By: JulieF,
on 8/9/2016
Birds do it. Bees do it. Microbes do it, and people do it. Throughout nature, organisms cooperate. Humans are undeniably attracted by the idea of cooperation. For thousands of years, we have been seeking explanations for its occurrence in other organisms, often imposing our own motivations and ethics in an effort to explain what we see.
The post Why cooperate? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: JulieF,
on 8/7/2016
As my family gazed down on the stratified color bands of geological history in the Grand Canyon, snow and ice lined each ridge, and made each step on the path going down a dangerous adventure, highlighting the glorious drama of the miles-deep gorge. It was dizzying and frightening and awe-inspiring.
The post Aldo Leopold’s legacy on our national parks appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Hannah Paget,
on 7/30/2016
Imagine a Hollywood film about the Iraq War in which a scene at a clandestine Al-Qaeda compound featuring a cabal of insurgents abruptly cuts to a truck-stop off the New Jersey Turnpike. A group of disgruntled truckers huddle around their rigs cursing the price of gas. An uncannily similar coup de thèâtre occurs in an overlooked episode in 1 Henry IV.
The post What would Shakespeare drive? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 5/23/2016
World Turtle Day is celebrated on 23 May every year since its inception in 2000. The American Tortoise Rescue sponsors this day of awareness to bring attention to one of the world’s oldest reptiles, and encourage humans to help in the conservation and protection of these grand animals. In honour of these grandiose creatures, we have compiled a reading list of biology titles and articles that have helped to further research into the conservation biology of all chelonians.
The post World Turtle Day: a reading list appeared first on OUPblog.
By: JulieF,
on 4/20/2016
“We may, without knowing it, be writing a new definition of what science is for,” said Aldo Leopold to the Wildlife Society in 1940. A moderate but still crisp April breeze was playing in my hair as the sun worked to melt the last bits of frost in the silt. Shoots of prairie grasses were popping up through the mud, past shell skeletons of river mussels and clams.
The post Science informed by affection and ethics appeared first on OUPblog.
By: JOANNA MARPLE,
on 4/15/2016
I had another book scheduled for today, but as I am staying with one of my writing buddies and she introduced me to a delightful biography of a tree-loving woman here in San Diego, I couldn’t pass up the chance … Continue reading
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By: Miranda Dobson,
on 12/30/2015
As the days get shorter, the Netherlands, a low lying waterlogged country, becomes a safe haven for approximately five million waders, gulls, ducks, and geese, which spend the winter here resting and foraging in fresh water lakes, wetlands, and along rivers. Many of these birds travel to the Netherlands from their breeding ranges in the Arctic.
The post New Year’s Eve fireworks cause a mass exodus of birds appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Shelf-employed,
on 10/19/2015
Fuzzy Mud by Louis Sachar, winner of the Newbery Medal and National Book Award for Holes. Narrated by Kathleen McInerny with a full cast and an author's note read by Sachar himself. (Listening Library, 2015)
4 hours
Target audience: Grades 5 and up
I reviewed Fuzzy Mud for AudioFile Magazine, and loved it. As I should have expected from Louis Sachar, there is much more to it than I first expected. It's a sci-fi, adventure thriller,that focuses on the very broad concept of ecology as well as the more intimate problem of bullying. A link to my review for AudioFile Magazine is here. [http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/reviews/read/104469/]
I highly recommend it.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 10/10/2015
In honour of Biology Week 2015, we have compiled a reading list of biology titles that have helped further the cause through education and research.
The post Biology Week: a reading list appeared first on OUPblog.
The Shark Rider Series: Tristan Hunt and the Sea Guardians #2 Written by Ellen Prager Illustrated by Antonia Javier Caparo Mighty Media Junior Readers 5/01/2015 978-1-938063-51-0 280 pages Age 8—12 “After thwarting the dastardly plans of J. P. Rickerton, Tristan Hunt is having trouble keeping his newfound talents a secret. And …
By: JulieF,
on 9/3/2015
Thailand is one of the most ecologically diverse countries in the world, housing more than 350 different species of reptiles. Learning about these turtles, tortoises, lizards, crocodiles, and snakes is more important than ever in light of recent threats to their extinction due to wildlife trade and loss of habitat for agricultural use of their habitat.
The post The reptiles of Thailand [interactive map] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: JulieF,
on 8/14/2015
Many of us involved in teaching botany feel a sense of urgency in our profession. Botany departments, botany majors, and botany curricula have gradually disappeared from most colleges and universities in the US,
The post Studying botany in college appeared first on OUPblog.
