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Is a seal cull needed to protect fish stocks?

For decades, Irish fishermen have called for Irish seals to be culled. The call for a seal cull has been made especially vociferously in the west of the country, and has been brought into the national discussion when backed by politicians and highlighted by illegal acts of violence against seals. Just weeks ago, Michael Healy-Rae, Independent TD for Kerry, was in the media demanding a cull. Though many people perceive seals to compete with fishermen, any impact on fisheries is not well supported by the research. Studies have found that seals do not generally compete for the same fish resources as fishermen, and modelling has indicated that the presence or absence of seals has little impact on fisheries catches.

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A New Horizon for Nature

This week saw the first National Biodiversity Conference in Ireland at Dublin Castle – an incredible joint effort between the National Parks and Wildlife Service of the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht and the Irish Forum on Natural Capital to engage people in nature. The conference aimed to get all relevant parties in the room to progress biodiversity conservation and restoration in Ireland.

Delegates at Dublin Castle for the New Horizons for Nature conference

The conference opened with a powerful short film by Crossing the Line Productions “This is Ireland” which set the tone for a fantastic two days.

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One Thing For Nature

If you could do one thing for nature, what would it be?

Invent a new way of automatically cataloguing species? Put location trackers on every single individual of a threatened animal population? Start collecting DNA sequences of threatened species so we can de-extinct them, Jurassic Park style?

The answers I got to this question when I posed it to our Tuesday lunchtime group of PhD students, researchers, and academics, was far less sci-fi and much more pragmatic.

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Looking beyond mean trends of environmental change

During my first week in Dublin, Ireland, I was more shocked by the countless sunny-rainy shifts within one single day than its natural beauty, although I had been warned of its fickle weather in advance. That was something totally new to me. Born and raised in a small inland town in North China, I had grown accustomed to taking for granted that a whole sunny day could be prophesised by bright morning sunlight through the window. Then I started to imagine that, if fitting a curve to the weather, the curve of my birth village would surely be much smoother than Dublin, even though the former has four much more distinct seasons. But, at that moment, I had neither realized that this thought actually reflected the difference in the temporal autocorrelation of environmental conditions in the two places nor how this could be linked to the dynamics and stability of ecosystems.

Read Marvin’s full post on the Nature Ecology & Evolution blog.

This post is based on the paper Yang et al. (2019) ‘The predictability of ecological stability in a noisy world.’ Nature Ecology & Evolution

Header photo by Brocken Inaglory on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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The 2018 EcoEvo Hall of Fame

As we launch into another year of research, we thought it would be interesting to look back on some of the work that came out in 2018, so we asked the School of Natural Sciences what papers they would like to induct into our second annual Hall of Fame. Read on for the papers we thought were fascinating, notable, or just cool. When you’re finished, you can check out 2017’s Hall of Fame here.

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Donuts with a Doctor – musings on mentoring

Who doesn’t like donuts? Sugary and crispy on the outside, doughy and satisfying on the inside. And it turns out that eating a donut provides the perfect opportunity for some academic mentoring. The recent Ecology and Evolution Ireland conference put on a “Donuts with a Doctor” mentoring session that brought donut lovers together to exchange experiences on career opportunities, work-life balance, skills, mobility, and whatever else could be said between bites. Continue reading “Donuts with a Doctor – musings on mentoring”

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A Scientist Goes to Court

A very interesting case has been underway in the high court the past week. Last Thursday and Friday, the Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE), a conglomerate which represents Irish environmental NGOs, have been laying out their case that the Irish State’s actions on climate change are inadequate. They argue that that the government’s approval of the National Mitigation Plan in 2017 was in violation of Ireland’s Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act, the Constitution, and human rights obligations. Basically, climate change is a thing, and Ireland hasn’t acted adequately to decarbonise the economy, putting the lives of its citizens at risk. Today the state was responding, so I went along to hear how they were going to defend their record. Continue reading “A Scientist Goes to Court”

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Irish Pollinator Research Network goes from strength to strength…

Following on from the successful meeting last year, we held our Second Annual Irish Pollinator Research Network Meeting on 18th January 2019. This year, 22 researchers from TCD, UCD, DCU, MU, TUD and QUB gathered at DCU’s Water Institute for 16 oral presentations and discussions about pollinator, pollination and pollen research currently underway in Ireland. Continue reading “Irish Pollinator Research Network goes from strength to strength…”