Sexual conflict between males and females is well documented in the animal kingdom. Often, the best strategy for one sex is not the optimum for the other. In mammalian species, lactation of new mothers suppresses ovulation. Therefore, males gain a reproductive advantage (earlier mating opportunity) by forcing early mother-offspring separation. On the other hand, females benefit from prolonging care for their current young, so it has been hypothesized that they adopt counter-tactics to avoid premature separation from their offspring.
Camouflage is all about staying hidden. Hiding is useful for animals because they’re less likely to get eaten – or are better able to sneak up on prey! So why do some animals display “flash behaviour”, making them temporarily more obvious and undermining their camouflage?
Human activity has affected every part of the biosphere – the soil is no exception. Agricultural and industrial practices have deteriorated soil health, impacting ecosystem function as well as food security. For the past two years, I have been working with the e-Seed Start-up to develop an innovative technique called endophytic inoculation, which uses naturally occurring endophytes (microorganisms that live in plant tissues) to improve plants’ resistance to stresses. Endophytic inoculation has a broad range of application, from maintaining and stimulating soil health to improving crop production and reducing the need for pesticides. In our most recent paper, we explored the possibility of using endophytes to enhance plants’ resistance to heavy metal-contaminated soil, paving the way for using endophytic inoculation to help detoxify soils polluted with heavy metals.
We can now use acoustic recording equipment to monitor all the sounds produced in an ecosystem. By recording and listening back to sound in this way, we hope to capture useful information about nature. One way to do this is using ‘acoustic indices’, mathematical summaries of the acoustic information contained in audio recordings. But how reliably do such indices actually reflect the biodiversity many of us are trying to monitor and understand?
Drumroll please! It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for! The votes have been cast, they’ve been counted and recounted, and we can finally showcase the entries and reveal the winner of the 4th EcoEvo blog photo competition!
Food security is crucial to society. Today, the challenge is not just producing enough food globally (and distributing it), but to produce it sustainably and ensure long-term food security for society. Our work in the Trinity Botany Department (in collaboration with UCD) is all about developing more sustainable agricultural practices using endophytes.
An introduction in the secret world of the endophytes and their application in agriculture
A fungal endophyte culture (Penicillium species)
Endophytes are a class of plant-associated microorganisms that have shown particular promise in agriculture. Endophytes (bacteria, fungi and unicellular eukaryotes) live at least part of their life cycle inter- or intracellularly inside plants, usually without inducing pathogenic symptoms. Endophytes can have several effects on plants and may change function during their life-cycle. Many bacterial and fungal endophytes are known to enhance abiotic and biotic plant stress tolerance and show real promise as crop inoculants.
We have been working with endophytes for over eight years and continue to discover new aspects of their relationships with plants. We focus mainly on barley as this is the largest crop in Ireland, but we have also investigated endophyte relationships with other crops such as strawberry, lettuce, wheat, oat, tomato, and forage grasses. Our research has revealed several beneficial aspects of endophytes that have potential to improve agricultural sustainability: we have discovered endophyte that can help to reduce chemical inputs to crops (i.e. reduce the need for pesticides), enhance crop yields, and even contribute to pathogen resistance! [1–4]
A field of experimental barley plots, some of which are treated with endophytes
Making Research a Reality
Results from our research have been very encouraging and we have published extensively on the topic. However, we are also keen to see the fruits of our work (so to speak) in action. Funding for our research has come from Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland, and this has resulted in two patent filings (through TCD and UCD) related to our discoveries. We are now in the process of commercialising our endophyte technology with the support of Enterprise Ireland, who have fast-tracked us into their High-Performance Start-Up (HPSU) programme to develop a technology to make agriculture more sustainable and profitable. We have also recently partnered with UCD, NUIG, and Teagasc in a new multi-disciplinary research programme, funded by DAFM, which will continue our discovery pipeline for beneficial endophytes for barley.
Current and planned restrictions on chemical crop inputs mean that alternative methods of crop treatment are needed and this will present difficulties for farmers. We believe that the bio-based technology we have developed will form part of the solution. Agriculture is facing many problems due to unsustainable practices and the effects of global warming, but we think that restoring the natural endophyte partners to agricultural crops will enable a more sustainable future for farming.
It’s that time of year when we redecorate the blog and change the wallpaper with the help of our contributors and their photography skills. That’s right, it’s the 4th annual EcoEvo Blog Photo Competition!
For anyone living in a city during a pandemic, the benefit of parks to your physical and mental health is obvious. There is space to properly social distance, space to meet up with friends, space to exercise or kick a ball around, benches to sit on, air to breathe, life to live. Then there is the life in the parks, the trees and shrubs and birds and insects, all the stuff that comes under the vague heading of greenspace or nature. So, to celebrate World Cities day and in the interest of public health, let us explore a very interesting area of research developing at the intersection of ecology and psychology: meaningful nature experiences.
It’s finally here. The day we’ve all been waiting for… It’s World Statistics Day! And I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than writing about a beer-brewing statistician who changed the world through his ingenious statistical inventions and the sublime stout he helped to perfect. Let’s call him “Student” for now.
If you’re trying to compare two groups based on some variable and you use a t-test, then you have “Student” to thank. Maybe you want to compare two species of finches based on their beak sizes. Maybe you want to check if film critics preferred Karl Urban or Sylvester Stallone as Judge Dredd. Or maybe you’ve brewed two beers with slightly different amounts of hops, and you want to know which one tastes best. These questions (and countless more) can be answered with more confidence thanks to “Student”, our brewer-statistician extraordinaire, and his t-test, which for many (if not most) young scientists is the first test learnt to analyse data.
As well as creating a topic that students around the world cover in Stats 101 courses, “Student” also helped to perfect arguably the most perfect beer on the planet. Guinness is sold in over 150 countries around the world and through its classic adverts and futuristic foam faces, it really is a global phenomenon.*
A classic Guinness advert (not to scale).
During the early 1900s “Student” was in charge of Guinness’ experimental brewery in Dublin and founded their statistics department. He had to deal with small sample sizes in his experiments due to production costs and wasn’t confident with the statistical approaches at the time. So, instead of using a standard normal distribution to estimate errors, he invented the Student’s t-distribution, which accounts for sample size. This idea led to a “logical revolution” in how we understand data.
How come the vast majority of people who use t-tests don’t even know the creator’s name? Probably because Guinness didn’t let “Student” use his real name when publishing his findings! One story is that Guinness didn’t want their competitors knowing that they had their own statistics department, so Gosset published under a pseudonym, “Student”; now scientists around the world agonise over the p = 0.06 results of their Student’s t-test.
Student’s original publication
Well today, World Statistics Day, let’s celebrate the brewer-statistician extraordinaire: William Sealy Gosset. In a parallel universe we would compare two groups using the “Gosset t-test”. So let’s all raise a hypothetical pint of a Guinness to this brilliant “Irish”** brewer, who apparently had “more energy and focus than a St. Bernard in a snowstorm”. To Gosset!
The perfect pint
* This blog was not sponsored by Guinness.
** He was actually English but I think improving Guinness grants immediate and retroactive Irish citizenship.