By: JulieF,
on 8/12/2015
The agents of natural selection cause evolutionary changes in population gene pools. They include a plethora of familiar abiotic and biotic factors that affect growth, development, and reproduction in all living things.
The post The hidden side of natural selection appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Sara Pinotti,
on 8/8/2015
My first experience of an academic conference as a biology books editor at Oxford University Press was of sitting in a ballroom in Ottawa in July 2012 listening to 3000 evolutionary biologists chanting ‘I’m a African’ while a rapper danced in front of a projection of Charles Darwin
The post Looking forward to ESEB 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.
Frankie Dupont And The Science Fair Sabotage
Written by Julie Anne Grasso
Illustrated by Alexander Avellino
Published by J. A. Grasso 5/11/2015
978-0-9873725-9-8
230 pages Age 8—12
“Frankie Dupont is less than impressed when he has to attend the Sustainable Science Fair with Kat and Amy. Upon his arrival, he learns that Amy’s brothers have had their robotics chip stolen Keen to recover the chip, Frankie questions the kids in the competition, but everyone seems to have a motive. When baffling clues start rolling in via “Snap-Goss” instant messages, Frankie realizes it will take all of his detective muscles to solve this case.” [back cover]
Review
Frankie Dupont and the Science Fair Sabotage is the third book in the Frankie Dupont series. This time around, mom and dad are going away for the weekend, leaving Frankie in charge of the detective agency. When he is called to the Sustainable Science Fair, he finds Angus and Archie in angst over their robotic chip, stolen sometime after arriving at the fair. Frankie swoops into action. He finds the twins entry into the fair, or rather just the twins, causes equal angst among the other student entries. Angus and Archie have pranked each of the contestants and none of them are friendly toward the boys. Each contestant has a reason to sabotage the twin’s entry, though none will admit they stole the chip. Frankie becomes more confused the longer he tries to figure out the culprit. If each kid had a reason to take the robotic chip, how does he decide which is the guilty party?
The mystery is not terribly complicated, still Grasso, whose writing improves with each new story, does a great job keeping the reader with Frankie. Kids will not figure out the culprit much sooner than Frankie will. After three outings, the characters remain fresh. Frankie has lost the arrogance he had during the Lemon Festival Fiasco, yet he is still clueless regarding Amy’s admiration. Frankie’s best friend and cousin Kat, who has been his sidekick through the first two stories, is less involved in the mystery of the stolen chip. Frankie’s main motivation comes from Inspector Cluesome, whom Frankie is determined to outwit.
Kids will enjoy the Science Fair Sabotage. The science fair projects are interesting. One has a house built out of stevia-made sugar cubes and another using scrap aluminum to build a working guitar. The ideas of conservation and recycling are clear in the science fair entries, though I would have liked to have read more about why this fair came about, which could have lead to an indepth conversation about these important issues.
The Science Fair Sabotage will entertain readers. The short chapters, divided by student entry, will keep reluctant readers interested. The end works out fine, with Frankie finding the culprit, the science fair going on as planned, and a winner announced. The culprit is not who readers will expect, so keep you eyes peeled to the clues. The Science Fair Sabotage is a fine addition to the Frankie Dupont series.
Next up for Frankie, Kat, and Amy (seems they might have become a team), is a luxury cruise in Frankie Dupont and the High Seas Adventure, scheduled to release in September 2015.
Awards for the Frankie Dupont Series
2014 Wishing Shelf Independent Book SILVER for Frankie Dupont and the Mystery of Enderby Manor. (book #1)
FRANKIE DUPONT AND THE SUSTAINEABLE SCIENCE FAIR. Text copyright © 2015 by Julie Anne Grasso. Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Alexander Avellino. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Julie Anne Grasso, Australia.
Buy The Sustainable Science Fair at Amazon
Learn more about The Sustainable Science Fair HERE.
Free Activity Booklet is HERE.
Meat the author, Julie Anne Grasso at her website: http://whenigrowupiwannawriteakidsbook.blogspot.com.au/
Meet the illustrator, Alexander Avellino, at his website: http://www.alexanderavellino.com/
Also by Julie Anne Grasso
Frankie Dupont and the Mystery of Enderby Manor (review)
Frankie Dupont and the Lemon Festival Fiasco (review)
Adventures of Caramel Cardamom #1: Escape from the Forbidden Planet
Adventures of Caramel Cardamom #2: Return to Cardamom (review)
Adventures of Caramel Cardamom #3: Stellarcadia
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Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews. All Rights Reserved
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Review section word count = 433
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Full Disclosure: Frankie Dupont and the Sustainable Science Fair by Julie Anne Grasso & Alexander Avellino, and received from the publisher, Julie Anne Grasso, is in exchange NOT for a positive review, but for an HONEST review. The opinions expressed are my own and no one else’s. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonies in Advertising.
