I admit it, my devotion to the work of George Monbiot (or The Monb, as he's apparently known in some environmental circles) borders on the unhealthy.
But this piece on marine conservation, and the overfishing of top predators such as sharks, is really excellent.
The Spanish fishing industry, he writes, is "traditionally dominated by Galician fascists". There's no fascist like a Galician fascist.
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Some stories what I wrote, and one that I didn't
I'm working for news@nature for a few weeks, so I haven't had a chance to write much stuff for El Gentraso.
What I have written is a story about what the direction a dog's tail wag means, one about 'semi-identical' twins', both of which were subsequently picked up (i.e. copied) elsewhere.
I found them, not by any particular piece of investigative brilliance, but by looking at journal tables of contents. As a science journalist, if you look beyond the press releases on sites like Eurekalert and Alphagalileo, you'll often find that you've got no company.
The twins story, in particular excited a rush of comments to Nature's newsblog, mainly from people who thought they were, or had had, semi-identical twins. But probably aren't/haven't.
Not that incentives for good practice should be necessary, but writing for online is a useful reminder of what people might make of your stories - it's always sobering to see the expressions of hope that come in after any story on a potential cure for a disease or disability, however caveat-laden the story.
More recently, I've written about cane toad distribution and mammal evolution.
So doing all that has prevented me from blogging about John Lanchester's masterly essay on climate change in the LRB. This has one of the best intros I've seen in a long time:
It makes you think (and tempts you to act). My guess is that most people don't like doing violence, to property or people, and that we shy away from escalating a confrontation, usually for good reason. Maybe that's another word for cowardice, or apathy, though.
I don't bandy the words 'essential reading' about much, but I'd say that this is. The one thing I might take issue with is Lanchester's approving words on James Lovelock's advocacy of nuclear power.
I don't have an issue with nuclear power per se, and I think it should probably be in our energy portfolio. But George Monbiot's 'Heat' argues that, in practical terms, building a new generation of power stations would take so long that it's not a quick fix - we might as well go all out for renewables and carbon sequestration - and that energy efficiency gives the best return in carbon-saved-per-pound-spent.
One's always tempted to find rational arguments to support things you emotionally favour, but Monbiot makes an effort to do his sums - and also shows that no one really knows what's what when it comes to how we're going to get our energy.
What I have written is a story about what the direction a dog's tail wag means, one about 'semi-identical' twins', both of which were subsequently picked up (i.e. copied) elsewhere.
I found them, not by any particular piece of investigative brilliance, but by looking at journal tables of contents. As a science journalist, if you look beyond the press releases on sites like Eurekalert and Alphagalileo, you'll often find that you've got no company.
The twins story, in particular excited a rush of comments to Nature's newsblog, mainly from people who thought they were, or had had, semi-identical twins. But probably aren't/haven't.
Not that incentives for good practice should be necessary, but writing for online is a useful reminder of what people might make of your stories - it's always sobering to see the expressions of hope that come in after any story on a potential cure for a disease or disability, however caveat-laden the story.
More recently, I've written about cane toad distribution and mammal evolution.
So doing all that has prevented me from blogging about John Lanchester's masterly essay on climate change in the LRB. This has one of the best intros I've seen in a long time:
It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism. After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action, and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about, say, animal rights. This is especially noticeable when you bear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations, or vandalising SUVs. In cities, SUVs are loathed by everyone except the people who drive them; and in a city the size of London, a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible, just by running keys down the side of them, at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time. Say fifty people vandalising four cars each every night for a month: six thousand trashed SUVs in a month and the Chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets. So why don’t these things happen? Is it because the people who feel strongly about climate change are simply too nice, too educated, to do anything of the sort? (But terrorists are often highly educated.) Or is it that even the people who feel most strongly about climate change on some level can’t quite bring themselves to believe in it?
It makes you think (and tempts you to act). My guess is that most people don't like doing violence, to property or people, and that we shy away from escalating a confrontation, usually for good reason. Maybe that's another word for cowardice, or apathy, though.
I don't bandy the words 'essential reading' about much, but I'd say that this is. The one thing I might take issue with is Lanchester's approving words on James Lovelock's advocacy of nuclear power.
I don't have an issue with nuclear power per se, and I think it should probably be in our energy portfolio. But George Monbiot's 'Heat' argues that, in practical terms, building a new generation of power stations would take so long that it's not a quick fix - we might as well go all out for renewables and carbon sequestration - and that energy efficiency gives the best return in carbon-saved-per-pound-spent.
One's always tempted to find rational arguments to support things you emotionally favour, but Monbiot makes an effort to do his sums - and also shows that no one really knows what's what when it comes to how we're going to get our energy.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
One of the best things about being a science writer...
Is sitting down on a Monday, and turning out a story about something that, that morning, you knew less than nothing about - the 248-dimensional exceptional Lie group E8. And then coming in on Tuesday and writing a story about a burrowing dinosaur. Who knew?
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Oekologie #3
Here beginneth the third edition of the Oekologie blog carnival. Thank you everyone who took the time to send in posts. It was great to receive such a diverse bunch — we've got just about every group of organism and every part of the world represented, at scales ranging from the global to the backyard, and addressing just about every issue you can think of. So here we go…
Crime! Julie from The Human Flower Project has sent in a cool story on the banning of the Hungarian hovirag harvest. The hovirag is a snowdrop, sold in Hungary as a mark of coming spring, but now grievously over-picked (and with a street value somewhat greater than crack, apparently). The flower is also the source of the protein that, put into to GM potatoes, led to the controversy around the experiments by (Hungarian-born) Arpad Puzstai.
