So, the ESA is coming to a close. This was my first time attending, and I was very impressed with the science. There were not, however, enough parties. Here are a couple of shots from last night’s shindig at the Milwaukee Public Museum, an old fashioned collection of skeletons, butterflies in cases, and lots of dioramas peopled with mannequins. Food was served in a little mannequin-peopled village called “The Streets of Old Milwaukee”, and the consensus was that it would not do to be there alone at night. Various food was served. I had the German platter, with potato pancakes. Yes, that picture is of an the world’s largest bowl of sour cream.

The highlight of the evening was contra dancing, a kind of complex-looking but not too hard (at least for this crowd) dancing with a caller, in which you end up dancing with everyone in the room—not a bad idea for a mixer. The program chair for this year’s meeting, Louis Gross, is apparently a contra dancer himself.

I talked with Richard Primack of Boston University, who has been using records collected by Henry David Thoreau to see if blooming times in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts have been shifted by climate change. They have, by seven days.

He thinks that the clearest trend in the Ecological Society of America is its shift, en masse, towards studying climate change. “Two years ago there were very few papers on climate change,” he said. “Four years ago there were virtually none. But if you look at this year, it is becoming the major driving topic of the ESA.”

That’s all from Milwaukee. Next year the meeting will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Posted by Emma Marris at 04:13 PM | Permalink

US military cargo ships from the Admiralty Islands brought the brown tree snake to Guam. It ate 10 forest bird species to extinction; the last two native species are clinging to life.

“What we have is an island with no birds,” says Haldre Rogers of the University of Washington in Seattle. “I found an conservationists nightmare, but an ecologist’s dream.” Rogers was able to imagine a world without birds, “the fate of a silent forest” without birds to eat bugs and disperse seeds.

Looking at seed dispersal, Rogers reckoned that seeds and seedlings would no longer be found far from their parents. And that’s what she found. Without birds to eat seeds and fly to new locations before they drop them or defecate them out, they all just fall—plop—right under their parents.

Without a sudden resurgence of avian dispersers, the landscape of Guam might change substantially, with clumps, or indeed, rings, of single species and wide-open space in between.

Photo by Isaac Chellman

Posted by Emma Marris at 03:43 PM | Permalink

Kasi Jackson of West Virginia University studies images of female scientists in horror films. But not just any horror film: “My criteria were puppets, people in rubber suits, or claymation," she says. "None of that fancy CGI stuff allowed.”

Jackson believes that B movies are actually more revealing of cultural currents than $100 million blockbusters created by marketers. In between the splatter and frontal nudity, interesting scenerios play out: women scientists as mediators between Science with a capital S and Nature with a capital N; women scientists as maternal protectors of nature—to humanity’s cost.

So I asked Jackson for her top 3 favorite B horror films featuring female scientists. And viewer beware, some of these are really gory.

1. Carnosaur (1993). Diane Ladd plays a mad scientist in a pink lab coat who decides that humanity, having trashed the planet, no longer deserves to live. After some scientific finagling, women begin giving birth to dinosaur eggs. Jackson’s fave quote from Ladd’s character: “To understand nature, you have to become as remorseless as Nature herself.”

Jackson says, “In spite of the giant dinosaurs, it is really a pretty sophisticated critique of science and society.”

2. Aligator (1980). A woman who once had a pet alligator grows up to be a zoologist played by Robin Riker. The pet alligator grows up to be mutated into gigantic proportions by a nefarious pharmaceutical company. Dismemberment ensues.

Jackson says, “In spite of the giant alligators, the woman plays a real scientist who actually does the kinds of things that scientists do.”

3. Kingdom of Spiders (1977). Tiffany Bolling plays an entomologist involved in a very serious spider situation, in which hordes of the arachnids begin mobbing cattle when pesticides kill off their more usual prey. Jackson points out that she also does something perhaps unique in the history of cinema: she resists the amorous advances of William Shatner.

Jackson says, “I really have a fondness for William Shatner, and besides, it really is a classic example off the ‘nature out of balance’ theme.”

Break out the popcorn.

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Jane Kavanagh of University College Cork wins a prize for most self-deprecating talk title, with “As dull as ditch water? Elevating the status of the undervalued drainage ditch”

Kavanagh studied a network of ditches draining several farms in County Cork, Ireland. As you can see from the photo to the right, which she kindly supplied, her ditches are lush and attractive. Her sampling of macro-invertebrates revealed that they also like streams in that they harbor quite a bit of diversity, with communities dependent on variables like nutrient composition and water flow.