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By: Samantha Zimbler,
on 4/22/2015
No time to plant a garden or ride your bike to work this Earth Day? Don't worry--you can still do your part to honor Mother Nature today by staying informed about our global environment. Test your knowledge of water, weather, air, sea, and soil with the Earth Day quiz below, featuring content from Oxford Bibliographies in Environmental Science.
The post Are you an “earth ranger”? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alex Guyver,
on 12/13/2014
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience, 1844.
The concept of looking at nature through multiple lenses to see different things is not new and has been long recognized. As always, the devil is in the details. Recent developments in analytical tools and the embracement of an integrative metapopulation concept and the newly emergent field of functional biogeography, are allowing exciting new insights to be made by population ecologists that have direct bearing on our understanding of the effects of environmental change on biodiversity patterns.
The metapopulation concept posits that isolated populations of organisms are connected through dynamics of dispersal and extinction. Across a landscape, areas of suitable habitat occur, which at one point in time may or may not host a viable population of a particular species. I study this concept with terrestrial plants, and have asked what environmental conditions determine suitable habitat for metapopulations.
Much of the foundational work in this topic was conducted on butterfly populations in meadows across otherwise forested habitat. Regardless of study organism, embracement of this concept has been enough to make population ecologists realize that studying single populations may give only a limited view on generalities of ecology and evolution. Indeed, taking this concept on board, has led population ecologists to want to predict in which areas of suitable habitat across the landscape a new population may establish.
“There’s no getting away from field work!”
There are obvious conservation and management implications that result from being able to predict the geographical distribution of a species, whether an invasive exotic spreading across the globe, or an endangered organism. Unfortunately, just knowing where a species or a group of species may occur across the landscape is not enough. Individuals in some populations may have low fitness and their populations may be barely hanging on. For some species such as potential island colonizers, it has been proposed that limited ability to colonize vacant habitat patches may be due to the occurrence of closely related species occupying a similar niche.
Important ‘missing pieces’ from a full understanding of the metapopulation puzzle have been through inclusion of population growth rate estimates and incorporation of species evolutionary relationships (i.e., their phylogenic ancestry). Population ecologists have been toiling away making fitness estimates of their species of interest in the field. Systematists, on the other hand, have been grinding it out in the lab to generate the molecular data necessary to construct phylogenetic trees to help classify their species.
Community ecologists studying multispecies assemblages, as a third-dimensional angle to this question, have been working with geographers to develop species distribution models. It is only recently that the analytical tools have emerged that allow these groups of scientists to collaborate and address questions of common interest about metapopulations.For example, Cory Merow and colleagues have recently shown how Bayesian models can be used to propagate uncertainty estimates in the application of integral projection models (IPMs) to forecast growth rates as part of predictive demographic distribution models (transition matrix models could also be used). In other words, species geographic distribution predictions can be improved by accounting for population-level fitness estimates.
In another study, Oluwatobi Oke and colleagues have shown how phylogenetic relationships among 66 co-occurring species in populations across a metapopulation structured landscape of Canadian barrens can improve understanding of species distribution patterns. The basis for Oke et al.’s phylogenetic patterns among their species was the large angiosperm supertree based upon nucleotide sequence data of three genes from over 500 species.
The basis for all of the work described above are precise and accurate estimates of individual fitness and population growth rates. There’s no getting away from field work! Methods for carrying out the field work component of these studies, to allow the use of modern statistical methods including Bayesian analysis, IPMs, and transition matrix models, have to be planned and carried out with care. We have come a long way in the last decade in enabling population studies to scale up to address fundamental questions at higher levels of the ecological hierarchy.
The field of population demography is moving fast. For example, the recent launch of the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database, with accurate demographic information for over 500 plant species in their natural settings worldwide, will make addressing these scale-related types of comparative evolutionary and ecological questions even more tractable in the future.
