Disease snippets

Just from today:

A cruise liner hit by a suspected outbreak of legionnaires' disease is due to return to Britain today. (July 30)

Russia dealing with Legionnaire's outbreak. (July 30)

Doctors Debate Over Lyme Disease: Patients ache as doctors disagree about whether there is a chronic form of the tick-borne malady. (July 30)

Personal Health Beliefs Are Largely Hit and Myth. False or Outdated Sense Of Risks Is Widespread, Cancer Study Shows. (July 30)

Global Warming Could Harm Health. Evidence Indicates Climate Change Could Affect Individuals, In Addition To Planet As Whole. (July 30)

In addition The Ecological Society of America have a short factsheet on Hanta Virus, to illustrate that even ecological research with no apparent direct applications can sometimes turn out to be of vital importance.

This time last year: The lost Children of Rockdale County and Mad Cow.

Ecosystem services: a primer

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) provides a nice summary of the idea of ecosystem services at their website: Ecosystem Services: A Primer
Take a look at the article and then at the end you can follow up some of the links. For example there is an interesting interview with Gretchen Daly, one of the authors of an article that attempted to put a dollar value on ecosystem services ($33 trillion if you are curious).

This time last year: Shipbreaking. Not to be confused with Shipbuilding, the Elvis Costello song, that is about the Falklands war, although no-one here seems to know that.

More snippets

Vital ecosystem functions, such as sequestering carbon dioxide and purifying water, depend on a larger number of species than previously thought. From a Nature article this month. Read the article here and a news summary here.

The rainforest fragmentation experiment I described in lecture, the one with 1, 10 and 100 hectare plots, is now in danger of destruction itself. The experiment has been going on since 1979 and has produced an invaluable long term data set. The nearby town of Manaus has grown rapidly since being declared a free-trade zone in the 1970s, with a population of 1.7 million people. Settlers are now moving onto the land around the project and raided a research camp last year. A fire lit by the new arrivals also destroyed several study plots. News report from this week and the experiment's web site.

More species than we thought? It turns out we may not even know how many species there are in the places we thought we did know well. Cryptic species – animals that appear identical but are genetically quite distinct – may be much more widespread than previously thought a paper published this week alleges. The findings could have major implications in areas ranging from biodiversity estimates and wildlife management, to our understanding of infectious diseases and evolution. Read the Research paper published last week here. This also means that what I told you about us knowing how many large species there are may also be up for debate. In 2001 a new species of African elephant was discovered, not by looking under bushes, but by genetic analysis of existing African elephants which suggested two groups distinct enough to warrant species status: The African Bush Elephant and the African Elephant. (Research report on the new elephant species).

People consume a massive 24% of Earth's production capacity, depleting species and habitats - and things could get worse if more land is used for biofuel crops. By comparing carbon consumption through human activity with the amount of carbon consumed overall researchers found that humans use 15.6 trillion kilograms of carbon annually. Read the PNAS paper published this month here.

This time last year: Save the Rhino Maggot!, Specicide, Bird Extinction Rates and Snakes on a Plane.

Fish Farming

Perfectly timed for our mutualism lecture is this report from yesterday that the dusky damselfish has joined a select group of species, including humans, ants, and salt-marsh snails, that are known to cultivate beneficial crops. The fish rely on the algae as a source of food, but the algae also benefit because they only survive well if they are farmed. The algae farms are kept both protected and weeded by the damselfish. Unwanted sea urchins and starfish are ejected from the farms, and unpalatable algae are meticulously weeded out to promote lush turfs of the preferred species. When the damselfish are removed from the 'farms' it only takes a couple of days for other grazing fish to move in and obliterate all the algae growing inside the gardens.

This time last year: Mt. St. Helens and Wiki1B again

Worth a thousand words

If you like your news with cool photographs you should bookmark National Geographic's 'Photos in the News' page.

Here are some recent stories relevant to this class:

New 'Wasp' Orchids tempt male bugs. In a crafty evolutionary hoax, six newly discovered orchid species are shaped like female wasps to trick males into pollinating them.




Baby Mammoth found frozen in Russia. A six-month-old baby mammoth found in Russia's remote Siberian north is the best preserved example of the species ever recovered.




It's those giant penguins again. Two species of ancient penguin have been uncovered in a Peruvian desert, including one that stood almost 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, a new study reports.



Surprising herds discovered in Southern Sudan. Aerial pictures reveal vast herds of antelope, elephants, and ostriches flourishing in Southern Sudan, despite decades of war.




Amazon expedition discovers dozens of new animals. A flashy purple frog and a kissy-faced catfish are among the 24 new animal species recently discovered by scientists working in the remote highlands of Suriname.