Deceit! GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life posts on a neat piece of mimicry — the moth that pretends to be a jumping spider.
Pestilence! Jennifer Forman Orth at the Invasive Species Weblog reports on beech bark disease, which involves an invasive insect infesting the tree, which leads to a fungal infection, which leads to trouble.
Meanwhile, showing that not you don't need to cross an international borders to be an invasive species, Paul Decelles at The Force that Through… points the finger at red cedar, a native of the eastern US now making trouble further west. And then defends his position.
Goats! Aydin at Snail's Tales discusses the impact of goats on the past and future vegetation of the Mediterranean. "If we want to return at least some of the land to its original, pre-grazing, pre-human state, the goats must go," he says.
The Mediterranean is interesting because it has diverse plant life, even though it has seen millennia of heavy human impact, suggesting that the plants have coevolved with people and their animals. (This has also equipped Mediterranean plants to do well in places like California and Australia.) But, of course, whether this flora was in place before people showed up — and if not, what was — is another matter.
That's enough exclamation marks.
Fish: Stephen Leahy at, um, Stephen Leahy points us to his story discussing the concept of peak fish — global catches have levelled off (not sure what's happened to global fishing effort, but it seems unlikely to have fallen), and may soon start falling.
Another option for providing seafood is fish farming. The US government has proposed to extend fish farming into federal waters, 3 to 200 miles offshore. But Lish at Science Ripsaw is worried it that this would deplete nutrients and increase pollution.
Oil: Tom Elko at Sky Blue Waters reports on the concerns around the environmental impact and property rights issues of the MinnCan pipeline. If built (which is looking likely) it would carry crude oil from Canadian oil sands (which are environmental and carbon-emissions bad news in themselves) to refineries in Minnesota.
Milk(weed): Miconia at A Neotropical Savanna meditates on Asclepia.
I know it's not a very scientific reaction, but…
Eeuuw: GrrlScientist reports on a blind, cave-dwelling Madagascan snake (that looks like a worm), rediscovered more than 100 years after the last known specimens were collected. They avoid the light, and sniff out their prey — the eggs and larvae of ants and termites.
Eeuuw II: The pygmy-hog-sucking louse (as a part-time copyeditor and punctuation geek, I place those hyphens with some confidence). Sticking up for the bloodsuckers at Endangered Ugly Things, Garfman makes the excellent point that every large, cuddly and charismatic species in danger of extinction also has (probably several) parasites that depend on it for their own survival. Coendangered is the technical term, apparently.
Mangroves: On the Ecological Society of America's blog, Edward Barbier has posted an authoritative guide to the issues surrounding the loss and restoration of mangrove forests, particularly regarding their ability to buffer against storm and tsunami damage.
Barbier — who has done lots of research into the interactions between development, mangroves and ecosystem services (the mangroves usually come off worse) — argues that the debate around the benefits and costs of replanting, that have followed from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, is oversimplified.
Cheetahs: Over at Laelaps, Brian Switek highlights something that was new to me — Iranian cheetahs. Brian writes about the Wildlife Conservation Society's work to conserve this population.
(This also made me intrigued about another thing I know nothing about — what issues a US conservation organizations faces when it works in Iran — in terms of dealing with both the Iranian and US governments.)
Bats: Jennifer Pinkley at The Infinite Sphere discusses how the eastern pipistrelle's more catholic taste in habitat and roosts has made it "more adaptable to changing environmental pressures" than its close relative the gray myotis.
Microbes: Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock alerts us to PLoS Biology's glut of papers on ocean microbial diversity (i.e. metagenomics). This is way-cool stuff right now (see also previous post on this blog).
Semantics: Matt at the Behavioral Ecology blog has sent in a post entitled 'Is rape adaptive?', which also discusses whether 'rape' is a good word to apply to forced copulations in (non-human) animals. The consensus appears to be not and, although I usually favour strong words and try to avoid jargon, I agree.
Celebrity: Mike at 10,000 birds muses on the ethics of twitching, and the motivations of twitchers. Naturalists, paparazzi, rubberneckers, or all of the above?
Memories: for me at least, with Jeremy Bruno, and the Voltage Gate's guide to tropical dry forest.
Jeremy mentions Guanacaste in Costa Rica, conservation success story (thanks to the idea of introducing large domestic herbivores to do the seed-dispersal job once done my extinct species), macroecological hotspot, and a place I visited while researching ITBOAH (I had to get a mention in somewhere). One of the remarkable things about Costa Rica is that this forest is about half-an-hour's drive from cloud forest containing a totally different set of species.
Global: John Feeny at Growth is Madness! muses on whether spreading the news that we're in the middle of the earth's sixth mass extinction since the Cambrian will help turn people on to conservation.
And Vbecer00 at Reconciliation Ecology also touches on the issue of how you get people to care in his/her post on, well, just about every issue in conservation — why do it, how to do it, and how to make it work.
Local: Join Dave Bonta at Via Negativa for a walk in the snow in Plummer's Hollow, and benefit from his sharp eyes. The man knows his neighbourhood, and his shrews.