The post Population ecologists scale up appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Julie Fergus,
on 11/30/2014
For those of us living in the northern hemisphere one of the great annual events of nature is winding down. This is the autumn migration of numerous species from summer breeding grounds to wintering areas farther south. Even to the most casual observers of nature, it is apparent that migration is a conspicuous behavior for many organisms. Great whales moving along our coasts attract watchers to excursion vessels and promontories on our coasts; echelons of ducks, geese, and swans fly in V-formations to marshes and estuaries; and in North America millions of bright orange monarch butterflies inspire awe with their migrations to wintering sites in the mountains of central Mexico and the coast of California. Equally apparent, to the dismay of agriculture the world over, are the migrations of insects like locusts and armyworm moths that can cause enormous crop losses, even to the extent of stripping fields of ‘any green thing’ in the words of the Book of Exodus. What is not so appreciated, however, are the numerous tiny insects, mites, and spiderlings that also migrate. On spring and summer evenings at temperate latitudes the air to considerable heights is often filled with aphids and ballooning spiders that with the aid of selected winds can migrate for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. From the tiniest to the largest of organisms migration can play a crucial role in the life cycle, allowing the exploitation of resources that can be distant in both space and time.
New methods reveal just how dramatic some migrations can be. Geolocators no larger than a fingernail attached to godwits have shown that these shorebirds departing Alaska in the autumn fly nonstop to their nonbreeding areas in Australia and New Zealand. Radio transmitters attached to European storks communicate with orbiting satellites and show that the tracks of birds migrating from eastern Europe to eastern and southern Africa often wander widely even as far Nigeria before heading back eastward to the wintering areas. Radar tracking of migrating moths demonstrates that these insects possess highly sophisticated navigation systems that allow them to select winds of seasonally appropriate directions to assist them on their passage. Winds are a major factor in migratory performance from tiny aphids to large raptorial birds like vultures and eagles. In the ocean and tidal estuaries currents assist the migrations of marine denizens from crab larvae returning to salt marshes to become breeding adults to sea turtles returning to nesting beaches from remote reaches of the open ocean.
Migration for an individual is a ‘complete package’ of physiology, behavior, and ecology. Important defining behavioral characteristics include specific arrival and departure tactics and the refusal to stop even in favorable habitats until the migration program is complete. This is as true of the one-way migration flights of aphids as it is of the nearly pole to pole round-trips of arctic terns. In the words of David Quammen migrants “are flat-out just gonna get there.” The program or syndrome includes specific modifications of metabolic physiology like enhanced fat storage to fuel transit, and of sensory systems to detect inputs from the sun, stars, and magnetic field lines that indicate compass direction. Intimately involved in the latter are daily and yearly biological clocks – daily to time the movements of sun or stars and yearly to time the seasons. The pathway followed, whether round-trip in long-lived organisms or one-way in the short-lived is an outcome of the syndrome of migratory behavior and physiology and is part of the ecology that provides the natural selection acting to determine the evolution of migration. The whole performance has been likened to a marathon, but as Chris Guglielmo of the University of Western Ontario points out, the modifications of performance required make migration more akin to a trip to the moon than a marathon.
Migration syndromes ensure that a huge number and biomass of migrants move over the surface of the earth and impact ecosystems in a variety of ways many little appreciated. We are aware of the impacts of migrant pests on agriculture enhanced by our predilection to plant monocultures of ruderal crops that provide optimal habitats for these invaders. We are less aware of the benefits provided by migrants. Migrant birds and bats consume enormous quantities of insects, and it is hard to imagine what our world would like without this consumption. Many migrants transport energy and nutrients from one ecosystem to another. Salmon, for example, carry nutrients from the ocean thousands of kilometers inland where they fertilize both fresh waters and neighboring terrestrial environments via the predators and scavengers that feed on them. Not long ago salmon provided us with abundant cheap and healthy protein (the ‘poverty steak’ of the Great Depression), but we have now so dammed and polluted their freshwater rivers that current migrations are either extinct or shadows of their former abundance. Overall we have not treated migrants particularly well, and one wonders what a future of continued human population growth, overexploitation of our resources, and the consequences of a changing climate have in store for them. Migrants are a wonder, a resource, and an inspiration impacting humanity over most of the globe. They deserve our attention and protection.
Featured Image: Butterfly migration. Photo by Hillebrand Steve, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Public Domain.
The post Nature in motion: migration and its implications appeared first on OUPblog.
By: yesisedit,
on 11/8/2014
Little bee, no swerving from your line when you deliver the goods back home.
A busy place with no door but when you enter you still use your buzzer.
Then back again from flower to flower, collecting the pollen that gives you power.
It’s home again, little bundles carried to feed the Queen
By: yesisedit,
on 10/17/2014
What’s on my mind?
Indigenous peoples and their worry about being over run by other populations I guess could sum it up.
I suppose if cougars, wolves, elephants and such learned to shoot guns or band together better they would kick out the human populations who have transgressed on their land but as people go I believe we need to understand the reason for others unlawfully entering areas already overpopulated.
