Irene Bottero is a 3rd year PhD student in Botany (Trinity College Dublin). She is part of PoshBee project (https://poshbee.eu/) and in her thesis she is evaluating the impact of different habitat types on pollinators, specifically, honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies, and butterflies.
Elena Zioga is a 3rd year PhD student in Botany (Trinity College Dublin). She is part of PROTECTS project (https://protects.ucd.ie/) and in her thesis she is evaluating the levels of pesticide residues in pollen and nectar of plants growing in Ireland.
Getting to know them better!
The 20th of May is declared as the ‘World Bee Day’ and its purpose is to acknowledge the importance of bee pollinators in our ecosystem. Animal pollinators play an important role in the reproduction of many plant species (90% benefit from animal pollination – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-0706.2010.18644.x), including crops (crops pollinated by animals make up 35% of global food production – https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2006.3721), ensuring the abundance and good quality of fruits, nuts, and seeds, which are crucial for human nutrition. Beyond food, pollinators also contribute directly to medicines, biofuels, fibers (e.g. cotton and linen), and construction materials.
This picture shows Atlantic Bluefin Tunas (ABFT) (Thunnus thynnus) bursting through the surface to feed; just off Donegal (Ireland). ABFT are warm-blooded fish which display many physiological adaptations to regional endothermy in order to warm up their red muscle and increase their swimming performance. Swimming without stopping for thousands of kilometers every year: from spawning in the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico to the cold and productive Irish, Icelandic and Norwegian waters. Such is the life history of adult ABFT. Indeed, tunas evolve in a vast habitat where food resources are scarce. The open ocean is the marine equivalent of a desert in terms of the distribution of food resources. To sustain their high metabolic rate, it is in the northern feeding grounds that adults access highly caloric prey such as herring, mackerel and scad. The incredible profile of these powerful fish tells us how crucial it is for them to swim efficiently and minimize their drag and transport costs through morphological and behavioural adaptations.
Tuna are obligate swimmers (ram ventilators), meaning they breathe passively by opening their mouth while swimming. This highlights the importance of such adaptations for the survival of these endurance champions. This picture also illustrates that ABFT are one of the best sprinters of the oceans. By maximising their energetic surplus through behavioural adaptations such as dive gliding when they travel or search for food, they are able to capitalise this energy into impressive speed burst events to catch prey. Reaching speeds of 6 to 8 m.s-1, their fast twitch white muscle allows them to lift their 200 kg out of the water!
A herbarium contains collections of dried, pressed and therefore preserved plant material. Herbaria are amassed primarily for the purposes of understanding plant evolution, biogeography and systematics but are also useful in very many other domains including, for example, pharmaceutics, climate change, ecology and conservation.
The interior of the TCD herbarium (on the left and in the middle) and a typical set of cabinets in the TCD herbarium (on the right) showing the array of preserved specimens in presses. Those specimens in red covers are type specimens – specimens which are the reference specimens for the species.
Whilst the TCD herbarium is internationally renowned it is perhaps not as well know as it should be inside the walls of TCD.
Adopting green lab practices and rethinking research can significantly reduce a lab’s carbon footprint, and it’s needed now more than ever- here are some simple steps to take towards sustainable science today!
Last month the Botany and Zoology departments at Trinity held their annual Postgraduate Symposium. Research students from both departments present a talk on recent and upcoming projects for their thesis, and the whole event is run by the students themselves. This is a big event for Botany/Zoology postgraduates not just because they get to show off their work and discoveries to the college community – it’s also great practice for future events, and students receive feedback on their presentations both from other postgraduates and from lecturers and professors in the two departments. Developing your ability to communicate your research is a crucial skill for all scientists. After all, what’s the point in discovering things about the natural world if you can’t share that knowledge!
Where do animals live and why? These are some of the questions that ecologists are interested in. Sure, we can talk about patterns of abundance in an area in terms of abiotic or biotic factors or niche variation. But what if there’s more to animals than that?
What if a young animal is concerned not just about eating, being eaten and living to reproduce but also with their finances, housing, commute and social mobility? What if a larger or older individual lives where they live not because they can outcompete smaller individuals for limited resources, but because they have accrued greater capital over time and thus have higher purchasing power?
None of these questions are answered by current ecological theory. We need an alternative explanation for animal distributions and abundances. Here, I present to you the socio-economic theory of animal abundance. I illustrate this theory using the Australian ghost crab (Ocypode cordimana) as a case study.
Today we are celebrating our science using pictures! Here below, you can find a collection of pictures from our PhD student and research staff from Trinity College Dublin who kindly participated in this initiative.
Talking about your research interests can be stressful. After all, you’ve spent ages poring through the literature, devising experiments, developing a thesis, justifying your ideas for grants and in publications – trying to condense that into something appropriate for casual conversation (often with a well-meaning relative asking “what are you studying?”, shortly followed by “oh, what’s that?”) is a dangerous rabbit hole. It’s even more perilous when your research interest is something that’s virtually unknown even among other researchers in the field. Trying to explain something that niche to an audience can very quickly make you look quite mad. My research is on dietary conservatism. Hands up who’s heard of dietary conservatism?
“Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.”
