Science “Is ungulate migration culturally transmitted? Evidence of social learning from translocated animals” Wow, this is super cool. We often think of humans as exclusively cultural, but it is only the extent to which we rely on culture that makes us unique. That doesn’t mean that culture’s not crucial to the learning of other animals, whose Read More
A Minor Post, Conservation Biology, Cultural Evolution, MammalsScience “Climate model shows large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase rain and vegetation” These kinds of positive feedback loops are exciting. Generally, we are really good at creating deleterious positive feedback loops: changes that further exacerbate our environmental dilemmas. But as this modeling article demonstrates, careful re-engineering of our environment can create Read More
A Minor Post, Climate Change, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Restoration, Ecology, Modeling (General), Sustainable EnergyScience News “Artificial intelligence spots obesity from space” Wow, if you are the kind of person who tends to put a lot of stock in “personal responsibility”, maybe you don’t want to read the brief article above. Because it is an amazing piece of evidence that individual human behaviors are highly influenced by the environments that Read More
A Minor Post, Behavior, Environmental Justice, Gene by Environment Interactions, Health & Medicine, Urban Ecology, Urban PlanningScience News “When this beetle mom disappears, her children become stronger and nicer” There are so many cool aspects to this study! First, it is amazing that lab evolution can produce this dramatic a change in both anatomy and behavior. These results are kind of like what we observe in artificial selection scenarios: there’s a lot Read More
A Minor Post, Behavior, Behavioral Ecology, Competition, Cooperation, Kin Selection, ParentingScience “What lives in the ocean’s twilight zone? New technologies might finally tell us” We tend to think that there’s nothing unexplored on the earth, that we know what kinds of organisms inhabit different ecosystems. So it’s pretty striking that there’s a whole area of the ocean that we know so little about. The scientific challenges Read More
A Minor Post, Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Fluidity of Knowledge, Marine Ecosystems, SustainabilityScience “This ancient bone belonged to a child of two extinct human species” It’s amazing what can be discovered by looking at ancient DNA. It will be interesting to see how robust this finding is: is this just a rare occurence that we happened to find, or will additional evidence suggest that hybridization between hominin Read More
A Minor Post, Homo species, Human Evolution, SpeciationScience “This parasitic ‘love vine’ is sucking the life out of freeloading wasps” A plant evolves to parasitize the parasitic structure of an animal parasite that targets another plant. You can’t make this stuff up folks: it’s nature…
A Minor Post, Coevolution, Parasitism, UncategorizedSince I began teaching Ecology at Pratt, I have used the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone as the cornerstone case study of my community ecology lessons. Using material originally developed by my colleague Damon Chaky for the Ecology for Architects course, I ask my students to use ecological theory to explain some of the changes that Read More
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Community Ecology, Conservation Biology, Ecology, Interactions, Keystone Species, MSCI-270, Ecology, MSCI-271, Ecology for Architects, Predation, Public PolicyScience Now “Early Human Ate Like a Giraffe” To me this finding indicates that Australopithecus sediba is unlikely to be an ancestor of modern humans.
A Minor Post, Homo species, Human EvolutionScience Now “Is Acid Rain a Thing of the Past?” It is wonderful that this policy is yielding results, but a bit scary how slowly recovery takes. Obviously climate change is a very different problem, but seeing how this “success story” has come with such time lags really makes me scared of how long we Read More
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Pollution