Or, you could visit Wayne at Niches, and read his reports on the effects of heavy rains on the creeks on his property in Athens, Georgia.
And finally….
Personals: Johan Stenberg is in Sweden, feeling lonely. Cheer Johan up and join his journal club on insect-plant ecology, at (where else but the) Insect-Plant Ecology blog.
So there you have it. Oekologie — opening your minds, grossing you out, winding you up, bringing you together. Thanks again, and be sure to check out the next edition in a month's time on the Behavioral Ecology Blog.
Crime! Julie from The Human Flower Project has sent in a cool story on the banning of the Hungarian hovirag harvest. The hovirag is a snowdrop, sold in Hungary as a mark of coming spring, but now grievously over-picked (and with a street value somewhat greater than crack, apparently). The flower is also the source of the protein that, put into to GM potatoes, led to the controversy around the experiments by (Hungarian-born) Arpad Puzstai.
Deceit! GrrlScientist at Living the Scientific Life posts on a neat piece of mimicry — the moth that pretends to be a jumping spider.
Pestilence! Jennifer Forman Orth at the Invasive Species Weblog reports on beech bark disease, which involves an invasive insect infesting the tree, which leads to a fungal infection, which leads to trouble.
Meanwhile, showing that not you don't need to cross an international borders to be an invasive species, Paul Decelles at The Force that Through… points the finger at red cedar, a native of the eastern US now making trouble further west. And then defends his position.
Goats! Aydin at Snail's Tales discusses the impact of goats on the past and future vegetation of the Mediterranean. "If we want to return at least some of the land to its original, pre-grazing, pre-human state, the goats must go," he says.
The Mediterranean is interesting because it has diverse plant life, even though it has seen millennia of heavy human impact, suggesting that the plants have coevolved with people and their animals. (This has also equipped Mediterranean plants to do well in places like California and Australia.) But, of course, whether this flora was in place before people showed up — and if not, what was — is another matter.
That's enough exclamation marks.
Fish: Stephen Leahy at, um, Stephen Leahy points us to his story discussing the concept of peak fish — global catches have levelled off (not sure what's happened to global fishing effort, but it seems unlikely to have fallen), and may soon start falling.
Another option for providing seafood is fish farming. The US government has proposed to extend fish farming into federal waters, 3 to 200 miles offshore. But Lish at Science Ripsaw is worried it that this would deplete nutrients and increase pollution.
Oil: Tom Elko at Sky Blue Waters reports on the concerns around the environmental impact and property rights issues of the MinnCan pipeline. If built (which is looking likely) it would carry crude oil from Canadian oil sands (which are environmental and carbon-emissions bad news in themselves) to refineries in Minnesota.
Milk(weed): Miconia at A Neotropical Savanna meditates on Asclepia.
I know it's not a very scientific reaction, but…
Eeuuw: GrrlScientist reports on a blind, cave-dwelling Madagascan snake (that looks like a worm), rediscovered more than 100 years after the last known specimens were collected. They avoid the light, and sniff out their prey — the eggs and larvae of ants and termites.
Eeuuw II: The pygmy-hog-sucking louse (as a part-time copyeditor and punctuation geek, I place those hyphens with some confidence). Sticking up for the bloodsuckers at Endangered Ugly Things, Garfman makes the excellent point that every large, cuddly and charismatic species in danger of extinction also has (probably several) parasites that depend on it for their own survival. Coendangered is the technical term, apparently.
Mangroves: On the Ecological Society of America's blog, Edward Barbier has posted an authoritative guide to the issues surrounding the loss and restoration of mangrove forests, particularly regarding their ability to buffer against storm and tsunami damage.
Barbier — who has done lots of research into the interactions between development, mangroves and ecosystem services (the mangroves usually come off worse) — argues that the debate around the benefits and costs of replanting, that have followed from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, is oversimplified.
Cheetahs: Over at Laelaps, Brian Switek highlights something that was new to me — Iranian cheetahs. Brian writes about the Wildlife Conservation Society's work to conserve this population.
(This also made me intrigued about another thing I know nothing about — what issues a US conservation organizations faces when it works in Iran — in terms of dealing with both the Iranian and US governments.)
Bats: Jennifer Pinkley at The Infinite Sphere discusses how the eastern pipistrelle's more catholic taste in habitat and roosts has made it "more adaptable to changing environmental pressures" than its close relative the gray myotis.
Microbes: Coturnix at A Blog Around the Clock alerts us to PLoS Biology's glut of papers on ocean microbial diversity (i.e. metagenomics). This is way-cool stuff right now (see also previous post on this blog).
Semantics: Matt at the Behavioral Ecology blog has sent in a post entitled 'Is rape adaptive?', which also discusses whether 'rape' is a good word to apply to forced copulations in (non-human) animals. The consensus appears to be not and, although I usually favour strong words and try to avoid jargon, I agree.
Celebrity: Mike at 10,000 birds muses on the ethics of twitching, and the motivations of twitchers. Naturalists, paparazzi, rubberneckers, or all of the above?
Memories: for me at least, with Jeremy Bruno, and the Voltage Gate's guide to tropical dry forest.
