Trinity College Dublin, Ecology and Evolution
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!
Continue reading “How green is your lab? Simple steps towards sustainable science!”
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!
Continue reading “Interview with the Speakers of the 2021 Botany/Zoology Postgrad Symposium”
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.
Continue reading “The socio-economic theory of animal abundance”
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.
Continue reading “Picture your science”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?
Continue reading “A Beginner’s Guide to 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.
Continue reading “Science and the English Language”
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!
Chosen by Andrew Neill
Read the full People and Nature paper here.
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.
Chosen by Fionn Ó Marcaigh
Read the full Nature Communications paper here.
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).
Chosen by Sam Ross
Read the full Science paper here.
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.
Chosen by Jenny Bortoluzzi
Read the full Marine Policy paper here.
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).
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.
Continue reading “The Opti-Mum condition: How brown bears use humans to prolong maternal care”
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?
Continue reading “How Being Obvious Can Make You Discrete”
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.
Cover image credit: http://modernfarmer.com/2014/04/microbes-will-feed-world-real-farmers-grow-soil-crops/
Continue reading “Endophytes for Heavy Metal Bioremediation”