twice (although I might return to Inversand next weekend) and last weekend I assisted some taphonomic processes, but admittedly I'm generally lacking in hands-on experience. With the weather warming up, though, I'm a bit hungry for some work outdoors.
Some people feel that gaining…
laelaps | March 28, 2008
The skull of Mosasaurus hoffmani. Lingham-Soliar 1995.
On my first trip to the Inversand marl pit in Sewell, New Jersey, I didn't find the wonderfully preserved Dryptosaurus skeleton I had been dreaming of. I come across a number of bivalve shells and geologically younger sponges, but other than a few scraps of "Chunkosaurus," my excavations didn't yield very much. Before my paleontology class left the site, though, we took a walk by the spoil piles, great green mounds of sediment that had already been mined for glauconite. It had recently rained, and little pillars revealed fragmentary…
voltagegate | March 27, 2008
The black caiman is just one of the endangered species that inhabits the Guiana Shield.
Back in November, the president of Guyana, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, offered the entirety of his country's rainforest to a British-led international body in return for help with development. Jagdeo was searching for alternatives to an obvious, but morally objectionable solution.
"Maybe we should just cut down the trees. Then someone would recognize the problem," said Mr Jagdeo. "But I want to think we can fulfill our people's aspirations without cutting down the trees."
British…
tsmith | March 25, 20081980 marked a milestone in infectious disease epidemiology: the World Health Organization declared the smallpox virus eradicated in the wild. However, while smallpox currently exists only in frozen stocks, poxviruses as a class certainly haven't disappeared. A related virus, monkeypox, regularly causes illness in Africa, and even spread half a world away in the American midwest.
Additionally, Africa isn't the only area with endemic poxvirus infections. Brazil has been dealing with their own poxvirus outbreak, and poxviruses have popped up in Europe as well. More on both of those after…
tsmith | March 24, 2008 As I mentioned Friday, the good folks from Google were part of the crowd at this year's ICEID. This included a talk by Larry Brilliant, described on his wikipedia page as "...medical doctor, epidemiologist, technologist, author and philanthropist, and the director of Google's philanthropic arm Google.org." His talk discussed not only stopping outbreaks in their tracks--as current outbreak investigations seek to do, and Brilliant himself as worked on, as part of his background in vaccination campaigns for polio and smallpox--but to pay attention to "the left of the epidemic curve" as part…
laelaps | March 24, 2008
An African civet (Civetticus civetta) that had been rescued and found a home at the Popcorn Park Zoo. I don't know the history of this particular animal, but civets are often "farmed" for civetone, an ingredient used in expensive perfumes that is found in a substance secreted from a gland near their anus (the civets aren't killed; a spoon is used in the process). Civetone can be created synthetically, but some companies still prefer the natural stuff, and strangely enough some wildlife biologists have found perfumes containing civetone to be useful to their research. Jaguars seem especially…
voltagegate | March 21, 2008There's a neat study being published today in Science discussing the reproductive potential of ecological systems 570 mya. The findings are based on the new discovery of a "tube-like" organism (so say the PRs) called Funisia dorothea, which apparently was able to reproduce sexually and lived in a complex ecosystem despite the apparent absence of predation. The researchers have taken this to be an example of a much more complex world during the Neoproterozoic and periods before. From the PR:
...in describing the ecology and reproductive strategies of Funisia dorothea, a tubular organism…
laelaps | March 19, 2008Last night I had one of those ideas that made my eyes go wide, wake my wife up, and try to explain what was bouncing around in my brain before it skittered away into the recesses of my thoughts. I think I was able to grab a fragment of the idea, but the more I turned it over in my head the more I realized that it represents a much bigger problem than I originally anticipated. I was hoping to have a blog post up about it today, but it's going to require a bit more work than I expected.
In the meantime, I suppose I can tell you this. The idea occurred to me while thinking about the diversity of…
clock | March 17, 2008The wilding of the American West is definitely a controversial idea. Josh Donlan provides links to the details of the proposal and asks the readers to do a quick poll about it - go do it!
laelaps | March 17, 2008Josh Donlan of Shifting Baselines wants to know what you think of Pleistocene Re-wilding. I recently aired some of my complaints about the hypothetical plans after reading Paul Martin's Twilight of the Mammoths, but while I don't support the idea I would encourage you to take the survey and add your thoughts to the discussion about this controversial topic.
mikethemadbiologist | March 12, 2008I've written before about CTX-M-15 beta-lactamases which make bacteria resistant to most cephalosporin antibiotics--those antibiotics that begin with cef- (or ceph-) or end with -cillin. I've also discussed the role of clonal spread in the rise of antibiotic resistance: most (but obviously not all) resistant infections are not the result of a sensitive strain evolving resistance during the course of infections, but rather due to colonization by a previously resistant strain. A recent article in Emerging Infectious Diseases discusses the role of clonal spread in the dissemination of CTX-M-…
edyong | March 11, 2008
Some of us have enough trouble finding the food we want among the ordered aisles of a supermarket. Now imagine that the supermarket itself is in the middle of a vast, featureless wasteland and is constantly on the move, and you begin to appreciate the challenges faced by animals in the open ocean.
Thriving habitats like coral reefs may present the photogenic face of the sea, but most of the world's oceans are wide expanses of emptiness. In these aquatic deserts, all life faces the same challenge: how to find enough food. Now, a couple of interesting studies have shed new light on the…