Cicada Safari is a phone app (I’m going to stop saying “smartphone”, I know there are still simple phones out there, but if I’m talking about them I will be specific) that lets people upload reports of Cicadas, and lets you see where people are reporting them. I’m haven’t seen any here in Philadelphia yet. But I am happy to report their cousins the mosquitoes and spotted lanternflys have joined us in the past week or so.
Tag Archives: ecology
October 2020 in Review
In current events, this was just the month that the fall resurgence of Covid-19 exploded in the U.S. and around the world. Just a month when a new, controversial Supreme Court justice was sworn in. Just the last month leading up to the Biden-Trump election, amid a swirl of questions about a peaceful and orderly transfer of power if the voting goes the way the polls clearly say it is going to. Just a month when my home city erupted in “unrest” for the second time this year and the National Guard rolled in. (Incidentally, Joe Biden is also here as I write this on November 1, and I wonder if the National Guard rolling in is entirely a coincidence.)
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.
Most hopeful story: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.
social insects and disease
This article in Wired says social insects like ants and bees have a variety of behaviors that reduce pathogen spread in their crowded colonies. They range from obvious ones like keeping the nest clean and keeping waste outside, to forms of social distancing where they reduce the number of other individuals they are interacting with. Some species also swap body fluids intentionally to spread antibodies, which reminds me of the old stories where mom puts all the kids in bed with the first one to catch the mumps or chicken pox.
I’ve always found ants interesting because there are enormous numbers of them, rivaling or exceeding human biomass, they build cities and transportation systems and hunt and gather and farm and fight each other, and yet they don’t negatively impact the environment. They are the environment and nobody ever asks whether their population or their consumption patterns exceeds the planet’s carrying capacity. They also adapt just fine to all kinds of novel and damaged ecosystems that we are creating.
integrating movement ecology and biodiversity research
This article talks about two sub-disciplines of ecology that have developed independently and would benefit from more integration. One is about the movement of individual animals, whether natural or fragmented/impacted by humans. The other is about the variety of organisms and how they interact with each other in habitats.
Editorial: thematic series “Integrating movement ecology with biodiversity research”
Bridging the gap between biodiversity research and movement ecology is possible. First integrations demonstrated that individual movement capacities and strategies are critical in determining the persistence of species and communities in fragmented landscapes, with changing climatic conditions, or in the presence of invasive species. At the same time, the ever-increasing human impact on nature puts long-established movement patterns in jeopardy, and organismal movement is changing perceivably across scales. Yet, a full-fledged integration of movement ecology and biodiversity research is still in its infancy. Empirically, we need more studies that not only focus on the movement of individuals, but also how they interact, while moving, with their environment and with other individuals, including their own and other species. From a theoretical viewpoint, there is a lack of modelling approaches that integrate individual movement and its consequences with population and community dynamics.
Movement Ecology
This could potentially be helpful at a time when remaining natural habitats are becoming increasingly fragmented, and are interspersed with agricultural, urban and suburban environments. All this could be optimized, given the right theory. Professional and political understanding and willingness to act would have to follow, of course, but doing the science would be a necessary first step.
May 2020 in Review
You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
- Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!
Most hopeful story:
- E.O. Wilson is alive and kicking somewhere in Massachusetts. He says if we want to save our fellow species and ourselves, we should just let half the Earth revert to a natural state. Somewhat related to this, and not implying my intellect or accomplishments are on par with E.O. Wilson, I have been giving some thought to “supporting” ecosystem services in cities. When I need a break from intellectual anything, I have been gardening in Pennsylvania with native plants.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
- There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.
open source scientific data
This post on ROpenSci has links to a ton of open data sources, many with R packages to help download and clean up the data. There particularly appears to be a lot of ecological data here.
locust plagues
East Africa is dealing with a massive locust plague, according to Grist. And of course, they just couldn’t resist using the phrase “biblical proportions”.
East Africa had an unusually wet year in 2019 — warming waters in the Indian Ocean produced a high number of tropical cyclones, which doused the coast and created “exceptional” conditions for locust breeding, Nairobi-based climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker told the Associated Press. Now, swarms of hungry insects are feasting on crops in the Horn of Africa, where millions of people already lack reliable access to nutritious food.
Grist
October 2019 in Review
Most frightening and/or depressing story:
- A third of all of North America’s birds may have disappeared since the 1970s. (Truth be told, it was hard to pick a single most depressing story line in a month when I covered propaganda, pandemic, new class divisions created by genetic engineering, and nuclear war. But while those are scary risks for the near future, it appears the world is right in the middle of an ongoing and obvious ecological collapse, and not talking much about it.)
Most hopeful story:
- I’ll go with hard shell tacos. They are one of the good things in this life, whether they are authentic Mexican food or “trailer park cuisine” as I tagged the story!
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
- A list of “jobs of the future” includes algorithms, automation, and AI; customer experience; environmental; fitness and wellness; health care; legal and financial services; transportation; and work culture. I’ll oversimplify this list as computer scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, banker, which don’t sound all that different than the jobs of the past. But it occurs to me that these are jobs where the actual tools people are using and day-to-day work tasks evolve with the times, even if the intended outcomes are basically the same. What might be new is that even in these jobs, you need to make an effort to keep learning every day throughout your career and life if you want to keep up.
There will still be openings for evil HR cats.
30% of North America’s birds gone since 1970s
This is not 30% of species. It’s not just song birds, or bald eagles, or other charismatic species. It’s a third of the total birds in the sky, gone. This is an ecological collapse in motion – we are losing birds, insects, amphibians, you name it.
beware the powerful house cat lobby
House cats have hired a major lobbying firm to promote their interests, as the song bird special interest attacks continue to escalate.
Okay, that’s my onion-like joke headline. But apparently, there is a vicious academic debate about just how much of a risk domestic cats pose to biodiversity when they are allowed to range outdoors. There is also a values conflict between people who feel very strongly about the welfare of individual animals, both wild and domestic, and people who feel very strongly about ecosystem functions and services. And obviously, there are lots of people who have strong feelings about all these things, and may have some internal conflicts to resolve.
There was one turn of phrase in this article I particularly liked: describing cats as “sentient, sapient, and social individuals”. I looked up sapient in the Websters 1913 dictionary:
Sapient
Sa”pi*ent
(?), a.
[L. sapiens, -entis, p. pr. of sapere to taste, to have sense, to know. See Sage
, a.
] Wise; sage; discerning; — often in irony or contempt.
Where the sapient king
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse.
Milton.
Syn. — Sage; sagacious; knowing; wise; discerning.