Overpopulation and species extinctions

An interesting little phenomenon is underway throughout the month of February called the “Global Population Speak Out.” It was first started in 2009 by environmental writer John Feeney. This year, he’s enlisted the help of a group that calls themselves the Population Institute. Their stated goal with the GPSO campaign is to break the taboo of talking publicly about Earth’s human population problem and related ecological and environmental ills.

Instead of writing one of my usual posts about research, I’m just going to direct you to the GPSO site, and also to the Center for Biological Diversity’s Overpopulation Campaign which has some good information about the connections between human population and the current extinction crisis, including this nice little USGS graph showing how species extinction rates are linked to the growth of a single specie’s meta-population:

Credit: USGS

Book review: Vicious, wolves and men in America

Click for Yale Univ. Press page.

Vicious. The word connotes being evil for reasons of personal satisfaction. At least, to me it does. I recently finished reading a book by this title, “Vicious: wolves and men in America” which explores the first encounters of European settlers with both wolves of the eastern U.S. and Native Americans.  (Published in 2004 by Yale Univ. Press.) The author, Jon Coleman, sets up an interesting perspective in the beginning where he states that he will explore the miscommunications between Europeans and wolves, as well as Europeans and Native Americans. For the most part, he keeps up this framework of exploring communications by analyzing historical records and folk lore. He discusses how wolves’ body language was ignored or misinterpreted. Consider this excerpt:

The story of Old Whitey, however, undermined the predator’s legendary bravado. Whitey was terrified. The traps snapped and he panicked. He demolished foliage, shredded his coat, and cracked his teeth in wild fear

Picture of the Day-14 thru 21

Pic-14: Three-toed sloth, near Manaus, Brazil on the Amazon River. © 2004 DeLene Beeland

Rivers are the highways of the Amazon basin. In this photo, a Brazilian guide named Angelo who I’d hired for a boat trip to the “Meeting of the Waters” near Manaus, Brazil, takes a three-toed sloth from two sisters in a dugout canoe. The girls captured the sloth from the rain forest and they paddle around with it all day on the river, waiting for tourists to come by. They paddle up to water taxis like the one I was aboard in 2004 and “lend” it to tourists to hold for picture opportunities in exchange for a few reals (Brazilian money). I think it is either a brown-throated three-toed sloth, or

Sudden Oak Death and P. ramorum

California bay laurel leaves infected with Phytophthora ramorum. Bay leaves typically become infected with P ramorum, the causal agent of SOD, on the tips of their leaves where water and dew collect. Bay leaves play a significant role in the spread of the disease to oak trees. (Photo courtesy D. Schmidt, Garbelotto Forest Pathology Lab, UC Berkeley)

Sudden Oak Death affects western coastal forests in the U.S. It’s an emerging pathogen caused by a fungus-like brown-algae organism that kills oak trees. Before 2001, this pathogen was not known to science. It was named Phytophthora ramorum.

I recently wrote a story that ran in the Charlotte Observer (also ran in the Raleigh News & Observer) about a researcher studying this disease using a combination of landscape epidemiology, high-tech mapping and GIS. But because of space constraints, a lot of the cool ecology and modeling aspects had to get cut or just weren’t included in the print/online story. So this post is about the stuff that did not make it in.

The main source for the story was the director of the Center for Applied Geographic Information Systems at UNC-Charlotte, Ross Meentemeyer. His background is in landscape ecology and GIS. You could say his center makes detailed maps by melding high-powered computational technologies and remote sensing tools like aerial imagery with good old-fashioned muddy-boots-ecology field work.

Meentemeyer is a self-described family man and outdoors man, and he spends several weeks each year out West doing field work and studying Sudden Oak Death and it’s causative agent, P. ramorum.

“As a landscape ecologist, a lot of my work has focused on developing models of species distributions that predict where and why different plant species and other organisms exist where they do,” Meentemeyer said. “And I use a lot of geographical systems technologies for mapping and developing different geographical models.”

My take on the James Hansen talk at UNC

Internationally-recognized climate scientist James Hansen spoke at UNC last night, in the aftermath of a wacky snow and ice storm. I blogged about it for Science in the Triangle, here.  Go check it out.

Science in the Carolinas, tracked by the Observer

The Charlotte Observer, a newspaper in Charlotte, N.C., is bravely wading into regional science coverage with a new science section that features scientists and science projects in the Carolinas in addition to wire stories of national or global interest. In an age when science sections are shriveling up like slugs cowering under threat of a dousing with salt crystals, it is refreshing and heartening to see this regional paper ratcheting up coverage.

The first feature story in their new section covered “Sonar wars in the night sky” on Jan. 11 (by Cassie Rodenberg, a New York science journalist). Soon after announcing their kick off in this series, their sister paper in Raleigh, the News and Observer, also hopped on board. Other feature stories in this section that have cast a spotlight on our area’s wealth of scientists include: Sabine Vollmer’s “Finding new power in pigs” (1/18) — Sabine is my co-blogger over at Science in the Triangle – and “Searching for the Unseen,” also by Rodenberg (1/25).