So George Orwell began his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, which is still relevant today as both a guide and a warning. Reading it now (the whole thing is available online courtesy of the Orwell Foundation), it strikes me that the decline Orwell saw in the English language might be blamed on science as much as politics. Three of his “five specimens” of poor writing come from academia (one of them written by a prominent zoologist), and many of the specific writing habits he criticises are ones I see regularly in modern papers. One of our recent “NERD Club” discussion sessions was based on Orwell’s essay and related topics, as we looked for the conscious actions that might help us to write clearly and accurately.
At the start of each year we ask the EcoEvo contributors to share their favourite scientific publications from the past year and why they found them interesting, inspiring, or otherwise worthy of inclusion in the Hall of Fame. Keeping with tradition, here are the EcoEvo Hall of Fame entries for 2020! And if you enjoy reading about our favourite papers from 2020, remember you can also check out our favourites from 2017, 2018 and 2019, too!
I really enjoyed this paper because it tackles a really difficult topic at the intersection of poverty, human rights, development, conservation, and sustainability. It is important to remember that conservation will never meet its objectives without considering how people depend on nature for their needs and livelihoods. The areas of richest biological diversity (and therefore conservation potential) are usually in developing countries with communities experiencing poverty. This paper collects responses from conservation practitioners to examine their viewpoints on poverty in the context of their work.
They found some areas of agreement such as the poorest people should not be expected to shoulder the costs of preserving a global public good (the conservation of biodiversity). However, they also identify differences between responses: Is the focus placed on meeting the needs of people or more closely aligned with the “do no harm” principle? Is poverty a driver of nature’s decline, or is it the over-consumption that drives environmental degradation? This paper was a great opportunity to question my own views on these very complex ideas and to appreciate the wide diversity of thought going on across the world of conservation.
Fisher, J.A., Dhungana, H., Duffy, J., He, J., Inturias, M., Lehmann, I., Martin, A., Mwayafu, D.M., Rodríguez, I. and Schneider, H. (2020). Conservationists’ perspectives on poverty: An empirical study. People and Nature, 2 (3), pp.678-692.
This paper is based on a truly colossal undertaking: to collect their data on dispersal ability, Sheard et al. measured the wings of 10,338 bird species, i.e. 99% of all bird species on Earth. They used the Hand-Wing Index, a measure that correlates with aspect ratio and basically tells you how long and pointed the bird’s wing is. The higher this number (i.e. the pointier the wing), the better the bird will be at dispersing and flying long distances.
This is important for evolution, as the more birds that are able to fly between distant populations the more gene flow there will be and the less likely the populations are to diverge. Sheard et al. found important links between dispersal ability and geography and ecology, as tropical and territorial birds, had lower Hand-Wing Indices and migratory species had higher ones. It’s fascinating to see how these traits affect the ability of a species to move around, which in turn dictates where that species will be found in the world. The authors have made this incredible dataset freely available and it is sure to inform new insights into bird ecology and evolution for years to come.
Sheard C., Neate-Clegg M. H. C., Alioravainen N., Jones S. E. I., Vincent C., MacGregor H. E. A., Bregman T. P., Claramunt S. & Tobias J. A. (2020) Ecological drivers of global gradients in avian dispersal inferred from wing morphology. Nature Communications, 11 (2463).
The COVID-19 pandemic has been extremely challenging for many, so it was great to see some excellent science coming from the ‘natural experiment’ offered by COVID-19 movement restrictions. The authors show that during the COVID-19 restrictions anthropogenic noise (from vehicles etc.) in the San Francisco Bay Area reached a 70-year low, characteristic of the mid-1950s. They use a long-term dataset of White-Crowned Sparrow recordings to show that during the COVID-19 lockdown, when human noise pollution was minimal, Sparrows exploited the emptied acoustic space (usually occupied by human-related noise) by producing higher-performance songs at lower amplitudes, to maximise song distance. The authors highlight the rapidity with which behavioural traits (song characteristics) adapted to changes in human activity, suggesting incredible plasticity and potential resilience to pervasive anthropogenic pressures like noise pollution. To me, this study is a perfect example of nature’s resilience, and also on finding opportunity from tragedy (research made possible by a global pandemic).
Derryberry E.P., Phillips J.N., Derryberry G.E., Blum M.J., Luther D. (2020). Singing in a silent spring: Birds respond to a half-century soundscape reversion during the COVID-19 shutdown. Science, 370, 575-579.
This paper looked at the human behavioural responses to a blanket ban on thresher shark fisheries in Sri Lanka and fisher’s perceptions of different aspects of the ban. A blanket ban means a complete prohibition on exploitation of a species, and Thresher sharks are considered to be the most vulnerable species of pelagic sharks. A blanket ban might therefore seem like a straightforward and easy conservation measure to protect them. But this study looked at the human impact behind such a drastic policy decision. A ban like this has consequences for the livelihoods of fishers – particularly smaller fishermen who rely highly on thresher shark landings to provide for their families. The study clearly shows the disparity in the impact this conservation policy has had between fishers who rely on these catches to survive and those for whom they are not the primary catch.
The biggest message I took from this paper is how important it is that human lives are taken into account when making conservation decisions; and more importantly that scientists and policymakers need to involve communities early on in the process, communicate better and work together, not against each other if we want conservation to be effective – and supported. This is a message I think more scientists need to hear and integrate into their work and one I hope to take forward in my future career.
Collins C., Letessier T. B., Broderick A., Wijesundara I., Nuno A. (2020). Using perceptions to examine human responses to blanket bans: The case of the thresher shark landing-ban in Sri Lanka. Marine Policy, 121 (104198).