This time last year: Leonard Cohen's March of the Penguin's and Elephants in Space

Life in a seed

Some species of insects complete their entire development in seeds. Protected by the seed coat and nourished by the seed's food supply a developing insect has everything it needs. However these reserves only normally accumulate in fertilized ovules - requiring female insects that wish to lay eggs inside the seeds to either wait until ovules are fertilized (and be able to discriminate), or to lay their eggs earlier and risk many being laid in unfertilized seed. A paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society last year describes how a host-specific insect, the chalcid Megastigmus spermotrophus that lays its eggs in ovules of Douglas fir has managed to evolve a solution to this problem. This insect lays its eggs before fertilization has taken place in the plant and ovipoisiton of eggs not only prevents the expected degeneration and death of unfertilized ovules, but it induces energy reserve accumulation. Ovules that would otherwise develop as empty seed are redirected in their development by the insect to provide food for the developing larvae. This is the first report of this type of insect-host relationship.

Mt. St. Helens

Last year was the 25th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption. Since that time scientists have been monitoring the colonization of plant and animal species as the ecosystem undergoes succession.

A report in National Geographic suggests that succession has been far less predictable than expected and has proceeded at different speeds in different areas.

The USDA maintains a good website about the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument that has some good links to information on the eruption and the recovery of the communities.

Mount St. Helens is named after, Alleyne Fitzherbert, 1st Baron St Helens of St Helens in the County of Lancaster. This is the same, rather dismal, northern British town I grew up in. Having spent so much time on Wikipedia lately I couldn't resist looking it up. I was most amused to find the following item listed under 'Trivia'.

Residents of St Helens are known as "Woollybacks" which is an offensive term.

It's been a long while since I'd heard that term...

Honey guides, killer bees and land mines

The story of the honey guide and the honey badger (aka the ratel) is an interesting one, but is it true? It is frequently reported in text books but there appears to be little evidence that the birds actually guide the ratels to the bees nests. Birds are certainly found when ratels tear into the nests but that doesn't indicate they helped the ratel get there.

There is no doubt, however, that the honey guides can lead people to birds nests and their behavior has become quite sophisticated. The Boran people of northern Kenya are able to summon the birds to their camp before a bee hunting expedition by giving a particular whistle. So honey guides do have a mutualistic association - but with humans rather than ratels. Whether this evolved from a prior relationship they had with the ratel is currently unknown.

When I mentioned this today I suddenly wondered whether it would be possible to use honey guides to detect Africanized bee nests (aka killer bees). When killer bees first invade a new area there is a considerable economic cost as farmers and other outdoor workers need to be more careful. Like land mines, much of the economic cost comes about as the cost of farming increases and people are denied access to certain areas. Fortunately this probably isn't necessary. Most human incidents with Africanized bees occur within a couple of years of the bees' arrival and then subside as the bees interbreed with local bees - especially if beekeepers cull the queens of the most aggressive strains.

Curiously, the aggression of Africanized bees may be due to the ratel. The colony most likely to survive a ratel attack was the fiercest one and so natural selection strongly favored fierce bees. European bees did not have to contend with anything quite as vicious as the ratel.

On the subject of land mines it is interesting to note the number of biological alternatives that are now becoming available for demining areas (a need that is sadly increasing - mines are still being laid 25 times faster than they are being cleared). Since it costs one to two million dollars to clear a single square kilometer of land there are obvious benefits to any cheaper, more accurate and safer method than demining by hand. Hitting news headlines within the last few years have been the Gambian pouched rat, which can sniff out mines, and the humble Arabidopsis (or cress) which has been manipulated to create a strain that changes color to red in response to the nitrous oxide that leaks from landmines and other explosives. The picture at the top of this post shows the quite dramatic color difference.

In a strange coincidence, the oddly shaped South African Infantry Fighting Vehicle is called the Ratel, after the animal - which has a reputation as a ferocious fighter. It's an odd shape because the bottom of the hull is angled in a v shape to deflect mine blasts.

100 ecological questions

The latest issue of the Journal of Applied Ecology contains an interesting article:
The identification of 100 ecological questions of high policy relevance in the UK. Ecologists hope the list will have a major impact on both science and policy and in the press release they liken the list to the 23 mathematical problems David Hilbert posed at the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900. This list had a major impact on mathematics throughout the twentieth century.

The list is interesting to browse through (the link above takes you to the complete paper) because it really does help to highlight how little we know in ecology.