Jeremy mentions Guanacaste in Costa Rica, conservation success story (thanks to the idea of introducing large domestic herbivores to do the seed-dispersal job once done my extinct species), macroecological hotspot, and a place I visited while researching ITBOAH (I had to get a mention in somewhere). One of the remarkable things about Costa Rica is that this forest is about half-an-hour's drive from cloud forest containing a totally different set of species.
Global: John Feeny at Growth is Madness! muses on whether spreading the news that we're in the middle of the earth's sixth mass extinction since the Cambrian will help turn people on to conservation.
And Vbecer00 at Reconciliation Ecology also touches on the issue of how you get people to care in his/her post on, well, just about every issue in conservation — why do it, how to do it, and how to make it work.
Local: Join Dave Bonta at Via Negativa for a walk in the snow in Plummer's Hollow, and benefit from his sharp eyes. The man knows his neighbourhood, and his shrews.
Or, you could visit Wayne at Niches, and read his reports on the effects of heavy rains on the creeks on his property in Athens, Georgia.
And finally….
Personals: Johan Stenberg is in Sweden, feeling lonely. Cheer Johan up and join his journal club on insect-plant ecology, at (where else but the) Insect-Plant Ecology blog.
So there you have it. Oekologie — opening your minds, grossing you out, winding you up, bringing you together. Thanks again, and be sure to check out the next edition in a month's time on the Behavioral Ecology Blog.
We are family
This week's Nature is a special issue for Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and I've got a feature($) in it looking at what genomics has done for the Linnaean project, in terms of working out the tree of life (and what evolutionary biology can do for genomics). The field is called phylogenomics. One of the surprising things I found when researching this was how uncertain things still are - we have no idea how many of the animal phyla relate to one another, for example.
I'm also talking with Henry Nicholls and Kerri Smith about this on the Nature podcast, recorded at the Natural History Museum in London. Henry has a feature about Linnaeus' raccoon, and has achieved full-spectrum science media dominance by also having a feature($) on metagenomics in today's New Scientist.
Jonathan Eisen's blog is a good place to find out about both phylo- and metagenomics.
I'm also talking with Henry Nicholls and Kerri Smith about this on the Nature podcast, recorded at the Natural History Museum in London. Henry has a feature about Linnaeus' raccoon, and has achieved full-spectrum science media dominance by also having a feature($) on metagenomics in today's New Scientist.
Jonathan Eisen's blog is a good place to find out about both phylo- and metagenomics.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
A quick toot on my own trumpet
Library Journal has just named ITBOAH as one of the best science books of 2006. Picket your local college or public library now, demanding that they buy at least one copy.
Beard-stoking
The Scientist has a big ol' article, with a fine typo in the last paragraph, on West, Brown, Enquist and their metabolic theory. It's particularly good on recent historical and biographical detail, although a little sketchier on how the idea works, and what else it might apply to besides metabolism.
And I would take issue with the statement that temperature is a "variable necessary to explain the 3/4 scaling of metabolic rates across organisms". It's not, it's an additional variable that explains some of the variation in metabolic rates (between say, reptiles, birds, and mammals, all of which have different body temperatures) not accounted for by size-based 3/4-power scaling.
The article also shows how some of the disagreements about the theory come from differing expectations and goals. WBE are after a theory that gives an abstract, approximate, first-order account of the underlying structure of organisms and ecosystems.
Confronted with Helen Muller-Landau's data on forest population biology that contradicts their predictions they say, well, ok, it shows something else must be going on. Much as, if you see a planet that doesn't follow its predict orbit, you look for something else influencing it before you junk gravity (not that I am saying metabolic theory is as well-established as gravity). Muller-Landau and others, however, see deviation as disproof.
It's a difference partly of philosophy. But it also shows the genuine uncertainty about when you decide that just because a theory can't predict everything doesn't mean it's wrong (as Michael Ruse has written, natural selection's failures are a sign of its strength), and when you decide it's wrong.
WBE's metabolic model is too powerfully predictive, and its foundations make too good sense, to be junked yet. In fact, it seems to be popping up more and more - I have recently spoken to fisheries and foodweb researchers who are using it.
I would also say that people tend not to change their minds, regardless of what data or theory say. A scientific field's centre of gravity depends on when people retire and who gets their job, as much as it does on dialectic.
(The Scientist has published a couple of previous things on metabolic scaling and so on: here and here.)
And I would take issue with the statement that temperature is a "variable necessary to explain the 3/4 scaling of metabolic rates across organisms". It's not, it's an additional variable that explains some of the variation in metabolic rates (between say, reptiles, birds, and mammals, all of which have different body temperatures) not accounted for by size-based 3/4-power scaling.
The article also shows how some of the disagreements about the theory come from differing expectations and goals. WBE are after a theory that gives an abstract, approximate, first-order account of the underlying structure of organisms and ecosystems.
Confronted with Helen Muller-Landau's data on forest population biology that contradicts their predictions they say, well, ok, it shows something else must be going on. Much as, if you see a planet that doesn't follow its predict orbit, you look for something else influencing it before you junk gravity (not that I am saying metabolic theory is as well-established as gravity). Muller-Landau and others, however, see deviation as disproof.
It's a difference partly of philosophy. But it also shows the genuine uncertainty about when you decide that just because a theory can't predict everything doesn't mean it's wrong (as Michael Ruse has written, natural selection's failures are a sign of its strength), and when you decide it's wrong.
