Ecology

What? Someone noticed? From Manchester University: A comprehensive new study looking at variations in Ichthyosaurus, a common British Jurassic ichthyosaur (sea-going reptile) also known as ‘Sea Dragons’, has provided important information into recognizing new fossil species. Professor Judy Massare (SUNY College at Brockport, NY, USA) and Dean Lomax (The University of Manchester) have studied hundreds of specimens of Ichthyosaurus. After their latest research project the pair urge caution in naming new fossil species on the basis of just a few fragmentary or isolated remains. For their research Prof Massare and Lomax focused on one particular part of the Ichthyosaurus skeleton, the hindfin (or back paddle). The purpose was to evaluate the different forms among the six-known species of Ichthyosaurus. They Read More ›

From Erik Lief at ACSH: The researchers, from the well-known Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discovered more than 750,000 nesting pairs of the Adélie penguin – or more than 1.5 million in all – on the Danger Islands archipelago, which consists of nine, small land masses spanning 35 kilometers on Antarctica’s northern tip, facing South America. “Our estimate is more than three times the abundance estimated by an earlier survey,” wrote the study’s authors, “largely because several colonies, not known to exist at the time, were missed entirely.” The paper, published online Friday in the journal Scientific Reports, adds that the population find on the Antarctic Peninsula was “more than the rest of AP region combined, and include the third and Read More ›

From Sarah Chaffee at ENST: Professor Peter Ridd heads up the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia. He has over a hundred scientific papers to his name and has spent thirty years studying the Great Barrier Reef. But he wrote a chapter in the volume Climate Change: The Facts 2017 for a think tank, critiquing claims that the Great Barrier Reef is nearly dead due to global warming and other factors. When he talked about the article on television last August, his university went ballistic. Ridd took his situation to the public, writing an op-ed for Fox News, “Science or silence? My battle to question doomsayers about the Great Barrier Reef.” More. From that job-endangering op-ed: Around Read More ›

So much for Darwinism. Joshua B. Plotkin writes at Nature: Ecological interactions emerge spontaneously in an experimental study of bacterial populations cultured for 60,000 generations, and sustain rapid evolution by natural selection. (paywall) Yes, that’s the abstract. It’s a model of economy. This is from the article: The authors’ most profound discovery is the spontaneous emergence of ecological interactions that fuel ongoing evolution (Fig. 1). Persistent subgroups have previously been identified in one of Lenski’s populations, but Good et al. reveal that at least 9 of the populations divide into two separate clades (genetic groups). These clades co-exist for tens of thousands of generations, and so must be maintained by some form of interdependence. These emergent ecologies sustain ongoing adaptation Read More ›

Paper published in June in PLOS Biology: Environmental change drives accelerated adaptation through stimulated copy number variation From author summary: Stimulated copy number variation (CNV) operates at sites of preexisting copy number variation, which are common in eukaryotic genomes, and provides cells with a remarkable and unexpected ability to alter their own genome in response to the environment. pdf (public access) Abstract: Copy number variation (CNV) is rife in eukaryotic genomes and has been implicated in many human disorders, particularly cancer, in which CNV promotes both tumorigenesis and chemotherapy resistance. CNVs are considered random mutations but often arise through replication defects; transcription can interfere with replication fork progression and stability, leading to increased mutation rates at highly transcribed loci. Here Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Using 3D laser scans of growing plants, Salk scientists found that the same universal design principles that humans use to engineer networks like subways also guide the shapes of plant branching architectures. The work, which appears in the July 26, 2017, issue of Cell Systems, could help direct strategies to increase crop yields or breed plants better adapted to climate change. Well, that sure beats doomsaying, fascism, and war. Engineered transportation networks, whether for moving people or power, need to balance the cost of construction with providing efficient transport. Think of a subway system: If the main objective when designing it is to get people from the suburbs to downtown as quickly as possible, each suburb will have Read More ›