Today’s feature science story… was written by me. It covers an emerging pathogen threatening Western coastal forests, with a potential to affect the South’s picturesque oak trees: Sudden Oak Death. The story “Stalking the ‘bird flu’ of trees” is an important one in my mind. Because space is limited in the print edition of these stories, much of the cool ecology of this pathogen had to get cut from the final draft. At some point this week when I can find the time, I will post the cut parts here. (I took the time to research and report these things; would like for them to be used somewhere!) Check back for it soon…

You can keep up with all of the Observer’s sci-tech stories here.

New dietary study on Mexican wolves

Gray wolf scat, courtesy of Oregon Department of Game and Fish.

When Mexican gray wolves prey upon cattle in the southwest, they do more than just bovine harm — they become public enemy Number One to the area livestock growers. Typically, the numbers of cattle losses to Mexican gray wolves are inflated by ranchers, and down-played by wolf advocates. The truth lies somewhere in the murky middle. And so a team of researchers delved into that murky middle and studied the scats of Mexican wolves during two summers (2005 and 2006) to piece back together what the animals were actually dining upon.{1}

The team, led by Jerod Merkle, picked up scats along roads and hiking trails in the New Mexico and Arizona reintroduction area. They also followed cues from radio-collared wolves and sought out dens and rendezvous sites, where they collected even more scats. All in all, they picked up 165 scats from den sites, 109 from roads, 17 on trails and 7 at rendezvous sites (6 were gathered from other places) for a grand total of 304 poop samples. Using a previously established method for determining the mass of prey from the hairs and bones present in the fecal matter, they parsed apart what each wolf had consumed. The team tracked the samples by pack territory, and linked pack territories to the region’s predominant grazing practices: seasonal grazing, or year-round grazing. (For background on the Blue Range Wolf Reintroduction Area, see my previous posts here, here and here which both describe the wolf program in the context of the active federal lands grazing practices.)

Neat science and nature stories

Since I’m traveling this week and don’t have much time to blog, I’ve posted links to a few stories I’ve enjoyed reading lately, or think are important:

Arizona Intentionally Snared Last Jaguar, Inquiry Finds, New York Times
Sonar Wars in the Night Skies, Charlotte Observer
Asia’s Wildlife Trade, National Geographic
Scientists Need to Get Out More, Miller-McCune
White-nose swings at European Bats, Miller-McCune
No Pay, No Say, Audubon
Pacific’s rising acid levels threatening marine life, Seattle Times
Cold War Split Birds Too, ScienceNOW
Kingfishers, National Geographic
Measuring How Hard ‘Old Growth’ Takes it on the Chin, Miller-McCune
Cold, Hard Facts About Saving Florida’s Oranges, Miller-McCune
Conservation as a matter of managing people, New York Times

Social networks, and social animals

Gray wolves are gregarious, social animals. (Photo by Joel Sartore, click to go to National Geographic site.)

Winter has set in around my home in N.C.’s Piedmont, and so I take my exercise on a stationary trainer that I hook up to my road bike in our living room. The downside to this system is that I miss out on the social aspect of cycling, and the friends I like to ride with out-of-doors when the weather is nicer. And I miss seeing the birds and the trees outside. The upshot is that I get to catch up on my reading, which I am forever behind on — stacks of articles and books litter my work area. Tonight while riding my trainer, I grabbed the latest issue of Science News and thumbed through it while gaining momentum on my pedals.

One article really caught my eye: a feature called “The Ties That Bind” on recent research into social networks, what they can tell us (about us), and how the data gathered in these studies are bumping up against the limits of the methods used to analyze them.{1} The article starts out by describing some nominally controversial work asserting that loneliness is catchy in social networks – so catchy that it can influence friends of friends of friends, who may not have even met.{2} The study, by University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo, Univ. of Calif. political scientist James Fowler, and Harvard Medical School sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis, falls into an emerging field dubbed computational science, according to the article. Earlier research by Fowler and Christakis asserted that happiness was also just as catchy, based on a 20-year longitudinal study.{3} This field is built upon data streaming out of the pores of our digital society: credit card purchases, mobile phone calls, and internet searches, to name a few. The detritus of your digital life, in other words.

Open Lab 2009

They gave me this nifty logo.

Life seems to be charging ahead at warp speed, so I’m just now getting around to announcing that one of my blog posts was chosen to be included in the Open Laboratory 2009. Fifty posts were chosen, out of 760 submitted, and they were announced on Neurotopia and A Blog Around the Clock on Jan. 13, 2010. (Yeah, in the blogosphere, I know that is the geologic past. But things have been really busy.)

My post, “Genital mimicry, social erections and spotted hyenas,” will be included in the science blogging anthology edited by SciCurious and Bora Z. Thank you judges, (and I have no clue how this happened). Though I was asked to participate as a judge, none of the judges received their own posts to review.