“These are marginal habitats that are largely ignored,” says Kavabagh. “Farmers leave them alone. Nobody really cares about them. So they are fair game for us. They are significant habitats, important in overall gamma [landscape scale] diversity, and because they are so numerous, potentially important for conservation.”

This kind of space could fall under the rubric of "novel ecosystems", a really fascinating concept I mentioned briefly earlier. The idea is that humans changed and ecosystem, but are not actively managing it, so that what one might call "natural processes" are still taking place, just with a new cast of characters and a new starting state. I expect to see more and more studies like this. Keep an eye out for the succession of street corners, the food webs of football fields and the trophic cascades of cracked tarmac.

Posted by Emma Marris at 10:24 PM | Permalink

What is the typical landscape of the United States? Jeffrey Cardille, of the University of Montreal wondered the same thing. He may be in Montreal now, but he’s from the US of A, and a big Woody Guthrie fan. Guthrie, in his alternative national anthem “This Land is Your Land” invoked the “redwood forests,” the “gulf stream waters” and so on. But could it be that the archetypal US landscape these days is rather a cornfield or a brand new subdivision?

To find out, Cardille used an algorithm called “affinity propagation”, made famous in this Science paper by Frey and Dueck. As Cardille explains, the algorithm is “a way to find representative samples in complex datasets.” In the Science paper, it was used to create clusters of faces the same people out of a sea of photographs. Each cluster was organized around a central exemplar photo.

Cardille used the same method on landscape data from the National Land Cover Data Set, and metrics extracted from the dataset with a program called fragstats. He gridded the lower 48 off into 6 km by 6 km squares and then let the algorithm rip on the data— He was only able to run 5% at a time due to computing power limitations. "We would have needed a 500 GB computer to do the whole US," says Cardille.

What emerges on any one of the runs are something like 17 exemplar squares, real chunks of the landscape that best represent the totality of the landscape. Predictably, of the 17 in the run he presented, 13 are human dominated—row crops, clear cuts, urbanizing suburban land, and the like. Two are carefully managed national parks. Just two are more or less running themselves. One of these is a square of the vast shrub-lands of Texas.

Posted by Emma Marris at 05:52 AM | Permalink

Ecologists often study succession in communities. That is, after a disturbance like a fire or windstorm or, indeed, even volcanic eruption, plants and animals re-colonize the site in predictable patterns. But why wait for a fire, when you can just wash your hands or wait for a brand new leaf to emerge from a tree? Voila, a blank slate for microbes of various kinds to colonize—and quickly.

“There has been a huge amount of work on plant community succession studied from an ecological perspective,” says Noah Fierer. “And food scientists have studied how food rots, but that’s it.”

Until now. Fierer is running several different projects studying microbial succession on surfaces including new leaves, which emerge from a tree as “sterile or close to sterile” according to Fierer, and the palms of undergraduates.

In the leaf experiment, Fierer and Co. visited the same plains cottonwood tree from leaf out until leaf fall, from May until end of September to see what microbes lived on it when. “Some people had speculated that it was going to be random,” says Fierer, but he showed that it looked a lot like succession on a larger scale, with recognizable early, mid and late succession community patterns.

“We are confirming 19th century ecology,” says Fierer. “At a coarse level of resolution, microbial succession is not different from macrobial succession.”

There are hundreds of microscopic species per leaf, and the details of what they are doing there are still vague. “The next step is to figure out are the early colonizers physically different than the midstage colonizers, and why they switch,” says Fierer. “I think they are responding to changes in leaf physiology, but I’m not sure.”

If I had Fierer's tools, I would track succession on a laptop keyboard from box-opening to first anniversary, or maybe on decomposing apples in different environments: urban gutter, shady woods, bobbing in the ocean, or in my shoes...once you start thinking about it, the neat experiments to run are endless.

Posted by Emma Marris at 08:10 PM | Permalink

A food web talk examining structural characteristics of webs that predict stability was hard for me to follow. But it introduced me to the 13 food web motifs: the 13 possible interactions between three species. The speaker, Daniel B. Stouffer, came to the conclusion that persistence of isolated motifs does not predict whether they will contribute to stability in a full food web.

I was thinking, while looking at his slide with the above figure, which comes from Milo, R. et. al. Science 298 (824-827) 2002, that one could write a book with 13 short vignettes about three people and love, using the 13 food web motifs to determine the structure of the emotional webs between the three. And one could call it “The Persistence of Isolated Motifs”.