WBE's metabolic model is too powerfully predictive, and its foundations make too good sense, to be junked yet. In fact, it seems to be popping up more and more - I have recently spoken to fisheries and foodweb researchers who are using it.
I would also say that people tend not to change their minds, regardless of what data or theory say. A scientific field's centre of gravity depends on when people retire and who gets their job, as much as it does on dialectic.
(The Scientist has published a couple of previous things on metabolic scaling and so on: here and here.)
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
A GUT of ecological scaling?
OK. I'm not going to pretend that I grasp the details of this, but here goes.
A recent paper in Physical Review Letters by Jayanth Banavar et al. presents a general theory of (macro)ecological scaling.
That is, they offer a common explanation for patterns such as that between the area of a place and the numbers of species that live there, area and total biomass, the number of organisms and species of different sizes, the maximum body size of the biggest species in an ecosystem (see here for another view of maximum carnivore size), and relative abundance — the spread of rare and common species.
All these scaling patterns seem to follow power laws, at least over partially. That is, they take the form y=ax^n, and plot as straight lines on a log/log graph.
Here's the abstract:
As far as I can tell, Banavar et al. present a scaling hypothesis, based on a probability distribution of the mass and abundance of different species. Using this, and a set of reasonable assumptions (such as, that an ecosystem's total population and mass is proportional to its area) they derive the relationships described from a single starting point.
Blimey. If all these things can be brought under the one roof — this is the first such attempt that I know of — that's a big deal, I think. These are fundamental ecological parameters. Together, they pretty much sum up most of the questions that community ecology seeks to answer. Even the metabolic ecology models of West et al. (with which I am more familiar) have steered clear of tackling the relationships between species diversity and area, and between body size and diversity and abundance.
But, although much of the criticism of metabolic ecology focuses on its generality, Banavar and his colleagues have an interesting history of seeking yet more general models for the scaling of metabolic rate with body size. Banavar has also worked with Steve Hubbell to develop the neutral ecological theory. It's interesting that this is in PRL. I wonder what a biology journal would have made of it.
Thanks to Phil Ball for bringing this to my attention. I think. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them.
A recent paper in Physical Review Letters by Jayanth Banavar et al. presents a general theory of (macro)ecological scaling.
That is, they offer a common explanation for patterns such as that between the area of a place and the numbers of species that live there, area and total biomass, the number of organisms and species of different sizes, the maximum body size of the biggest species in an ecosystem (see here for another view of maximum carnivore size), and relative abundance — the spread of rare and common species.
All these scaling patterns seem to follow power laws, at least over partially. That is, they take the form y=ax^n, and plot as straight lines on a log/log graph.
Here's the abstract:
Scaling provides an elegant framework for understanding power-law behavior and deducing relationships between critical exponents. We demonstrate that scaling theory can be generalized to develop a framework for the analysis of diverse empirical macroecological relationships traditionally treated as independent. Our mathematical arguments predict links between the species-area relationship, the relative species abundance and community size spectra in excellent accord with empirical data.
As far as I can tell, Banavar et al. present a scaling hypothesis, based on a probability distribution of the mass and abundance of different species. Using this, and a set of reasonable assumptions (such as, that an ecosystem's total population and mass is proportional to its area) they derive the relationships described from a single starting point.
Blimey. If all these things can be brought under the one roof — this is the first such attempt that I know of — that's a big deal, I think. These are fundamental ecological parameters. Together, they pretty much sum up most of the questions that community ecology seeks to answer. Even the metabolic ecology models of West et al. (with which I am more familiar) have steered clear of tackling the relationships between species diversity and area, and between body size and diversity and abundance.
But, although much of the criticism of metabolic ecology focuses on its generality, Banavar and his colleagues have an interesting history of seeking yet more general models for the scaling of metabolic rate with body size. Banavar has also worked with Steve Hubbell to develop the neutral ecological theory. It's interesting that this is in PRL. I wonder what a biology journal would have made of it.
Thanks to Phil Ball for bringing this to my attention. I think. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Oekologie blog carnival
Just a reminder that this blog will be hosting next month's round of the Oekologie blog carnival. This follows the grand jobs done so for by Infinite Sphere and Perceiving Wholes.
So, for the period of Feb 15-March 14, please send me your favourite ecological and environmental blog posts by following this link. And I'll bring it to the world's attention, or at least that subsection of the world that reads this.
So, for the period of Feb 15-March 14, please send me your favourite ecological and environmental blog posts by following this link. And I'll bring it to the world's attention, or at least that subsection of the world that reads this.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Review: Measuring the world
I'm still recovering from the Just-Science exertions of last week, but I have got a review of Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World in this week's Nature ($).
They asked me to do this because I write a bit about one of the book's central characters, Alexander von Humboldt, in ITBOAH.
As a rule, I'm not really into historical fiction, or magic realism/postmodern whimsy. But I rather liked MTW (which has been a huge success in German). And I liked it more as it went along.
If you'll forgive me for quoting myself:
They asked me to do this because I write a bit about one of the book's central characters, Alexander von Humboldt, in ITBOAH.
As a rule, I'm not really into historical fiction, or magic realism/postmodern whimsy. But I rather liked MTW (which has been a huge success in German). And I liked it more as it went along.
