Posted 15 Dec 2010 / 0
There’s an interesting article in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “A Path for Puffins“. The article discusses the campaign to help eradicate an invasive plant species from a somewhat-remote Scottish Island that is home to thousands of puffins. The puffin population was showing steady decline on the island, and an Read More
Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Conservation Biology, Invasive Species, Marine Ecosystems
Posted 29 Nov 2010 / 0
As an ecologist one of my biggest pet peeves is the way that manned space travel is treated in the mainstream media, both fictional and non-fictional. Without going deeply into the details, suffice it to say that our dependence on ecosystem services makes manned space travel of any appreciable duration or distance completely unrealistic. Of Read More
Articles, Astronomy, Ecosystem Services, Space Travel
Posted 18 Nov 2010 / 0
The latest issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment features a great guest editorial by David N. Laband and David B. South entitled “Walking the talk on sustainability”. In this short piece, Laband and South make a point that is brought to light far too infrequently: that we use the word “sustainable” in a Read More
Articles, Environmental Justice, Greenwashing, Quantitative Analysis, Sustainability
Posted 17 Nov 2010 / 0
On of the things that I like about the Ecological Society of America’s “accessible” journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment is that it always contains an eclectic mix of articles. The November 2010 issue contains an article entitled “Strategic tradeoffs for wildlife-friendly eco-labels” that you just would not see in most academic journals. Authored Read More
Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Conservation Biology, Sustainability
Posted 16 Nov 2010 / 0
For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo neanderthalensis was the dominant hominid species of Europe and the Middle East. Then, somewhere in the range of 80,000 to 50,000 years ago, modern humans (Homo sapiens) expanded out of Africa and came in contact with the Neanderthals. Although there is some evidence of limited interbreeding between Homo Read More
Articles, Development, Homo species, Human Evolution, Radio & Podcasts
Posted 13 Oct 2010 / 16
One of the most difficult things about being the only full-time biologist on the Pratt Institute campus is that I do not have the opportunity to discuss serious science in my field with colleagues or guest speakers. To help alleviate this problem, I have my friends who are at serious research institutions on the lookout Read More
Adaptation, Altruism, Articles, Behavioral Ecology, Cooperation, Data Limitation, Evolution, Game Theory, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Multilevel Selection, Sociology, Superorganisms, Talks & Seminars
Posted 28 Sep 2010 / 0
In the March 2010 issue of National Geographic there’s an excellent article on the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park entitled “Wolf Wars”. I was excited to discover it because I use the example of how wolves were brought back to Yellowstone as a way of discussing various issues in population and community ecology Read More
Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Conservation Biology, Ecology Education, Grasslands, MSCI-270, Ecology, Reviews, Temperate Forest
Posted 19 May 2010 / 0
This month’s Scientific American contains a great article (“Arctic Plants Feel the Heat“) on how scientists are documenting climate change in the Arctic. Focusing on the two dominant biomes of this region, the tundra and the taiga, author Matthew Sturm explains how three sources of data are allowing us to see recent changes linked to Read More
A Major Post, Articles, Climate Change, Data Limitation, Long Term Ecological Research, MSCI-270, Ecology, Phenotypic Plasticity, Taiga (Boreal Forest), Tundra
Posted 05 Mar 2010 / 0
This month’s National Geographic features a really beautiful article on carnivorous plants written by Carl Zimmer. The article presents the numerous independently-evolved adaptations possessed by a diversity of plants which live in nitrogen-poor soil. These adaptations are a great example of coarse-scal evolutionary convergence, as a variety of plants have all come up with the Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Articles, Bogs & Wetlands, Convergence, Evolution, MSCI-260, Evolution, Predation