Overpopulation where they come from, economic despair, greed, the making of money into a God and the lust for power over others seem to be good places to start .
Seems to me that as people from a planet with finite resources we need to try to make all places a good place to live so people want to stay where they are. Make everywhere a good place to be.
Sharing with others does not have to mean give away my happiness but it could mean helping you gain yours. I hope I can do that with more than one other and if we all did it for just two other people it would cure the problem in my mind at least.
By: yesisedit,
on 9/7/2014
I was just thinking that it’s not the perfect flower I look for in my photography, it’s the perfect feeling, same with my friends, they all have little flaws just like me but when I close my eyes and think of them I only know the sweet essence of their perfection and see how wonderful life is to let me see them … Love you all !
By: Julie Fergus,
on 8/15/2014
For the most part, Buddhists have historically been less concerned with explaining the world than with generating personal peace and enlightenment. However, the emergence of “engaged Buddhism” — especially in the West, has emphasized a powerful commitment to environmental protection based in no small part on a fundamental ecological awareness that lies at the heart of Buddhist thought and practice.
People who follow ecological thinking (including some of our hardest-headed scientists) may not realize that they are also embracing an ancient spiritual tradition, just as many who espouse Buddhism — succumbing, perhaps, to its chic, Hollywood appeal — may not realize that they are also endorsing a worldview with political implications that go beyond bumper stickers and trendy, feel-good support for a “free Tibet.”
Biologists readily acknowledge that living processes are connected; after all, we breathe and eat in order to metabolize, and biogeochemical cycles are fundamental to life (and not merely to ecology courses). Nonetheless, biology — like most Western science — largely seeks to reduce things to their simplest components. Although such reductionism has generally paid off (witness the deciphering of DNA, advances in neurobiology, etc.), ecologists in particular have also emphasized the stunningly complex reality of organism-environment interconnection as well as the importance of biological “communities” — which doesn’t refer to the human inhabitants of a housing development.
Although “community ecology” and complicated relationships among its living and nonliving components has become a crucial part of ecological research, recognizing the existence — not to mention the importance — of such interconnectedness nonetheless requires constant struggle and emphasis, probably because the Western mind deals poorly with boundary-less notions. This isn’t because Westerners are genetically predisposed to roadblocks that don’t exist for our Eastern colleagues, but simply because, for reasons that no one seems as yet to have unraveled, the latter’s predominant intellectual traditions have accepted and embraced the absence of such boundaries.
In The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling captured the power of such recognition in the magical phrase by which Mowgli the human boy gained entrance into the life of animals: “We be of one blood, you and I.” Being of one blood, and acknowledging it, is also a key Buddhistic concept, reflected as well in the biochemical reality that human beings share more than 99% of their genes with each other. At the same time, there is no reason why Mowgli’s meet-and-greet should be limited to what transpires between human beings. After all, just as the jungle-boy interacted with other creatures — wolves, monkeys, an especially benevolent snake, panther, and bear, as well as a malevolent tiger — everyone’s relationship to the rest of the world, living and even nonliving, is equally intense. Thus, we share fully 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, and more than 92% with mammals generally; modern genetics confirms that we literally are of one blood, just as modern ecology — along with modern Buddhism — confirms that the alleged distinction between organism and environment is an arbitrary error of misperception, and not the way the world really is.
The interpenetration of organism and environment also leads both ecologists and Buddhists to a more sophisticated — and often paradoxical — rejection of simple cause-and-effect relationships. Thus, the absence of clear-cut boundaries among natural systems, plus the multiplicity of relevant factors means that no one can be singled out as the cause — and indeed, the impact of these factors is so multifaceted that no single “effect” can be recognized either. Systems exist as a whole, not as isolated causative sequences. Are soils the cause or effect of vegetation? Is the prairie the cause or effect of grazing mammals? Is the speed of a gazelle the cause or effect of the speed of a cheetah? Do cells create DNA or does DNA create cells? Chickens and eggs, anyone? “Organism” and “environment” interconnect and interpenetrate such that neither can truly be labeled a “cause” or “effect” of the other.
It has long been known, for example, that organisms generate environments: beavers create wetlands, ungulates crop grasses and thereby maintain prairies, while lowly worms — as Darwin first demonstrated — are directly responsible for creating rich, loamy soil. On the other hand (or rather, by the same token) it can equally be concluded that environments generate organisms: the ecology of North America’s grass prairie was responsible for the existence of bison genes, just as causation proceeds in the other direction, too. Even as ecologists have no doubt that organism and environment are inseparable, ethologists — students of animal behavior — are equally unanimous that it is foolhardy to ask whether behavior is attributable to nature or nurture, i.e. environment or genotype. Such dichotomies are wholly artificial … something that Buddhists would call maya.