If you'll forgive me for quoting myself:
Kehlmann tells his story in a relentless deadpan, which is at first alienating but then gets under the skin. As the story develops, your sympathy for the two men grows, as their own does for each other. [He] does a good job of capturing the strangeness and comedy of science, as well as the powerful sense of futility that can afflict researchers from time to time.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Just Science day 5: Kill and cure?
The best way to protect an endangered species might be to ... cull it.
That's the conclusion reached by Michael Bode and Hugh Possingham in a theoretical analysis published recently in Ecological Modelling. The problem that they address is the tendency of some species to show boom-and-bust population dynamics. This seems a particular feature of tightly linked predator-prey systems: if predator is rare, prey booms, predator has lots of food, predator booms, prey crashes, predator starves, predator crashes, and so on. The Canadian lynx-hare system is the most famous example.
At the bottom of the cycles, population sizes might be so small that either predator or prey is highly vulnerable to extinction - by some other event, such as disease or disaster.
Bode and Possingham model various options for damping these cycles by removing some predators, prey, or both, from the system. "Remarkably," they say, "if the interventions are enacted at the appropriate time, infrequent culling of a small number of individuals significantly reduces the probability of extinction of the predator."
My first thought when I saw this, was that we probably rarely know enough about a species' population dynamics to know when the best time to cull is, and that such a move would be politically untenable. But, as Bode points out, the most likely candidates for such a move are large game-park species, such as elephants, about which we know quite a lot. It's also heartening that their (as they say, simplistic) simulation suggests that culling prey (which would be plants for elephants, I suppose) is more likely to be effective than predators, and that culling would be needed only rarely.
They conclude:
I swapped e-mails with Bode, and besides mentioning that, in parks with very high elephant densities, such as Kruger, culling elephants seems 'almost unavoidable' (the issue seems to have flared up most recently in late 2005, judging by this BBC story), he also mentioned that similar issues were arising in Australia regarding koalas and kangaroos. As he says, why is it always the cure animals?
All I can say is I'm glad I don't have to make these decisions. Culling animals is clearly a terrible business - particularly for long-lived, highly social species such as elephants. But we now effectively control the destiny of all large, slow-breeding vertebrates. If the only places they can survive is in the parks we set up, and if we take a truly utilitarian and, dread word, holistic view of conservation, then we also have to take the responsibility of 'managing' their populations. Science isn't he only thing to guide us on such decisions, but it's best ot take as informed and clever a decision as possible, towards which Bode and Possingham's ideas can only help.
That's the conclusion reached by Michael Bode and Hugh Possingham in a theoretical analysis published recently in Ecological Modelling. The problem that they address is the tendency of some species to show boom-and-bust population dynamics. This seems a particular feature of tightly linked predator-prey systems: if predator is rare, prey booms, predator has lots of food, predator booms, prey crashes, predator starves, predator crashes, and so on. The Canadian lynx-hare system is the most famous example.
At the bottom of the cycles, population sizes might be so small that either predator or prey is highly vulnerable to extinction - by some other event, such as disease or disaster.
Bode and Possingham model various options for damping these cycles by removing some predators, prey, or both, from the system. "Remarkably," they say, "if the interventions are enacted at the appropriate time, infrequent culling of a small number of individuals significantly reduces the probability of extinction of the predator."
My first thought when I saw this, was that we probably rarely know enough about a species' population dynamics to know when the best time to cull is, and that such a move would be politically untenable. But, as Bode points out, the most likely candidates for such a move are large game-park species, such as elephants, about which we know quite a lot. It's also heartening that their (as they say, simplistic) simulation suggests that culling prey (which would be plants for elephants, I suppose) is more likely to be effective than predators, and that culling would be needed only rarely.
They conclude:
Most current methods of ecosystem control attempt to keep a single species population below a certain threshold, or between fixed bounds, leading to highly inefficient management. Furthermore, unnecessarily high levels of culling can generate considerable public opposition. Given the clumsy nature of such static controls, this view may be reasonable. Our dynamic control solution has the substantial benefit of minimising the preventable culling of organisms, and being extremely cost-effective.
I swapped e-mails with Bode, and besides mentioning that, in parks with very high elephant densities, such as Kruger, culling elephants seems 'almost unavoidable' (the issue seems to have flared up most recently in late 2005, judging by this BBC story), he also mentioned that similar issues were arising in Australia regarding koalas and kangaroos. As he says, why is it always the cure animals?
All I can say is I'm glad I don't have to make these decisions. Culling animals is clearly a terrible business - particularly for long-lived, highly social species such as elephants. But we now effectively control the destiny of all large, slow-breeding vertebrates. If the only places they can survive is in the parks we set up, and if we take a truly utilitarian and, dread word, holistic view of conservation, then we also have to take the responsibility of 'managing' their populations. Science isn't he only thing to guide us on such decisions, but it's best ot take as informed and clever a decision as possible, towards which Bode and Possingham's ideas can only help.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Just Science day 4: Cursory
What's (even) more fun than blogging? Snow!
So, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to recommend that you check out this paper on potential pitfalls of digital photography in biology, and this article by the excellent Jenny Diski, providing a much-needed antidote to all the gush concerning Second Life.
And now I'm off to muck about on Hampstead Heath.
So, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to recommend that you check out this paper on potential pitfalls of digital photography in biology, and this article by the excellent Jenny Diski, providing a much-needed antidote to all the gush concerning Second Life.
