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24/01/202026/01/2020

The 2019 EcoEvo Hall of Fame

Every year, contributors to the blog look back on their favourite papers of the previous year and tell us what it was about these publications that stuck in their mind so much. With a range of different topics and reasons, it’s always great to see what each of us thinks makes for a great paper! Find out what we elected as our favourite papers in 2018 and 2017, and read on for this year’s entries:

Perrot-Minnot, M. J., Guyonnet, E., Bollache, L., & Lagrue, C. (2019). Differential patterns of definitive host use by two fish acanthocephalans occurring in sympatry: Pomphorhynchus laevis and Pomphorhynchus tereticollis. International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife, 8, 135-144.

Chosen by Paula Tierney

Read the full International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife paper here

https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2213224418300671-fx1_lrg.jpg — Graphical abstract from paper

Sometimes a paper doesn’t have to make huge waves in the broader ecology world to be a great paper and sometimes a paper comes along at just the right time to answer the questions you need answering. Perrot-Minnot et al. 2019 did both for me this year. Since the taxonomic revision of the acanthocephalan parasite Pomphorhychus laevis by Špakulová et al in 2011 resurrected the closely-related species Pomphorhynchus tereticollis, the systematics of the genus in Europe has been something of a taxonomic dumpster fire. It also left one of my PhD chapters with a bit of an identity crisis since,

13/12/201913/12/2019

Home and Away: Australian expats

Natural history museum collections are invaluable snapshots of history. Research collections are snapshots of the animals and plants collected in history. Research collections are also a reflection of the people and attitudes at the time it was curated. There is a well-represented collection of native Australian animals in the Zoology Museum at Trinity College Dublin. Well-represented in many sense of the word. This is a story about the red land down under, Australia, and the collection of Australian animals held in overseas museums around the world. It is a story in parts. This is the third and final part.

Australian expats

The pride of the Zoology Museum is Ireland’s last Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis). As the Great Auk exemplifies, all you need to have a lecture room named after you is to be extinct. But this isn’t a story about extinct Irish birds.

There is a bird in the Museum labelled as a night parrot (Strigops habroptilus). As I’ve described in a previous story, the vernacular name for this specimen is kakapo (literally night parrot in Maori), an endemic New Zealand bird. Kakapos are great. They deserve a blog post to themselves, but this isn’t a story about New Zealand birds.

09/12/201910/12/2019

Comparing the biodiversity and network ecology of restored and natural mangrove forests in the Wallacea Region.

Habitat loss is the primary threat to most species, as humans convert ever more areas of the globe to intensive land uses for our purposes. While some of this is unavoidable, the unsustainable level of global habitat loss has caused great damage to biodiversity, the fight against climate change, and the local economy and culture of vulnerable communities in the poorest parts of the world. It is increasingly clear that slowing habitat loss will be not be enough to repair this damage, we must restore/rehabilitate lost and damaged habitat. This process is already happening in many areas where human use is no longer economical, such as abandoned mines, upland farms and elsewhere. However restoring an ecosystem is not a simple process, many of these projects fail, and the reasons for this are not always clear. There are no agreed standards for measuring the success of habitat restoration. However in the Newcastle University Network Ecology Group we believe that ecological networks may hold the key to monitoring and directing restoration efforts. As part of the CoReNat consortium we are seeking to use ecological networks to assess the success of mangrove forest restoration projects in remote Northern Sulawesi, Indonesia.

10/03/201818/02/2019

Firehawks: waking up to stories of the Dreamtime

Fire is an essential part of the ecology of many savannah and grassland ecosystems. In some cases, fire is the only way of removing older grasses that are no longer profitable for herbivores to consume. As well as having benefits for local ecology, grassland fires also offer great feeding opportunities. I have seen large groups of raptors and insectivorous birds gather at the fringes of bushfires in Kruger National Park, to take advantage of the animals flushed into the open by the moving fire front. In Australia, a number of raptors are frequently seen around bushfires. These birds; black kites (Milvus migrans), whistling kites (Haliastur sphenurus), and brown falcons (Falco berigora) are known as firehawks. In Malamalak, an Aboriginal language, the black kite is known as Kerrk, a reference to its call “kerrk-kerrk-kerrk“.There is an intriguing story about Kerrk:

“In the creation period or dreamtime, Kerrk stole fire sticks from the Dingo, so that he could cook the Cheeky yam. Kerrk is still attracted to fires and occasionally he can be seen carrying burning sticks from an existing fire to start more fires further away.” Continue reading “Firehawks: waking up to stories of the Dreamtime”