Western images are typically linear: a train, a chain, a ladder, a procession of marchers, a highway unrolling before one’s speeding car. By contrast, images derived from Indian thought (which gave rise to both Hinduism and Buddhism) are more likely to involve circularity: wheels and cycles, endlessly repeating. Although there is every reason to think that evolution proceeds as an essentially one-way street, Eastern cyclicity is readily discernible not only in ecology — a discipline that is intensely aware of how every key element and molecule relevant to life has its own cycling pattern — but also in the immediacy of cell metabolism, reflected, for example, in the Krebs cycle, or the wheel of ATP, the basic process whereby energy is released for the metabolism of living cells.
At the same time, and as we have noted earlier, there is no single entity labeled “Buddhism,” just as there is no single phenomenon identifiable as “Christianity,” “Judaism,” or “Islam.” And certain schools of Buddhism (e.g. Zen) are more sympathetic to ecological ethics than are others (e.g. Theravada, which remains more committed to personal enlightenment). To be sure, the science of ecology is partitioned as well, to some extent between theoreticians (fond of mathematical models) and field workers (more inclined to get their hands dirty in the real world), but also between ecology as a hard science and ecology in the broader sense of ethical responsibility to a complex natural world. Most spiritual traditions have some sort of moral relationship to the natural world built into them, from Christian stewardship to shamanic identification. Yet another reality, and a regrettable one, is that for the Abrahamic religions in particular (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), separateness — of soul from body, individuals from each other, heaven from hell, human beings from the rest of the natural world, and so forth — is the primary operating assumption. This is assuredly not the case with Buddhism.
For me (and I assuredly am not alone in this), Buddhism is not a religion but rather, a practice system and philosophical perspective. And it is with pleasure and optimism that I point to the convergence between Buddhism and biology generally — and ecology in particular — as something that is not only fascinating but also deeply reassuring.
The post Engaged Buddhism and community ecology appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Julie Fergus,
on 8/14/2014
It is well known that many of the permanent inhabitants of caves have evolved a bizarre, convergent morphology, including loss of eyes and pigment, elongation and thinning of appendages, and other adaptations to conditions of complete darkness and scarce food. These species include the European cave salamander, or olm, studied since the time of Lamarck.
Sometimes, the extremes of morphology of cave animals strain credibility, as is the case of a springtail from a Cambodian cave, with antennae several times the length of its body.
The adaptations shown by the olm and the springtail illustrated make sense in an environment of constant darkness and scarce food.
Species with morphologies like the olm and the Cambodian cave springtail, occur in and have evolved in habitats that only share the physical feature of darkness with caves. There are seven different kinds of dark habitats that occur close to the boundary of lighted and dark habitats:
All of these habitat harbor de-pigmented and eyeless species, even though there is often abundant organic matter present, and there are strong seasonal and sometimes daily fluctuations in temperature and other environmental conditions. Except for lava tubes, none provide the allure and adventure of caves.
The first of these categories, the fauna of seepage springs and the associated groundwater, epitomizes the ecological and evolutionary conundrums these shallow subterranean habitats pose. The habitat itself consists of a mixture of rocks and leaf litter underlain by a clay layer. The habitat is relatively rich in organic matter (both dissolved and particulate) and nutrients. Essentially, these are miniature drainage basins, that typically cover a few thousand square meters, and appear to be little more than wet spots in the woods.
These seepage springs and their fauna were first described from sites on Medvednica Mountain in Croatia in 1963 by Milan Meštrov, in several papers that are largely forgotten.
What he did leave is a tongue-twisting name for the habitat—hypotelminorheic, perhaps not surprising for a French word with Greek roots first coined by a Croatian. Unlike deep caves, the hypotelminorheic is high variable, and in many places the seepage spring dries up during the summer months, and most of the water is retained in the colloidal clay. The habitat is so shallow that there are daily temperature fluctuations. In spite of all this, these seeps harbor a number of amphipod, isopod, and snail species with the characteristic long antennae and absence of eyes and pigment characteristic of the deep cave fauna.