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:54 PM | Permalink

Now here’s in mage with an interesting back-story. This is a false-color infrared image, taken from an sensor called ASTER aboard the TERRA satellite, shows some a shallow lake in Iceland called Myvatn, which is well known for “periodic unbelievable eruptions of midges” according to Phil Townsend, of the Forest Remote Sensing Lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The midges leave the lake en mass over a week or so, mate, and keel over on the ground.

This midge pulse delivers a huge amount of biomass to the land around the lake, and as a consequence, it is haloed by vegetation distinctly lush compared to what’s going elsewhere in the area.

In these images, brighter red indicates more vigorous vegetation. Myvatn is the paradigm case: a thin border of hot pink rings the lake, comparable in brightness to the fertilized pastures that show up as blobs further from the lake.

Townsend is using satellites to identify more midge lakes. The signal is less clear on other suspect lakes, but the last two seem to share the pattern. He’s also used the images to estimate exactly how much biomass is being hurled on Myvatn’s shore during these midge pulses. Over eight days in late July and early August, the midges deposited 135 kg of biomass per hectare per day within 150m of the shore.

Posted by Emma Marris at 03:44 PM | Permalink

Here’s the general shape of the meeting
Number of attendees: about 3,000
Number of presenters, including poster authors: 2,200
Number of days: 6
Temperature in Milwaukee: 78 °F (26°C)
Press room hospitality: RC Cola
Younger attendee uniform: button up shirt, khakis
Older attendee uniform: vaguely Hawaiian print polo in earth tones, khakis
Chic accessory: last year’s tote bag

Posted by Emma Marris at 10:28 PM | Permalink

Well, we’ll never make sense of human sex, but we might make some sense of snail sex.

Adam Kay of the University St. Thomas in presented work on Potamopyrgus antipodarum, the New Zealand Mud Snail, which comes in both sexual and asexual flavors. When considering the snails it is unclear why sex should have evolved and why it should persist. The same is true of biology more generally. There is a cost to males, who are now not guaranteed to reproduce, and asexual populations just reproduce much, much faster.

According to Kay, there are more than 20 hypothesis for why sex exists, mostly genetic, focusing on phenotypic results of recombination. But their group has got another theory that I think is quite dashing in its simplicity. Most asexual snails have not just two chromosomes, but three (a little extra buffer against deleterious mutations usually considered to be good news). Chromosomes and associated RNA are made of nucleic acid, and nucleic acid contains tons of phosphorus.

“In invertebrates, DNA and RNA can make up a large fraction of organismal dry weight,” says Kay.

I bet you can guess where this is going. The hypothesis is that in places with limited phosphorus, the snails can’t afford to have all that nucleic acid, and so sexual snails are selected for.

So far, their evidence consists of a clear pattern of asexual snails being stuffed with phosphorus and sexual snails being phosphorus lean. And there you have it. Snails have sex because they are broke.

UPDATE: Kay's collaborator, Maurine Neiman, a biologist at the University of Iowa, tells us about the cool snail image above: "The snails are not naturally colorful, but were painted to identify four different lineages in an experiment studying how diet affects their elemental composition. They are also very tiny; the grid is 1 cm x 1 cm."

Nieman also asked that I mention the undergraduates from St. Thomas who did a lot of the work and will be authors on the paper, Katherine Theisen and Madelyn Mayry.

See also Evolution: Scandal! Sex-starved and still surviving

Posted by Emma Marris at 10:19 PM | Permalink

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Thomas Lovejoy of the Heinz Center, founder of the biodiversity concept, gave the opening plenary for the meeting. After a few preliminaries, he proceeded to chant a litany of environmental cataclysm, from invasive species to climate change and all its depressing effects, to disappearing frogs. At this point, I felt like bolting. I had heard this speech before, as, undoubtedly, had everyone else in the room, and I didn't feel a particular need to be driven to the hotel bar by despair. But I hung in there. Lovejoy went on to predict the future—bleak naturally, and culminating in "assemblages that are relatively hard to envision."

Funny thing was, I had just spent the whole day in a workshop on "novel ecosystems" where people talked about their research doing just that, studying the new ecosystems that spring up after human disturbance, and moving towards predicting them. It was an optimistic session, in a way, and it made me think again about Milwaukee as an ecosystem. What weird and interesting species interactions were afoot in the city?

