Category: Blog
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How biodiversity loss is like LeBron James and Miami Heat
This is a repost from Climate Central by Michael D. Lemonick. Ecologists have been saying for decades now that the world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. Hundreds of species are vanishing every year, thanks to assaults to the environment that include deforestation, overfishing, toxic pollution and, increasingly, climate change — the lethal icing…
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Sea level rise, one more frontier for climate dialogue controversy
Below is a repost of a piece by my UNC colleague Sarah Peach from the Yale Forum. It provides a bit of context about the struggles among scientists, developers, policy makers, and communities over formulating plans for dealing with climate change and sea level rise in a state blessed with so much wonderful shoreline. …
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Colbert’s take on the North Carolina sea level rise (isn’t happening) bill
The Colbert Report Get More: href=”http://www.colbertnation.com/video”>Video Archive
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Why are lionfish populations exploding across the Caribbean?
Lionfish are an exotic fish now found throughout the Greater Caribbean and eastern Atlantic that have become incredibly abundant on many reefs, especially in the Bahamas and off North Carolina. Lionfish are a piscivore (a fish that eats other fish) and were introduced from the Indo-Pacific by the aquarium trade in the late 1990s off Florida. Mostly likely,…
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How does trophic skewing affect the functioning of marine communities?
My former PhD student Dr Pamela Reynolds and I just published a paper in PLoS One* that attempts to address this question. Trophic skew is an ecological term that describes changes in the relative number of species at different tropic levels, i.e., “species richness“. In most natural food webs, there are more species at the…
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Lying liar Bob Carter is at it again
Here we go again. Our old friend Dr Bob Carter – climate change denier extraordinaire – is back at it; making counter-factual claims about climate change in another newspaper. Bob is reported to be paid nearly $2000 a month by the Heartland Institute to sow confusion about greenhouse gases and global warming. Read more about this…
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Corals and their housekeeping mutualists or the importance of having a diverse group of friends
This is a guest post by Dr Adrian Stier Coral reefs are among the most species rich ecosystems on earth, but what most people don’t know is that the majority of reef biodiversity is housed inside the reef. Indeed, in the South Pacific, a coral the size of a basketball can house over 50 different…
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Waimea River: How to make waves
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North Carolina legislature makes history yet again, proposing to outlaw sea level rise
[Editor’s note: OK, I know we live in crazy times, and getting crazier by the day. But this one is so utterly, bat-doo insane, masochistic and over-the-top that I can’t resist and must quote verbatim. By Scott Huler at From Scientific American blogs. John, Craig, Kevin Z, Andrew, et al — what the ___ is…
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New evidence for catastrophic loss of coral reef sharks
“[The] density of reef sharks has declined to 3–10% of baseline levels” This is the take-home finding from one of two new papers that help clarify just how much reef shark populations have declined. Nadon et al. 2012, Re-creating missing population baselines for Pacific reef sharks, just came out in the journal Conservation Biology. The team used a new database…