And now I'm off to muck about on Hampstead Heath.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Just Science day 3: The H. pylori story
A new Nature paper by Mark Achtman and his colleagues reminds me that today, Helicobacter pylori (Hp) is definitely my favourite member of the human gut flora.
This bacterium is best known for causing ulcers and increasing the risk of stomach cancer. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won a Nobel prize in 2005 for showing this (famously, few believed that bacteria could survive in the concentrated acid of the stomach, but Marshall chugged down a load of Hp, and got an ulcer.)
But the bacterium is much more than just a baddie. Once upon a time, it was probably in everybody's tummy (although no one is quite sure how its transmitted — vomit seems like the most likely culprit). It's still very common in developing countries and east Asia, but in Europe and North America it's steadily declined — only about 20% of US residents under 40 have it.
A good thing, you might think. But some scientists, such as Martin Blaser, have suggested that there might be a cost to this decline, as well as the benefit of reduced ulcers. Hp reduces the level of stomach acid, so without it there seems to be more heartburn, and possibly an increased risk of oesophageal cancer. There's also the general unknown consequences of having a part of the human ecosystem go extinct: "We have no good sense of the microbial ecology of humans," says infectious-disease specialist Julie Parsonnet of Stanford University in California. "H. pylori infection revs up the immune system - what happens to our ability to respond to other infectious agents when that isn't there?"
Another thing people have argued about is how the bug got into us in the first place:
The new study seems to confirm that Hp has an ancient origin. Achtman's team had previously shown that the spread of different Hp populations in stomachs around the world reflect the patterns of human migration. Now, they have found that we and them match up on a global scale:
So basically, we've been carrying it since we were human. Achtman has this graphic showing how the two spread:
Those of you with Nature subscriptions can read a 2003 feature by me on all this (which is where the earlier quotes came from). And if anyone's looking to write a short, sharp popsci book, you could worse than tell the H. pylori story. Just remember to give me a cut of the royalties.
This bacterium is best known for causing ulcers and increasing the risk of stomach cancer. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won a Nobel prize in 2005 for showing this (famously, few believed that bacteria could survive in the concentrated acid of the stomach, but Marshall chugged down a load of Hp, and got an ulcer.)
But the bacterium is much more than just a baddie. Once upon a time, it was probably in everybody's tummy (although no one is quite sure how its transmitted — vomit seems like the most likely culprit). It's still very common in developing countries and east Asia, but in Europe and North America it's steadily declined — only about 20% of US residents under 40 have it.
A good thing, you might think. But some scientists, such as Martin Blaser, have suggested that there might be a cost to this decline, as well as the benefit of reduced ulcers. Hp reduces the level of stomach acid, so without it there seems to be more heartburn, and possibly an increased risk of oesophageal cancer. There's also the general unknown consequences of having a part of the human ecosystem go extinct: "We have no good sense of the microbial ecology of humans," says infectious-disease specialist Julie Parsonnet of Stanford University in California. "H. pylori infection revs up the immune system - what happens to our ability to respond to other infectious agents when that isn't there?"
Another thing people have argued about is how the bug got into us in the first place:
Most mammals seem to have their own species of Helicobacter in their stomachs, leading some researchers to suggest that the relationship between microbe and host predates the evolution of modern humans. But others think that H. pylori's hook-up with humans, and subsequent spread around the world, was more recent.
That's the view taken by geneticist Douglas Berg of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Berg and his colleagues looked at more than 500 strains of the bacterium taken from people in five continents. Native Peruvians had bacteria more similar to Spaniards, they found, even though their genes are more similar to those of East Asians - the group that settled the Americas about 12,000 years ago. This led Berg and his colleagues to suggest that the conquistadors may have carried the bacterium to South America about 500 years ago, and that the continent's first humans arrived with virgin stomachs.
Martin Blaser disagrees. A microbiologist at New York University, he believes that Helicobacter has long been part of the gut flora of all humans. Late last year, Blaser and his colleagues seemed to reaffirm the ancient origins of American H. pylori, when they discovered strains closely related to the East Asian version of the bacterium in native people living in remote regions of Amazonia. And in unpublished work, pathologist Marvin Allison of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond has detected H. pylori in the stomachs of 1,800-year-old Chilean mummies. In areas where Europeans and Amerindians had mixed, Blaser believes, indigenous strains have fallen victim to microbial imperialism.
The new study seems to confirm that Hp has an ancient origin. Achtman's team had previously shown that the spread of different Hp populations in stomachs around the world reflect the patterns of human migration. Now, they have found that we and them match up on a global scale:
[G]enetic diversity in H. pylori decreases with geographic distance from east Africa, the cradle of modern humans. We also observe similar clines of genetic isolation by distance (IBD) for both H. pylori and its human host at a worldwide scale.
So basically, we've been carrying it since we were human. Achtman has this graphic showing how the two spread:
Those of you with Nature subscriptions can read a 2003 feature by me on all this (which is where the earlier quotes came from). And if anyone's looking to write a short, sharp popsci book, you could worse than tell the H. pylori story. Just remember to give me a cut of the royalties.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Just Science day 2: They're only after one thing
Before we begin, I notice that the aggregator at Just Science has given yesterday's post the date of 31 December 1969. Can anyone help with why this has happened, and how to stop it happening again?