Or so one would assume. From Sarah Zhang at the Atlantic: In “The Energy Expansions of Evolution,” an extraordinary new essay in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Olivia Judson sets out a theory of successive energy revolutions that purports to explain how our planet came to have such a diversity of environments that support such a rich array of life, from the cyanobacteria to daisies to humans. Judson divides the history of the life on Earth into five energetic epochs, a novel schema that you will not find in geology or biology textbooks. In order, the energetic epochs are: geochemical energy, sunlight, oxygen, flesh, and fire. Each epoch represents the unlocking of a new source of energy, coinciding with new organisms Read More ›

Fracking edition. From Hot Air: The draft report on hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from the EPA is nearing the end of its more than five year journey and the findings were a major blow to the green energy crowd. Try as they might, there simply was no evidence of systemic contamination to ground water or other resources and the report essentially gives the practice a qualified thumbs up. More. See also: Alarmists are the ones in denial about climate change Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: It turns out that forests in the Andean and western Amazonian regions of South America break long-understood rules about how ecosystems are put together, according to new research. … They discovered that the leaf economics of forests are not as straightforward as scientists once believed. “We found that Andean and Amazonian forests have evolved into diverse communities that break simple ecological ‘rules’ previously developed through field-based studies. These forests are actually much more interesting and functionally diverse than previously thought, and have sorted themselves out across a variety of environmental templates like geology, elevation and temperature,” Asner added. It turns out the forests aren’t so simply split between high-rollers and prudent investors either. Rather the authors found a Read More ›

Mathematicians and scientists who study evidence for design in nature are hardly the only ones! Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health offers some others, including Mark Davis. In an editorial for Nature, Davis and 18 of his colleagues made the case to stop vilifying invasive species. They argue that invasive species are not a threat to biodiversity, and the notion that these species are little more than barbarian invaders leads to bad policy. They write, “this perspective has led many conservation and restoration efforts down paths that make little ecological or economic sense.” More. Here: “Conservationists should assess organisms on environmental impact rather than on whether they are natives, argue Mark Davis and 18 other ecologists.” (paywall) Read More ›

From Daily Caller: The research concludes that when people purchase an electric car or install rooftop solar, that decision is often heavily motivated by a desire to appear trendy and fashionable to their peers, which researchers dub as “conspicuous conservation.” Economists previously calculated that car dealerships and manufacturers can charge an extra $7,000 for a Prius, a hybrid car, because of social status bonuses. That’s quite a bit considering the hybrid car starts at $24,200. “Every era produces hucksters trying to sell snake oil,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute who did not take part in the study, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “But the particular type of flimflam Read More ›

Depending on how we define species, extinction, as well as hybridization and evolution. From ScienceDaily: New research from UBC shows that when humans speed up the usually slow process of evolution by introducing new species, it can result in a lasting impact on the ecosystem. The phenomenon is known as reverse speciation and researchers witnessed it in Enos Lake on Vancouver Island where two similar species of threespine stickleback fish disappeared within three years.”When two similar species are in one environment, they often perform different ecological roles,” said Seth Rudman, a PhD student in zoology at UBC. “When they go extinct, it has strong consequences for the ecosystem.” Two species of endangered threespine stickleback fish lived in the lake. One Read More ›

From New Scientist: The biome of the ocean resembles that of the human gut We’re a step closer to understanding the microbial community that inhabits the ocean – and it has some striking similarities to the community that lives inside our guts. The microbiome of the world’s biggest ecosystem and one of the smallest appear to function in surprisingly similar ways. … For example, we already knew of about 4350 species of microalgae, 1350 species of protists and 5500 species of tiny animals, based on direct studies of their appearance. But the new genetic evidence suggests that there are probably three to eight times as many distinct species in each group as currently recognised. Shades of issues around claims about Read More ›

Life forms always make sense. Some theories do not. From Phys.org: By sequencing multiple Trichodesmium genomes—and using a wide variety of samples to ensure that there was no error—researchers found that only about 63 percent of the bacteria’s genome is expressed as protein. That’s an incredibly low amount for a bacterium and unheard of for a free-living oligotroph. (lives under very poor conditions, in this case it thrives massively in barren stretches of the ocean) “The unique evolutionary path reflected in this genome contradicts nearly all accounts of free-living microbial genome architectures to date,” said lead author Nathan Walworth, a Ph.D. candidate at USC. “Different evolutionary paths are foundational to all arenas of biology, including biotechnology, so it is important Read More ›