Tag: biodiversity
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Belize field log 2012: Witness to a murder
[The fourth installment, and I’ll confess my favorite, in our New York Times “Scientist at Work” field log.] Sunday, July 8 As the sun breaks the horizon, I sit in a wooden chair at the edge of the backreef, an eye on the weather horizon, gratefully sipping the first strong coffee and gauging what the…
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Belize field log 3: Journey to the center of the reef
[The third installment in our New York Times “Scientist at Work” field log.] Collecting shrimp is a complicated business. I am not as seasoned as my colleagues, but I quickly learn how tedious it can be. After taking a photograph and estimating the volume of a sponge, we have to locate every shrimp inside. Synalpheus…
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Belize field log 2: Social breakdown on the reef
[The second installment in our New York Times “Scientist at Work” field log.] Wednesday, July 4 Our hunt yesterday produced a good haul of shrimp species, but, alas, none of the social ones we’re searching for. I worked with my former Ph.D. student, Tripp McDonald, long into the night identifying the shrimp. Though little known…
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Belize 2012 field log 1: Snapping Shrimps and Hidden Sponges
[Our team has just returned from a 10-day research trip to the Belize Barrier Reef, searching for social sponge-dwelling shrimp in a long-term study of these curious animals as models for understanding the evolution of altruism and cooperation. The New York Times “Scientist at Work” feature is posting updates from our field log. We reprint…
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Biodiversity and the battle for Planet Earth: The graphic novel
[Editor’s note: It’s been a big month for the science of biodiversity and an exciting time to be a part of it. Last week, Nature came out with its issue commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Rio meeting that first put biodiversity on the world’s radar screen and spawned the Convention on Biological Diversity. The…
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Oceans at Rio +20
Next week sees the start of Rio +20. It’s the follow up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and hopes are high among some conservationists and scientists that this time positive change will be made for the oceans. You can keep up to date with the blue issues as they unfold at the…
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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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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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Happy International Day for Biological Diversity!
Not only that but Marine Biodiversity (yeah, it caught us by surprise too — I think the Convention on Biological Diversity needs some marketing advice . . .) Anyway, they have a cool logo which is worth a post in its own right. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, today, 22 May 2012, is the official International…
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Online Encyclopedia of Life hits a million pages
The Encyclopedia of Life has hit a million pages! From ScienceDaily: The Encyclopedia of Life has surged past one million pages of content with the addition of hundreds of thousands of new images and specimen data from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Launched in 2007 with the support of leading scientific…