This led me to photographer Eddee Daniel. Daniel's new book of photographs of the urban wilderness of Milwaukee came out recently, and photographs are on display at the Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee's Riverside Park. These beautiful pictures make clear that what are sometimes called "trash landscapes" are as worthy of landscape photography as they are of scientific inquiry.

Posted by Daniel Cressey at 02:46 PM | Permalink

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The Ecological Society of America annual meeting begins today in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee is best known for beer brewing, Harley Davidson motorcycles and its rust-belt decline. I decided to skip the whole question of Milwaukee as a city and examine Milwaukee as an ecosystem. I began by joining a field trip that visited a forest and a prairie, both remnants of ecosystems that once covered the area in a fluctuating mosaic controlled by fire.

The prairie, a sea of grasses, sedges, flowers and reeds, blooms from the earth after a fire from a seed bank that contains, in the case of Chiwaukee prairie, over 400 plant species. Bison would have grazed in such places. Today, the Department of Natural Resources struggles to keep this ecosystem from growing bushy. Burning is "tricky", according to Marty Johnson of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, as there are many houses adjacent to the prairie. The state is attempting to buy up these residential lots (developers named the area "Pleasant Prairie") to expand the habitat. He crew spends its time yanking out invasive species year-round. "Whatever is blooming, you deal with," he says. The prairie comes up to my shoulder in some places, and is at the moment alive with purple and yellow blooms. As I swished through the grass, I smelled wild bergamot and mountain mint.

Meanwhile, Renak-Polak Woods is a remnant of maple-beech forest, the ecosystem type that typically grew up in the absence of fire. The forest persisted because of two landowners that chose not to develop it for the pleasingly uneconomic reason that they liked it. Sugar maple and smooth-barked beech—"like an elephant's leg," according to Joy Wolf, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin Parkside—give the forest its name. Black cherry, many-trunked beech, and small herbaceous plants like bloodroot, wild ginger and red baneberry share the woods. Ephemeral ponds come and go, and we found a salamander and a number of crawfish nests to testify to their inhabitants.

These fragments are examples of what the landscape looked like when European settlers arrived. The difference, of course, is that these patches are held static in one phase—prairie or maple-beech forest—whereas the pre-settlement landscape was in reality a shifting mosaic of these and other types mediated by fires, fires often set by the Native Americans. So, in essence, these beautiful repositories of biodiversity are like fine museum pieces displaying fragments of an earlier, and perhaps more successful, land management philosophy for the Milwaukee area.

Posted by Daniel Cressey at 02:44 PM | Permalink

Before it hit the mainstream, the green movement was often criticized as having its head in the clouds. Sure, saving the environment is a brilliant idea, but it's just too expensive and will inconvenience too many people. Ecologists, with their earnest messages about rainforests, corals and other delicate ecosystems, were seen as part of this.

Yet that picture might be changing. One of the main themes of this week's meeting was the idea of pragmatism in dealing presenting ecological solutions and recommendations to policymakers. That's reflected as much as anything by the sheer number of economists giving talks here.

Continue reading "ESA: In praise of pragmatism" »

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Think about it for a second - what would be wrong with a synthetic version of the wilderness, if you can still go hiking and fishing there? How about a virtual reality program that allows you to witness the fall colours of New England without going there?

Continue reading "ESA: What's wrong with plastic trees?" »

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Why are scientists so dubious, wary, and even downright scared of journalists? While so many politicians, musicians and sportsmen seem to be in their element when talking to the press, attitudes to the fourth estate among the scientific community range from mistrust to open hostility and cynicism. Yet scientific issues have never been more important and newsworthy, and the public appetite for coverage of scientific issues has never been greater. So how can we get scientists to relax and feel comfortable speaking to the media?

It was this question that led to me finding myself sat on a panel last night alongside Wired magazine's Adam Rogers, freelance science journalist Thomas Hayden, and Paul Rogers of the San Jose Mercury News. Facing us were several dozen scientists, all keen to find out exactly what we look for in a story and how they can get their message across.

Continue reading "ESA: Scientists are from Mars, journalists are from Venus" »

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Mike Hopkin reports from the joint meeting of the Ecological Society of America and the Society for Ecological Restoration in San Jose, California.

We all know that saving carbon is good. But some ecologists think that we might be going about it in a rather misguided way. Restoring natural ecosystems, they argue, is vital as part of our efforts to cut the amount of greenhouse gas in our skies, and is greener than other schemes such as single-culture forestry or subsidized biofuel crops.

Continue reading "ESA: Are forests and biofuels bad for the environment?" »

Posted by at 07:47 PM | Permalink

Snow leopards tracked by monitoring fright of their prey.

