ScienceShot “These Bears Count” Scientific American The Thoughtful Animal blog “The Average Bear Is Smarter Than You Thought” This finding sheds fascinating light on the question of why counting exists. Because bears are not social animals, it appears that counting is not just about keeping track of fellow group members or assessing the level of Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Behavior, WebScience “Fear of Predation Slows Plant-Litter Decomposition” Nature News “Stressed grasshoppers slow plant decay” More interesting community-level feedback between predators and their prey!
A Minor Post, Decomposition, Phenotypic Plasticity, PredationPLoS One “Detecting Deception in Movement: The Case of the Side-Step in Rugby“
A Minor Post, Articles, CommunicationPLos One “Shorter Food Chain Length in Ancient Lakes: Evidence from a Global Synthesis” What I wonder is: what is the mechanism by which these communities evolve away from their initial “short-and-wide” configuration?
A Minor Post, Articles, Community Ecology, PredationPLoS One “A Comparison of the Effects of Random and Selective Mass Extinctions on Erosion of Evolutionary History in Communities of Digital Organisms“
A Minor Post, Community Ecology, Evolutionary Modeling, ExtinctionPLoS One “Mine, Yours, Ours? Sharing Data on Human Genetic Variation” This problem reminds me a little bit of a similar problem in computational biology: often modelers are reluctant to share their code, considering it proprietary information (although note that code represents “methods” and sequences represent “results”). But if gene sequences and model code are Read More
A Minor Post, Data Limitation, GeneticsPLoS One “Effects of Trophic Skewing of Species Richness on Ecosystem Functioning in a Diverse Marine Community“
A Minor Post, Articles, Community EcologyPLoS One “From Sensor Data to Animal Behaviour: An Oystercatcher Example” Miniaturization is going to make observing previously-unobservable animal behaviors possible.
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Experiments (General)Science Now “Pumas Leave Table Scraps” This is an interesting story because it suggests that Pumas maintain strong ecological interaction strengths with not just their prey but also all these commensal species. This finding makes it a lot harder to discount top predators as simply consumers whose only role is in depleting prey populations: for Read More
A Minor Post, Commensalism, Community Ecology, Predation, WebThe New York Times “Our Animal Natures” I find it particularly interesting how domesticated animals find themselves in some of the same behavioral traps (addiction, self-harm, obsessive-compulsiveness) as domesticated humans. This certainly suggests that mismatch theory has some validity.
A Minor Post, Articles, Behavior, Mismatch theory