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Meet the new editorial team for 2019/20!

Time flies and it’s time for yet another academic year! We’re a bit late for our introduction, students are already heading into reading week but we were too busy getting over the shock that first years were born in 2001… Do you feel old too?

And with that, we wave goodbye to our fantastic 2018-19 editor, Fionn Ó Marcaigh. Thank you for your hard work and enthusiasm for sharing people’s stories! We have big shoes to fill… We say “we” because this year, you get two editors for the price of one! Let us introduce ourselves:

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Worthless wetland?

For the past few months, I’d been hearing about this amazing urban wetland oasis. A wildlife haven right in the middle of Tallaght, on the south-west outskirts of Dublin. Every time I bumped into Collie Ennis on campus he was bouncing excitedly about how wonderful this place was and how I should go down there and see all the plants, and the incredible insect life. This sounded so amazing and I was looking forward to planning some insect and plant surveys there next year.

And then I heard this weekend that it’s been destroyed. Obliterated. Annihilated by >1.5m of dredged silt dumped on top of the entire habitat. This was a crushing blow to all those people caring for these wetlands and their wildlife, and the devastation they felt was reflected far and wide. If you haven’t seen the story – it was covered by Irish Times and Joe.ie as well as on Collie’s own Twitter feed. 

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Birds in paradise: biogeography in the subtropics

Light-vented bulbul (Pycnonotus sinensis), one of the species of interest in the Ryūkyū archipelago

The species-area relationship is considered one of the only ‘rules’ in ecology. We have observed more species on larger ‘islands’ (whether true islands or simply some habitat patch of interest) in studies of different plants and animals all around the world. When MacArthur and Wilson (1967) proposed this pattern and the pioneering biogeographical principles which underpin it, they acknowledged that a piece of the puzzle was missing: species identity.

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Invasive clams like it hot: heated water from power plants gives populations a boost

Corbicula fluminea dominating the River Shannon bottom near the Lough Ree Power Station.

This post by Maureen and Marcin is based on their paper in the November 2019 issue of Science of The Total Environment, “Thermal effluents from power plants boost performance of the invasive clam Corbicula fluminea in Ireland’s largest river”. (Penk & Williams, 2019)

The River Shannon is Ireland’s largest river, with a storied biological and cultural history. The River drains 20% of the country, running through the centre of the midlands while providing a source of power and water. The machinery used to generate power in most power plants, whether they’re nuclear, peat-fueled, or coal-powered plants, often heats up to extreme temperatures when the plants are running. To try to keep the machinery cool, many power plants today take water from local sources, use it to cool the generators, and then put it back out into the original source. Two of Ireland’s largest power plants, the Lough Ree Power Station and the West Offaly Power Station, use water from the River Shannon in this way, putting the water back into the river up to 10°C hotter than the River water. The warm water can change the structure of the aquatic community near the output, and our study shows that this increase in temperature gives a significant boost to the invasive Asian clam, Corbicula fluminea.

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Surveying birds on an unexplored tropical island – the TCD/Opwall expedition to Menui, South-east Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Menui Island

A big draw for those who study the natural world is the search for adventure – the chance to make a novel discovery, and to explore regions unknown to science. Despite that, in today’s world, such an opportunity rarely presents itself, and it is exceedingly rare to truly break new ground.  However, in the summer of 2017 circumstances allowed a team of scientists from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Halu Oleo University (UHO) and Operation Wallacea (Opwall) to venture to the remote, and scientifically unknown, Menui Island, in South-east Sulawesi, Indonesia. The expedition’s motive was to provide an account of the bird species present and their associating habitats. Our survey work, published in the latest issue of Forktail, found the island to be home to a unique avifauna and several important habitats, though these face serious threats from over-exploitation.

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Can you dig it? Parasites influence the rates of bioturbation in lakes and rivers.

Experimental setup for GAmmarus parasitism bioturbation experiment

This post was first published on the Cambridge Core blog, based on the original paper by Williams et al. It was selected as Parasitology‘s paper of the month for September 2019, and so is freely available for the month.