In one case, there are enough species of one genus of amphipods (Stygobromus), that relative size of antennae can be compared, and no differences between cave and hypotelminorheic species were found. What was different among the different subterranean habitats, was body size. A repeated pattern of small animals in habitats with small dimensions (soil and the upper layer of limestone) and large animals in habitats with large dimenions (lava tubes and deep caves). The conclusion is that absence of light and habitat size, not availability or organic matter or environmental variability, drives the evolution of the convergent morphology of subterranean animals. In fact, divergence as well as convergence occurs in subterranean habitats. Cene Fišer and his colleagues from the University of Ljubljana, have shown that when three or more species of the amphipod genus Niphargus are present in a subterranean site, their morphological divergence is greater than expected by chance. The task for biologists studying the subterranean fauna is to tease out the convergent and divergent aspects of adaptation.
The post Living in the dark appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Julie Fergus,
on 8/11/2014
It is likely that most ecologists have their own stories regarding the annual meetings of the Ecological Society of America (ESA), the world’s largest organization of professional ecologists. Some revere it, whereas others may criticize it. There is, however, truth in numbers—growth in attendance has been seemingly exponential since my first meeting in the early 1980’s. So, it is without debate that the annual ESA meeting remains an integral part of the professional life of many ecologists throughout the world.
This year’s ESA meeting will take place in Sacramento, CA. Image credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
My first ESA meeting was at the Pennsylvania State University (note: we were small enough to meet on college campuses then) in 1982 while still a Ph.D. student at Duke University working with Norm Christensen on herb-layer dynamics of pine forests of the southeastern United States. I was understandably wide-eyed at seeing the actual human forms of ecologists walking around, giving talks, drinking beer—all of whom had only been names on papers and books I had read as I was writing my dissertation. Despite logistical errors regarding my talk (the projectionist insisted on placing my slides in the tray, rather than allowing me to do so; then promptly put them in backwards), my first ESA was an unmitigated success, allowing me to meet folks who would become lifelong friends and colleagues. Small surprise that I not only attended the next year, but have attended all meetings since then, save two—1991, when I could not afford to travel to Hawaii, and 2012, when my son was entering the United States Naval Academy.
Although I still recall high points of virtually all meetings through the years, the ones that stand out the most for me are those when I collaborated to organize symposia. There have been three of these: 1993 (University of Wisconsin—Madison), 1998 (Baltimore, Maryland), and 2006 (Savannah, Georgia). Although they were of somewhat contrasting themes, I took the same approach to all of them—I always thought that topics/presentations worthy of an ESA meeting were also worthy of some type of formal publication, whether in a peer-reviewed journal or a book.
My old Duke office mate/best friend/collaborator, Mark Roberts, and I organized a symposium on the effects of disturbance on plant diversity of forests for the 1993 meeting. Highly successful at the meeting, with very high attendance and vigorous question/answer periods following each talk, this symposium resulted in the publication of a Special Feature in Ecological Applications in 1995.
Mark and I used that first symposium as a kind of template for the one which was part of the 1998 meeting, well into the period where the number of attendees had outgrown college campuses, relegating ESA to convention centers. The 1998 symposium was on the ecology of herbaceous layer communities of contrasting forests of eastern North America. We had assembled what we felt was a very good group, including the late Fakhri Bazzaz, who was actually the first person I had contacted prior to writing the proposal for the Program Committee, also very successful in terms of attendance and questions. We were also pleased with our efforts on this topic following the symposium.
For the 2006 meeting, another friend and colleague of mine, Bill Platt, and I organized a symposium on the ecology of longleaf pine ecosystems. This experience was especially rewarding in that it was so closely connected with both the meeting theme of that Savannah (Uplands to Lowlands: Coastal Processes in a Time of Global Change), and the meeting’s geographic location in the main region of natural longleaf pine—the Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States. We published these talks in a Special Feature in Applied Vegetation Science.
Oh, there was another high point for me—one not related to symposia. It was with great pride that I accepted the nomination to become the Program Chair for the 2010 Annual Meeting of ESA in Pittsburgh, PA. I chose the following for the scientific theme: Global Warming: the Legacy of Our Past, the Challenge for Our Future. At a time when eastern US venues were not nearly as popular for attendance as were western ones, attendance at this meeting was surprisingly high. I was especially pleased to be able to thank the Society publicly and collectively when I addressed them at the beginning of the meeting.
Since my arrival in 1990 here at Marshall University—a public school small state (West Virginia ranks 38th among the 50 United States) and with limited direct access to colleagues doing similar research—annual ESA meetings have provided me a lifeline, if you will, connecting me with ecologists, especially biogeochemists and vegetation scientists, from throughout North America and, indeed, the world. Most of my contributions to the field of ecology, including peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, and books, have been products of this event that has not only become an annual summer tradition of mine, but also has been invaluable to my career as a plant ecologist.