08/12/2017

The Botany Bake Off (2017 edition)

Cakes and baking have always been running themes in the Botany Department here at TCD. This year, members of the Department have turned things up a notch for the second ever Botany Bake off! The rules were simple; bake something that represents your research or work in the department. The stakes don’t get higher than this…

This cake represents the research of Prof. Jennifer McElwain using fossil leaves to reconstruct the evolution of the earth’s atmospheric composition and climate over millions of years. The leaves around the edge are of the Ginkgo tree. The pattern on the cake top shows what these leaves look like under a microscope. The ‘molecules’ on top of the cake represent the CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere around the plant leaves.

This cake was presented by Dr. Laura Russo to represent her research in the food webs of pollinators. The apple pastry roses represent different plant species, depended upon by various fondant pollinator species! Continue reading “The Botany Bake Off (2017 edition)”

29/11/201721/06/2019

What happens to animals when their habitat burns?

When you live in Ireland, it’s easy to forget that a good proportion of the world’s ecosystems regularly burn. In many regions, plants and animals have evolved to tolerate or even rely on fire. My recent paper investigates the factors that drive the success of an Australian gecko after fire. I found that the geckos were healthier after fires because of the availability of lots of prey, showing that these feeding relationships matter for a species that thrives after its forest burns. Continue reading “What happens to animals when their habitat burns?”

20/10/201418/02/2019

Nature jargon

At a recent meeting on “Natural Capital”, Jo Pike from the World Forum on Natural Capital drew our attention to a “sustainability jargon buster” that they developed last year. Jo has a background in communications and highlighted an important point: if we are to conserve and sustainably exploit the environment, we need a common language. Ecologists can’t always agree on terminology amongst themselves but when we try to talk to economists and businesses to try and convince them of the value of the natural resources, conversations and actions can be frustrated by jargon and our opposing academic backgrounds.

How do we ever expect the general public to engage when we are thoroughly confused ourselves?

As part of a first year undergraduate module, members of the public in Dublin were interviewed to find out what they know about biodiversity and ecosystem services. People were asked 3 questions:

what do you understand by the term “biodiversity”?
do you know what “ecosystem services” are?
do you think it’s important to maintain green space in urban areas?

Only 12% of respondents could give a complete correct definition of biodiversity and 28% had no idea what biodiversity was or had never heard the term before.

Even fewer people knew what ecosystem services were, with 23% of respondents giving a correct definition or defining them as “something nature does for us e.g. food/air/water”. Nearly half (48%) had no idea what ecosystem services were.

Despite this lack of understanding of the jargon, 74% of respondents answered that urban green space was essentially important and only 4% said that it isn’t at all important and that we should leave green space for the countryside.

So let this be a lesson to us – be clear, be concise and be consistent.

Enough said.

Author: Jane Stout, stoutj[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+eschew_obfuscation_small_framed_print,579649105

24/12/2012

The 12 days of NERD club

NERD club, for the uninitiated, is a weekly meeting of the Networks in Ecology/Evolution Research Cluster Dynamic of the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin. We present and discuss our research and also general aspects of academia such as science communication, job hunting and using twitter. The members include interns, PhD students, postdocs and both junior and senior faculty, so it’s always full of interesting research and heated debate! Essentially, it’s my favourite hour of the week, so as it’s the festive season and I’m in a festive mood, I decided to write a Christmas song for NERD club.

It’s to the tune of the 12 Days of Christmas. It’s also not very good, but I had time to fill on the train…

“On the 1^st day of Christmas the NERD club gave to me…

parasites in a fractal stomach

On the 2^nd day of Christmas the NERD club gave to me…

curious bluetits

and parasites in a fractal stomach

On the 3^rdday of Christmas the NERD club gave to me…

debates about twitter

curious bluetits

and parasites in a fractal stomach

[And so on until]

On the 12^th day of Christmas the NERD club gave to me…

a million chocolate fingers

specialist pollinators

ecological stability

mixed effects models

test tubes full of glitter

cryptic flowerpeckers

bats living longer

poisoned honey-bees

news on seminars

debates about twitter

curious bluetits

and parasites in a fractal stomach!”

Merry Christmas everyone! See you in the New Year (provided I survive the hippos – see Keith’s hippo-critical post last week).

Natalie Cooper

@nhcooper123

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons