Insects and plants are intimately linked in terms of their ecology and evolution. Insects and vascular plants both first appear in the fossil record around 400 MY ago, at the beginning of the Devonian, as terrestrial ecology changed to allow the colonization of the land. Then about 20 MY later, the first arboreal plants appear, [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Ecology (scientific)’
23/04/2009
SAVE THE PARROTFISH TO SAVE THE REEFS
November 2007 Parrotfish are major grazers of the algae that grow on coral reefs. Protecting them from over-fishing may be decisive for the survival of reefs in the Caribbean. Sea urchins can also do the trick. That’s the take-home message of a Nature article, most of which consists are rather hard to follow mathematical modelling – ecology is not all [...]
22/04/2009
FLIES ON A CRAB
September 2007 Essay from Current Biology about the varied lives of flies – including the three species that live in land crabs…
21/04/2009
ANTARCTIC BIODIVERSITY
May 2007 Amazing discoveries of fantastic new animals deep in the freezing sea around Antarctica. Described in this article in Nature (subscription needed to get past abstract), and in these pieces from The Independent and the BBC. Pictures here.
21/04/2009
ARE WHALES LIKE LYNX?
May 2007 Part of the complexity of understanding population cycles is that species can end up too successful, become so numerous that they eat all their food sources, then have a catastrophic collapse, before slowly rebuilding their population size. This is often seen with predators like lynx. Is this what is happening to the Pacific whale? How could we [...]
20/04/2009
EXTINCTION AND SPECIATION
March 2007 Interesting article in Science looking at the role of latitude in extinction and speciation. The authors conclude: ” most efforts have aimed at identifying the geological, climatic, and ecological factors that might have elevated tropical speciation rates, our results suggest that both speciation and extinction vary with latitude and contributed importantly to the latitudinal diversity gradient.” You or [...]
14/04/2009
TOO MANY GOATS IN SNOWDONIA?
November 2006 An article from The Guardian about plans to cull wild goats – which have been there for 10,000 years – to save woodland. And to make way for sheep…
14/04/2009
DO DINGOS GOOD?
November 2006 A new study suggests that the decline in Australian marsupials may have been partly caused by the decline in the numbers of the top predator – the dingo. BBC summary article here; original article here (open access).
14/04/2009
GLOBAL WARMING MAKES AMPHIBIANS SICK
October 2006 BBC article describing how frogs are dying from a fungal disease due to global warming.