It’s 2014, folks—see you in Sacramento!
Frank S. Gilliam is a professor of biological sciences, teaching courses in ecology and plant ecology, at Marshall University. He is also the editor of the second edition of The Herbaceous Layer in Forests of Eastern North America.
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The post If it’s 2014, this must be Sacramento appeared first on OUPblog.
By: DanP,
on 7/14/2014
Slow lorises are enigmatic nocturnal primates that are notoriously difficult to find in the wild. The five species of slow loris that have been evaluated by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species are classified as threatened or critically endangered with extinction. So, how did one end up recently on the set of Lady Gaga’s music video? Lorises don’t make good pets or video props, especially as they are the world’s only venomous primates. But, unfortunately, it is easier to see a loris as an exotic pet in a Youtube video or on Rihanna’s shoulder as a photo prop than it is to see them in the wild.
In my current research at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, my team is surveying for Bengal (Nycticebus bengalensis) and pygmy slow lorises (N. pygmaeus) in Vietnam to determine their population status – how many lorises remain across different key sites in Vietnam, and how their current numbers compare to previous surveys. I have written before about the challenges my team has faced searching for these elusive creatures, but this time, I’d like to discuss the broader difficulties of searching for low-density, rare animals, and how knowledge gaps about these creatures can preclude the development of effective management plans for their conservation.
Intensive fieldwork on Vietnam’s primates only began in the mid-1990s, focusing on those species assessed to be the most in danger of extinction, especially gibbons (Nomascus spp.) and colobines such as snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus avunculus), doucs (Pygathrix spp.), and leaf monkeys (Trachypithecus spp.). Comparatively little research to date has focused on species assumed to be common such as the macaques (Macaca spp.) and the nocturnal lorises (Nycticebus spp.). These groups are presumed common because they seem to be able to persist in more diverse habitats including agroforest and regenerating forest, while gibbons, doucs, snub-nosed and leaf monkeys are found in established primary or secondary forests, which are rapidly depleting in Vietnam. As a result of this assumption, very few studies have focused on macaques or lorises in Vietnam and thus, there is very little if any information available to accurately assess their conservation status.
Now that researchers have started collecting data more intensively on slow lorises in Vietnam, we are finding that they are at such low densities that it is difficult to accurately calculate their density with statistical precision. However, as more and more researchers choose to focus on nocturnal, rare mammals like lorises across the globe (from owl monkeys to galagos to colugos), we can synthesize across our efforts to learn from each other, refine our methods, and generate more appropriate statistical models. In addition to continuing our surveys, we also working to raise awareness about threats to slow loris populations in Vietnam, and we are training local forest rangers and researchers to conduct ongoing population monitoring.
Ironically, in this case, there was the least information available about the animals assumed to be the most common. Without fundamental data on population status or distribution, it is difficult to either build effective conservation management plans for slow lorises or attract the federal and private funding necessary to implement such plans. And as such, major conservation actions in the region to date have focused on higher profile primate species, for which there is more information about conservation status. We are finally moving towards having enough scientific information to design a plan of action for improved conservation management of slow loris populations in Vietnam.
In Indonesia, at least 15,000 lorises are trafficked each year for the exotic pet trade. Numbers are not available for Vietnam or other countries in Mainland Southeast Asia, but our work so far suggests that pressure from the trade remains quite high. Our upcoming work in Vietnam, funded by the US National Science Foundation, will expand our research to include social science approaches to better inform policy makers about the underlying social and economic drivers of illicit trade in lorises. You can learn more about what other intrepid loris researchers are doing and how you can help to raise awareness and decrease demand for these endangered animals as exotic pets and photo props.
Dr. Mary Blair is the Assistant Director for Research and Strategic Planning at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research explores how knowledge of evolutionary processes can inform conservation planning. Her work in Vietnam is supported in part by the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund and by a US National Science Foundation Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability Fellowship under Grant No. NSF-CHE-1313908. Mary has blogged about her work in Vietnam for the Museum’s Fieldwork Journal and for the New York Times, and is the author of Primate Ecology and Conservation. You can follow Mary on Twitter @marye_blair. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
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Image credits: (1) A pygmy slow loris (Nycticebus pygmaeus) at the Endangered Primate Rescue Center in Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam. Photo by Dr. Mary Blair. Do not reproduce without permission. (2) A Bengal slow loris (Nycticebus bengalensis) at the Endangered Primate Rescue Center in Cuc Phuong National Park, Vietnam. Photo by Nolan Bett, used with permission.
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