Posted 15 Feb 2016 / 0
Urban Wildlife Podcast “Bonus Episode: Pier 53 Skinks” Perpetually behind, I finally checked out the final Urban Wildlife Podcast “Bonus Episode“, posted last October as the final episode of Season 1. This is a great finale to the first season of this offbeat, fun podcast that looks at urban wildlife through the lens of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Solely focused Read More
A Minor Post, Biodiversity Loss, Commensalism, Conservation Biology, Ecological Restoration, Habitat Destruction, Habitat Fragmentation, Invasive Species, Mutualism, Predation, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Urban Ecology
Posted 01 Feb 2016 / 0
Image of the Oxeye Daisy courtesy of Dan F. Myers via Wikimedia Commons Sometimes the web seems better than it actually is. After about three decades of people adding content non-stop to the free internet, you would figure that it would be relatively easy to find well-written, accurate articles on basic concepts in ecology. But Read More
A Minor Post, Eco 101, Ecology, Public Outreach
Posted 01 Feb 2016 / 1
Image of what happens to architecture when civilization disappears courtesy of Michael Zawadski via Wikimedia Commons I always end up hearing the question at some point in the semester: why do architects have to take a course that provides in-depth understanding of ecology and environmental science? Implied undercurrents to this basic question include a slew of other Read More
A Minor Post, Architecture, Department of Mathematics & Science, Ecology, Ecology Education, MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects, Pratt Institute, Sustainability, Teaching
Posted 25 Jan 2016 / 0
Fundamentally, carrying capacity is a measure of the maximum density of a particular population How many organisms of a particular species can an area support? What determines this maximum population density? The answer to these questions is captured by the ecological concept of carrying capacity. The carrying capacity tells us how many organisms of a particular species Read More
A Major Post, Carrying Capacity, Eco 101, MSCI-270, Ecology, MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects
Posted 16 Jan 2016 / 0
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons National Geographic “Inside the Eye: Nature’s Most Exquisite Creation” This is another fantastic article by Ed Yong that very nicely captures the relativistic nature of the evolutionary process. We basically call any light-sensing organ an “eye”, but animals have eyes that perform radically different functions. How eyes work is a function Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Articles, Convergence, Divergence, Fossil Data, Interactions, Photography, Uncategorized
Posted 15 Jan 2016 / 0
Image courtesy of Nick Gray via Wikimedia Commons The Chronicle of Higher Education “The Vegetarian Lesson” This article by Chad Lavin neatly distills ideas and issues that I have been grappling with for more than half my life. As a current-day ecologist who was a vegetarian more than a decade before I took my first ecology course, Read More
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Behavior, Belief, Cooperation, Food, Parasitism, Political Science, Predation, Public Policy, Resource Consumption, Uncategorized
Posted 14 Jan 2016 / 0
Brooklyn garbage bag photo courtesy of Tom W. Sulcer via Wikimedia Commons New York City has endured a pretty bad environmental reputation for decades. If you find yourself on a Manhattan street on the right warm summer night, it is hard not to feel that the place is an environmental nightmare. Those piles of garbage Read More
A Major Post, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Climate Change, MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects, Pollution, Quantitative Analysis, Resource Consumption, Sustainability, Sustainable Transportation, Sustainable Urban Design, Web
Posted 08 Jan 2016 / 0
ScienceDaily “Cooperating bacteria isolate cheaters” This kind of study is where the field exploring how cooperation evolves should be headed: model predictions are verified by actual microbial microcosms, but the interactions of those microcosms are manipulated by genetically-engineering variation in behavior (what this article calls “synthetic ecology”). This approach helps overcome a common problem faced Read More
A Minor Post, Altruism, Competition, Cooperation, Methods, Microbial Ecology, Partner Choice, Reciprocity, Web
Posted 07 Jan 2016 / 0
The Scientist “The Evolution of Cooperation” Starting with the title, this short article is not bringing anything all that new to the existing literature on how cooperation evolves. But once I realized that this piece was really about the direction of Denison’s research on rhizobia, the rest of the basic background made a lot more Read More
A Minor Post, Coevolution, Competition, Cooperation, Host-Pathogen Evolution, Mutualism, Parasitism, Punishment, Reciprocity, Web
Posted 17 Dec 2015 / 0
“Lev Ginzburg has retired”. For anyone who knows Lev, this combination of words does not make a whole lot of sense. Is it possible that such a lively and active scientist would hang up his yellow pad and pencil in order to put his feet up in some retirement community far away from the world Read More
A Major Post, Allometries, Biography, Carrying Capacity, Conferences, Conservation Biology, Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Evolutionary Modeling, Population Genetics, Population Growth, Science as a career, System Stability, Talks & Seminars
