Tag Archives: ecology

beech leaf disease

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A new disease is threatening beech trees (Philadelphia Inquirer, paywalled) in the U.S. We don’t want to lose our beeches like we did our chestnuts. Beeches have some similar features in that they make up a significant amount of our eastern forest canopy (like chestnuts used to), produce fatty nuts that feed birds and other species, and their leaves serve as host plants for insects that feed birds and other species. It is not clear yet what is causing this disease, but hopefully we can learn from the cautionary tale of the chestnut and try to get out in front of it.

Go Birds!

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It’s the morning of Super Bowl Sunday as I write this, and I don’t know if the Philadelphia Eagles will win tonight. If you are reading this, you will probably know or you can look it up. In the meantime, if you want to watch eagles on TV there are at least two live streams of bald eagle nests in Pennsylvania. When I checked just now, one had an eagle in it and one was empty. Even an empty bald eagle nest is an impressive structure worth a look.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution horizon scan

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This journal does an annual “horizon scan” of of emerging topics and issues. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • “bio-batteries” – “DNA-enabled biobattery technology uses a set of enzymes coupled to DNA to degrade organic compounds, releasing electrons and generating electricity…Such batteries could theoretically supply power densities in orders of magnitude greater than widely used lithium-ion batteries”. There are also new processes for extracting lithium more sustainably from waste materials. So there is some hope that the resource and waste limitations to scaling up renewable energy can be solved. Thermophotovoltaic cells are a third energy storage technology mentioned.
  • more practical methods of converting human urine to fertilizer – This might not sound like a big deal, but our coastal waters are being choked by nutrients both from treated wastewater and from farm runoff, while the nutrients in the farm runoff are derived from fossil fuels in the case of nitrogen or a mined from finite geological resources in the case of phosphate. Reprocessing urine into fertilizer is almost a no-brainer. And the technology has been known for awhile. The problem has been waste taboos which seem to be extremely ingrained in our psyches. I really want this one to be overcome, but as a wastewater industry insider I have become more cynical about this one over time. Genetic engineering of crops to help them take up nitrogen directly from the atmosphere (which peas and beans can do naturally, but most crops can’t) is also mentioned.
  • A particular pathogen that infects amphibians may be spreading to new areas.
  • European countries are considering new policy/legal frameworks for biodiversity reporting and conservation. This might sound boring, but we have gotten there with conventional pollution and we are getting there with greenhouse gases and renewable energy, while land use and conversation have mostly been left out to date.
  • Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to try to accelerate drug, chemical, and pesticide research.
  • trash reefs – New ecosystems may actually develop and adapt around ocean garbage patches.

wolves create a landscape of fear!

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The “landscape of fear” is a thing in ecology where predators control prey behavior just by making them afraid of predation. This article compares the cost of wolf predation of livestock to the money saved when wolves keep deer away from highways. The comparison is overwhelmingly in favor of leaving the wolves to keep deer from the highways, even if they eat a few sheep.

Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation

Recent studies uncover cascading ecological effects resulting from removing and reintroducing predators into a landscape, but little is known about effects on human lives and property. We quantify the effects of restoring wolf populations by evaluating their influence on deer–vehicle collisions (DVCs) in Wisconsin. We show that, for the average county, wolf entry reduced DVCs by 24%, yielding an economic benefit that is 63 times greater than the costs of verified wolf predation on livestock. Most of the reduction is due to a behavioral response of deer to wolves rather than through a deer population decline from wolf predation. This finding supports ecological research emphasizing the role of predators in creating a “landscape of fear.” It suggests wolves control economic damages from overabundant deer in ways that human deer hunters cannot.

PNAS

So in a rational world you would maybe take a small fraction of gas tax or toll payments and use it to compensate the farmers for their sheep, in exchange for the farmers not going after the wolves. Or you could just make it illegal to go after the wolves and try to enforce that law. Or some combination. What makes this sort of thing tough in the real world is that a small group impacted by a policy can organize and get political attention, whereas some nebulous idea of “society as a whole” is not going to organize, understand the issue, and lobby the politicians. You could maybe imagine insurance companies representing car owners and truckers getting involved in this issue, if the savings are really so dramatic.

tongue eating parasites

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In Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files books, there are horrifying demon parasites from alternate dimensions that can eat your tongue (and, um…other body parts – why spoil it?) and live in your mouth, while turning you into a sort of zombie. A horrifying idea, but these books are fun, tongue-in-cheek (oops…) highly entertaining and recommended (by me). Anyway, it looks like he got the idea from an IRL horrifying parasite that is about a third of an inch long and can indeed eat your tongue and live in your mouth – if you are a fish. Gross.

John Philip Grime

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Trends in Ecology and Evolution has an obituary on John Philip Grime, a giant in plant ecology. Not being well educated in plant ecology, I had not heard of him, but I like to learn.

Two seminal publications of the early 1970s would come to define Phil’s approach to finding universal patterns in the structure of vegetation. ‘Competitive exclusion in herbaceous vegetation’ [1.] introduced the ‘hump-backed’ model, which predicted that plant species richness peaks in communities that produce an aboveground biomass of about 600 g m–2 year–1. The model was one of the first to make specific recommendations about the management of local biodiversity. ‘Vegetation classification by reference to strategies’ [2.] introduced ‘competition-stress-disturbance’ (CSR) theory. CSR would become synonymous with Phil’s approach to studying vegetation; because he chose to present the concept as a triangle of three opposing selection pressures, many would come to refer to CSR theory as Grime’s triangle. Although not obvious from these papers, each was based on extensive vegetation datasets of the Sheffield region compiled by the UCPE team (particularly longtime associate John Hodgson). Although many would come to know Phil as a theorist and provocateur (a role he would assume often in the 1980s and 1990s), Phil would always argue that his insights were born of detailed field observations and a UCPE research team with expertise in both field botany and physiology.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution

Cicada Safari

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Cicada Safari is a phone app (I’m going to stop saying “smartphone”, I know there are still simple phones out there, but if I’m talking about them I will be specific) that lets people upload reports of Cicadas, and lets you see where people are reporting them. I’m haven’t seen any here in Philadelphia yet. But I am happy to report their cousins the mosquitoes and spotted lanternflys have joined us in the past week or so.

October 2020 in Review

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In current events, this was just the month that the fall resurgence of Covid-19 exploded in the U.S. and around the world. Just a month when a new, controversial Supreme Court justice was sworn in. Just the last month leading up to the Biden-Trump election, amid a swirl of questions about a peaceful and orderly transfer of power if the voting goes the way the polls clearly say it is going to. Just a month when my home city erupted in “unrest” for the second time this year and the National Guard rolled in. (Incidentally, Joe Biden is also here as I write this on November 1, and I wonder if the National Guard rolling in is entirely a coincidence.)

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.

Most hopeful story: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.