The impact of parasites can often reach beyond their individual hosts, shaping populations and communities in their ecosystems. Parasites often control the behaviour of their hosts, leading to their role as “ecosystem engineers,” changing the ways in which the hosts physically shape their environments.

In lakes and rivers, gammarid amphipods, small shrimp-like crustaceans, are known to act as ecosystem engineers by digging into the sand, in a process called bioturbation. Bioturbation is a major process in the ecosystem, as this digging alters the concentration of oxygen in the sand, the concentration of nutrients in the water, and the biological communities living in and on the sand. We wanted to know whether the amphipods would dig into the sand more or less when infected with behaviour-changing parasites, like Polymorphus minutus, and whether the temperature of the ecosystem influenced the rate of digging.

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A Happy Réunion at the Island Biology Conference 2019

A beautiful sunset on the southern shore of Réunion ISland, after the ISland Biology 2019 conference

Island biologists often work in beautiful and interesting places. It seems only fitting that when they meet up to discuss their work, they do it somewhere like Réunion, a volcanic oceanic island in the Indian Ocean, administered as a French department and the site of the 2019 Island Biology conference. Armed with my Junior Cert level French, I made the journey to discuss my PhD project on the birds of Sulawesi and the work of the TCD Biogeography Working Group.

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Moon Landing Anniversary – Don’t look to the stars when the ground is burning

Buzz Aldrin on the surface of Earth's moon

Space: the final frontier. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission; the first time we had ever stepped foot on the moon. As Neil Armstrong boldly declared “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, we perhaps reached a new peak of human achievement. A peak that continues to climb upwards, itself shooting for the moon.

I’ve grown up with franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek. Where somehow there’s always a white (human) man getting into trouble with aliens and flying space ships. One thing that’s common in much science fiction is the idea that we can colonise new worlds, terraforming their surfaces to sustain life (as we know it). This idea is pervasive in the years since the moon landing, and continues to be drawn upon even in recent films claimed to be scientifically sound (e.g. Interstellar and The Martian). Whilst this is a romantic idea—of humans gallivanting across the galaxy (hitchhiking even)—I sometimes worry about the price of this dream. Of course, I’m sure the notion has inspired many great minds the world over to learn about space, and perhaps to successfully take us all there one day. But does this idealism come with a cost?

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Fieldwork, and why students need it

I recently took part in the 3rd year Terrestrial Ecology field course in Glendalough. Though I already had some experience teaching both lab work and fieldwork, this was my first time being “staff” on a trip I had previously been on as a student. It was a wonderful experience. This field course is a venerable institution of the Zoology Department: it has taken place Glendalough every year since 2007, having previously been held in the Burren and Killarney National Park. It has always been beloved by students, as seen in this video made in 2016.

Zoology students in Trinity have the chance to take part in three field courses: Terrestrial Ecology in Glendalough, Marine Biology on the rich shores of Strangford Lough, and Tropical Ecology around the ancient Rift Valley Lakes of Kenya. Here, from enthusiastic and experienced teachers, they learn skills that will stand to them in any ecological undertaking. On the Glendalough field course, students of both Zoology and Environmental Science are introduced to the techniques used to sample and survey wild animals, including Longworth trapping for small mammals, malaise trapping for flying insects, kick-sampling for aquatic invertebrates, and mist netting for birds. This last one was what brought me on the course.

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Wild and free: red deer grazing for conservation

Annabel Smith and Jana Eccard give an account of the Editor’s Choice paper of the June 2019 issue of the Journal of Applied Ecology: Grazing by wild red deer: Management options for the conservation of semi‐natural open habitats by Friederike Riesch and colleagues.

This post was originally published on The Applied Ecologists blog, where it is also available in German. The header photo was taken by Marcus Meißner.

It is widely accepted that semi-natural grasslands in Europe require active management to maintain biodiversity. Without management, woody shrubs typically replace grasslands and many plant species that have persisted for thousands of years will be lost from the area. This fact underlies ‘conservation grazing’ guidelines for managing livestock in semi-natural habitats, such as those embedded into EU agri-environment projects.

But is there a better way than livestock to manage biomass for conservation?

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