Tag Archives: water

Dragon Guts in the City

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Image Credit: Aravindhanp, CC BY-SA 3.0, Image Cropped

City life alters the gut microbiome and stable isotope profiling of the eastern water dragon (Intellagama lesueuriii) (2019) Littleford-Colquhoun, Weyrich, Kent & Frere, Molecular Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.15240

The Crux

It’s a pretty fair call to assume that if you build a city on a species’ habitat, it might be a little miffed. Yet as human settlements expand worldwide, many species are showing that they’re able to make rapid changes to their biology to adapt to living around humans.

This includes their diet, of course. As diets shift, many other aspects of a species’ biology follows, including the microbes that live in a species’ gut. And gut microbes influence a huge range of factors, including immunology, development, and general health. The response of a gut microbe community (the gut microbiome) to a new diet can in turn affect an animal’s ability to adapt to that environment.

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Inspiring Optimism: Notes from the Conservation Optimism Summit

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We can’t all be as happy as this little guy when thinking of the planet, but as Ben Cretois writes, the Conservation Optimism Summit is a good place to start (Image Credit: Sachin Sandhu, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped)

Guest post by Benjamin Cretois

At the beginning of last month, I attended the 2nd edition of the Conservation Optimism Summit. In times where bad news for biodiversity seem to come from everywhere, it was somehow refreshing. We need initiatives such as Conservation Optimism to help us not only keep a positive outlook on conservation in general, but also to open our eyes to new ecological solutions that are being found.

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Monitoring Freshwater Populations in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

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Radiation can have extremely negative effects on an individual. But is it as easy to measure its effects on an entire population? (Image Credit: Hnapel, CC BY-SA 4.0, Image Cropped)

Variation in chronic radiation exposure does not drive life history divergence among Daphnia populations across the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (2019) Goodman et al., Ecology and Evolution, DOI: 10.1002/ece3.4931

The Crux

As anyone who has recently watched HBO’s Chernobyl can tell you, large doses of radiation are capable of doing some pretty serious damage to an organism. But whilst examining the effect of radiation on an individual might be simple, monitoring those effects on a population can be difficult. Whilst radiation negatively effects fitness, it can also help individuals with higher radiation tolerance to reproduce and dominate within the population of a single species, making it difficult to monitor the exact effects of radiation on that population. If a population is filled with only those who were strong enough to survive, you don’t get an idea of the variation in the radiation’s effects.

This week’s researchers tried to break through that problem by looking at different populations of a water flea in Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone (CEZ) – the area still barred from entry in eastern Europe.

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The Ecology of a Mermaid

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Image Credit: The Little Mermaid, 1989

Adam regales us with one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard, and in case you were wondering, yes we do talk about how mermaids have sex. Jesus. Also there’s some cool ecology. Like how did mermaids evolve? Was it from a mutated baby tossed overboard? Probably not.

05:19 – Mermaids in Cinema
16:35 – Ecology of the Mermaids
33:25 – Mermaid Copulation (you were warned)
38:07 – The Mermaids vs. Jaws

You can also find us on iTunes and Google Play.

Kath Handasyde: Charisma, Culling and Conservation

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Koalas are gorgeous, no doubt. But does their overwhelming charisma mean that we forget about other species?

Koalas are gorgeous, no doubt. But does their overwhelming charisma mean that we forget about other species? (Image Credit: Erik Veland, CC BY-SA 3.0, Image Cropped)

Australia plays host to a wonderful range of very endearing species. Tourists come from the world over to get up close with kangaroos or koalas. But the charisma of these animals can often lead to issues, whether it’s prioritisation of resources for them over other more endangered species, or even to the detriment of the species themselves.

Doctor Kath Handasyde of Melbourne University has been working with Australian field wildlife for almost 40 years, and is perhaps the most charismatic teacher I had during my Bachelor’s at the same institute. During my time in Melbourne, I had the chance to talk to Kath about the sometimes problematic role of charismatic species in Australian wildlife conservation.

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Resuscitating Australia’s Floodplains: Environmental Water

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On the left, a thriving wetland. The right, an arid forest.

On the left, a thriving wetland. The right, an arid forest. (Image Credit: Sam Perrin, CC BY 2.0)

I’m standing on the dry side of the Murrumbidgee floodplain in country Australia. I say dry side, because whilst I’m standing on the harsh, dusty platform of soil and desiccated leaves that is pretty standard for this area, 15 metres away there’s a thriving wetland environment. It boasts waterbirds, a flock of emus, thirsty kangaroos, and fish. All that’s separating the wetland and dry land on which I stand is a road, only about half a metre above water level.

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The Chilly Cradle of Life

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Species richness is much higher in waters near the equator, but do we see that in a phylogenic tree?

Species richness is much higher in waters near the equator, but do we see that in a phylogenetic tree? (Image Credit: Rich Brooks, CC BY 2.0)

An inverse latitudinal gradient in speciation rate for marine fishes (2018) Rabosky et al., Nature  doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0273-1

The Crux

The tropical regions of the Earth are the most species-rich and diverse ecosystems on the planet, with this diversity and species-richness declining as you move further and further from the equator. One hypothesis explaining this is that speciation rates are simply higher in the tropics, meaning that more species are evolving in a given time in the tropics than anywhere else. To test for this, the authors used the largest phylogenetic tree available and analyzed speciation rates (how many new species evolve from older species) per million years.

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