Summer Reading part 2

To match the previous, evolution related, posting I was going to recommend two more books, one graphic novel and one more conventional book. But I can't manage to restrict myself to a single graphic novel - there's too many good ones out there on environmental issues and ecology. For reasons that could take (and probably have taken) a whole thesis to examine, a number of comic book characters regularly cover environmental topics: Swamp Thing, Toxic Avenger, Dr Strange and the Silver Surfer to name just four.

But perhaps the most environmentally conscious 'super hero' is Paul Chadwick's Concrete. In two different graphic novels he addresses first the environmental movement as a whole (particularly the more radical side) and then he takes on population growth (again addressing some of the more radical viewpoints). In both books, the readers responses give valuable additional viewpoints.

Japanese manga comics have also covered environmental issues. Perhaps the best example is Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I don't think I could begin to summarize the story. Oh, go on then: Joan of Arc like character helps defend people and planet, including lots of giant insects and toxic fungi, from warring factions. The story is collected in a 7 volume set or you can rent the movie, based around the first two books, by fimmaker and illustrator Hayao Miyazaki.

If you want to read an actual book, I'd like to recommend Laurie Garrett's 'The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance'. We won't cover this topic until our final lecture but in many ways this book shows some of the practical applications of the material we cover. If you are interested in public health you really should read this book. The paperback is a bargain at a little over $10 for a 768 page monster and I have a spare copy if anyone wants to borrow one.

Elephants in space

Actually that's a NASA headline, not mine. It turns out they aren't currently planning to put any elephants in space. In fact elephants are waaaay back in the queue - just ahead of whales, poison ivy, ferrets and killer bees.

The article and the NASA project concerns the viewing of elephants from space. The Wildlife Conservation Society (the people who run the fabulous, conservation oriented, Bronx Zoo amongst other things) have been collaborating with NASA to see if wildlife counts from space would be feasible. High definition photographs were taken of the Bronx Zoo itself by the Quickbird satellite, 450km vertically overhead. The advantage of taking photos of the Zoo for testing is that these could be ground truthed by taking photographs at ground level at the same time (see images above with 3 items: a clearing, a tree and a fence labeled in each).

The advantages are obviously many, from less disturbance of the animals to cheaper research.

Imagine being able to monitor a herd of elephants in the Serengeti, or a flock of endangered flamingos in Bolivia, from a lab in New York. This technology may allow us to do just that.
Dr. Eric Sanderson, WCS landscape ecologist

Satellite imagery resolutions are continuously improving. Typical resolutions today are about 1m (i.e. each pixel represents a square 1m on a side) and 0.5m resolution is probably close. Military satellites almost certainly have better resolution - perhaps as good as 5 or 10cm. With this sort of resolution you could spot, but not definitively identify some of the world's biggest insects! (But not if they were hiding under a leaf of course). I think ecologists will need to be out there in the field for a long time to come......

Can I eat the scorpion now mom?

A paper in this week's Science, and in fact the current banner headline story on the Science website (likely to change in a day or two), concerns the behavior of meerkats.

Perhaps surprisingly there is little evidence for teaching in nonhuman animals. In this study, by researchers at the University of Cambridge in England, adult meerkats in the Kalahari were shown to teach their pups how to deal with scorpions and other prey.

After all if part of your diet consists of deadly scorpions and you are born clueless it might be a good idea to get some pointers from an experienced relative. Meerkats are social animals that live in groups of around forty. Some of the teaching is carried out not by the parents but by helpers. These helpers are likely to be closely related to the pups they are teaching so this is a nice example of kin selection at work. There is a good summary of the research at the National Geographic website.

Running after Antelope

You may be familiar with the radio show This American Life. If not, then you'll just have to listen to it because it is hard to describe. Each week they have a number of stories loosely based around a theme.

Around here you'll find it on 88.5 KQED at noon on a Saturday and again at 10pm. Even better they stream practically all their shows on the web.

Back in 1997 one of their perennial favorites Scott Carrier told a great story about his attempt to run down an antelope. (It's actually the second story in the show but takes up the majority of the hour long show). For reasons a little too complicated to explain Scott and his brother are trying to show it would have been possible to hunt down antelope on foot simply by doggedly chasing them until the antelope become exhausted. Listening to this story made me realize yet another advantage to group living when it comes to defending against predators. After chasing a pair of deer for some hours they round a corner to find the two deer they were chasing had merged with another group of deer. This group then merged with yet another group. After repeated merging like this they found it impossible to know which deer they had been chasing which made it impossible to single out and chase down any particular individual.

But don't take my word for it, listen to the story. It's got some interesting observations on biology, grad school and life generally and it is a great example of storytelling.