The endangered snow leopard has returned to the valleys around Mount Everest, say wildlife researchers working in Nepal. And how do they know it's back? Because the leopards' traditional prey are terrified.

Read the story here.
And find Mike's blog from this ecological conference here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:54 PM | Permalink

Biodiversity loss isn't just bad for the species that go extinct - it can also lead to major increases in human disease. That's the message from ecologists at the ESA meeting, who are today calling for greater awareness of the often complex link between ecosystem harm and human health.

Continue reading "ESA: Ailing ecosystems means more human disease" »

Posted by at 04:14 PM | Permalink

If you've ever tried to eat lunch in an urban park you might know this already, but ecologists have shown that squirrels get a lot more cocky when there are loads of them around. Tommy Parker of the University of Missouri-Columbia studied squirrels in several parks in Baltimore, as well as Lafayette Park in nearby Washington DC - the single place with the highest density of grey squirrels in the world. What's more, it's bang opposite the White House: "It's hard to do science with all the secret service guys around," Parker says.

The results showed that squirrels, like people, get more pushy in crowded urban areas. Parks with the highest squirrel densities witnessed more squirrel-on-squirrel brawls, and the rodents were also less nervous of people. "The Lafeyette squirrels are very aggressive and not wary at all," says Parker. "You could walk directly up to them and they would just lean on your shoe." Yet another reason not to loiter near the White House, then...

Posted by at 09:16 PM | Permalink

Often, the best way to explain a scientific idea to someone is to put it in terms they can easily envisage, using a cleverly chosen metaphor, simile or other quip. A bon mot can clarify a tricky concept more easily than all the powerpoint presentations in the world – a case in point being Mark Twain’s pithy meteorological explanation: “Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.”

So the ESA decided to hold a competition to find the best analogy to explain an ecological concept – in a field where ecologists often have problems explaining ideas to each other, let alone to the public. The runner-up’s prize went to the following explanation of the staggering odds against an individual salmon successfully reproducing: Imagine you have to drive from the centre of a city all the way to the highway on the outskirts without stopping even once. Thus, if you come up against just a single red light anywhere on the journey you don’t make it.

The winning entry sought to explain the complex issue of ecosystem stability in terms of Jenga. Say each brick represents a species – at first, removing a piece makes the system a little more unstable, but overall it still stands up. But remove too many bricks and there comes a point when it all comes crashing down.

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While it might be true that no man is an island, it seems that his teeth are. According to researchers studying the bacteria that cause gum disease, your pearly whites have more in common with a tropical archipelago than you think.

Continue reading "ESA: Why your teeth are like tropical islands" »

Posted by at 04:30 PM | Permalink

Almost a year after Hurricane Katrina, researchers are still wringing their hands over the continued failure to start thinking about how to stop it happening again. The time has come, they say, for some drastic solutions... just don't expect them to be popular.

Continue reading "ESA: Drastic action for the Gulf Coast" »

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More than 2,500 ecologists have descended on Memphis, Tennessee, for this year's annual conference, which has the them 'Icons and upstarts of ecology'. And the society chose a political upstart (if indeed it's possible to be an upstart at 58 years of age) to give the opening address. Ron Sims, county executive for King County, Washington, is the first county leader in the United States to sign up to the Chicago Climate Exchange, a voluntary counterpart to Europe's formal emissions-trading scheme, which aims to cut emissions by imposing caps on emissions and then trading in the right to exceed them if necessary.

Sims claims that the move, along with a raft of other green initiatives, has the backing of the impressive roll-call of businesses, Microsoft and Starbucks included, that are based in his backyard. But his attitude makes him an upstart as compared with the continued slow progress of the federal government in tackling carbon emissions. In an impassioned speech, he argued that all politics is ultimately local, and that "the federal government will move slowly by design". He also called for scientists to speak up for themselves, citing the oft-quoted example that, among scientists, there is a genuine consensus that man-made climate change is really happening, however much politicians and the media would like to maintain that the issue is shrouded in controversy.

Although this is not a climate conference, there was much nodding of heads, because ecosystems so often hold up a mirror to climate change. And the fact that we're in Memphis, which is currently sweltering under an official severe heat advisory warning, was not lost on anyone either.

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Michael Hopkin discusses the health of the world's ecosystems at the Ecological Society of America's meeting in Memphis, Tennessee. Check back here for his diary entries from 6-11 August.

Click on a headline to leave a comment on any post.

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