Anyway, on with the madness. With Valentine’s day just a week away, this paper in the new issue of Ethology is a must-read. In it, self-proclaimed ‘media friendly expert’, Karim Vahed, of the University of Derby, looks at nuptial gifts — the tasty morsels that many male animals (especially insects and spiders) bring to their intended mates.
The orthodox view of this is that everyone wins — the female gains a meal that increases her fertility, the male gets a mating. Vahed, however, has a rather more cynical take on things:
There is some evidence for this notion. Experiments in the fly Rhamphomyia sulcata suggest that females are almost as enthusiastic about worthless gifts as they are about a full dinner. Such indiscrimate behaviour leaves the door open to an invasion of cheating males.
And if Dr Vahed gives you a box of chocolates next Wednesday, beware.
Anyway, on with the madness. With Valentine’s day just a week away, this paper in the new issue of Ethology is a must-read. In it, self-proclaimed ‘media friendly expert’, Karim Vahed, of the University of Derby, looks at nuptial gifts — the tasty morsels that many male animals (especially insects and spiders) bring to their intended mates.
The orthodox view of this is that everyone wins — the female gains a meal that increases her fertility, the male gets a mating. Vahed, however, has a rather more cynical take on things:
In this review, I explore the proposition that nuptial gifts act as sensory traps: by exploiting the female's gustatory responses, the male may be able to entice females to accept superfluous matings and/or transfer greater volumes of ejaculate than are in the female's reproductive interests.
Gift composition is more likely to be tailored to increasing the attractiveness of the gift to the female and/or maximizing gift handling time than to suit the female's nutritional needs … evidence suggests that the gift enables the male to overcome the resistance of the female to accepting an extra large ejaculate.
There is some evidence for this notion. Experiments in the fly Rhamphomyia sulcata suggest that females are almost as enthusiastic about worthless gifts as they are about a full dinner. Such indiscrimate behaviour leaves the door open to an invasion of cheating males.
And if Dr Vahed gives you a box of chocolates next Wednesday, beware.
Monday, February 05, 2007
Just Science day 1: cave bugs and shoot-em-ups
Not much time today (or tomorrow), so just a quick one drawing attention the juiciest morsels that popped into my inbox this morning.
First, and most closely related to this blog’s core themes, we have an interesting paper in Micobial Ecology by Raina Maier and her colleagues looking at the impact of tourists on the bacteria living in Kartchner Caverns, AZ.
These caves were opened to tourists in 1999. With admirable foresight (it’s depressing how rare this kind of thing is), researchers surveyed the caves’ microbial biota before opening, and now they reveal what’s changed as a consequence of having 200,000 people pass through the caves each year.
Raina's team found that the most heavily used areas had higher diversity, and different community composition — more Proteobacteria, fewer Firmicutes. This is probably a mixture of people bringing in bugs, and an increase in organic matter in the caves, say the researchers.
What we don’t know is what these changes mean for, say, nutrient cycling, food webs and so on in the caves, and whether they are something that should be of conservation concern. Microbial conservation is something I’d like to know more about, so if anyone has any pointers, please point them.
Three other things caught my eye:
1. Technological Forecasting and Social Change has a special issue of interesting-looking articles on terrorism and technology.
2. The Journal of Experimental Psychology reports that ‘action gaming enhances visuospatial attention throughout the visual field’ – i.e. playing Halo and its ilk makes you sharper-eyed. Whether this does you any good, and whether you get worse at anything else (insert your own joke about leaving the house, talking to girls etc.), is another matter.
3. And Psychopharmacology (always a favourite) finds that people who drink more coffee get more of a kick out of it. Which, given habituation and everything, seems to be the wrong way around. But I can’t tell from this abstract whether this is a consequence or cause of drinking lots and lots of lovely coffee.
There. That wasn't too bad. Back tomorrow.
First, and most closely related to this blog’s core themes, we have an interesting paper in Micobial Ecology by Raina Maier and her colleagues looking at the impact of tourists on the bacteria living in Kartchner Caverns, AZ.
These caves were opened to tourists in 1999. With admirable foresight (it’s depressing how rare this kind of thing is), researchers surveyed the caves’ microbial biota before opening, and now they reveal what’s changed as a consequence of having 200,000 people pass through the caves each year.
Raina's team found that the most heavily used areas had higher diversity, and different community composition — more Proteobacteria, fewer Firmicutes. This is probably a mixture of people bringing in bugs, and an increase in organic matter in the caves, say the researchers.
What we don’t know is what these changes mean for, say, nutrient cycling, food webs and so on in the caves, and whether they are something that should be of conservation concern. Microbial conservation is something I’d like to know more about, so if anyone has any pointers, please point them.
Three other things caught my eye:
1. Technological Forecasting and Social Change has a special issue of interesting-looking articles on terrorism and technology.
2. The Journal of Experimental Psychology reports that ‘action gaming enhances visuospatial attention throughout the visual field’ – i.e. playing Halo and its ilk makes you sharper-eyed. Whether this does you any good, and whether you get worse at anything else (insert your own joke about leaving the house, talking to girls etc.), is another matter.
3. And Psychopharmacology (always a favourite) finds that people who drink more coffee get more of a kick out of it. Which, given habituation and everything, seems to be the wrong way around. But I can’t tell from this abstract whether this is a consequence or cause of drinking lots and lots of lovely coffee.
There. That wasn't too bad. Back tomorrow.
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