Tag Archive for 'ecology'

Short Links: Gorillas, drunky shrews, and jellyfish

Published by Garry Peterson on August 6, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Three nature stories from the New York Times:

In the Congo Republic a survey has discovered a large population (125 000) of Western lowland gorillas.

Trove of Endangered Gorillas Found in Africa

The survey was conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society and local researchers in largely unstudied terrain, including a swampy region nicknamed the “green abyss” by the first biologists to cross it. Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, the president of the society, marveled at the scope of what the survey revealed. “The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”

It’s Always Happy Hour for Several Species in Malaysian Rain Forest

German scientists have discovered that seven species of small mammals in the rain forests of western Malaysia drink fermented palm nectar on a regular basis. For several of the species, including the pen-tailed tree shrew, the nectar, which can have an alcohol content approaching that of beer, is the major food source — meaning they are chronic drinkers.

Oceanic food webs shifting to dominance by jellyfish, due to overfishing of top predators, and likely coastal eutrophication and climate change.

Stinging Tentacles Offer Hint of Oceans’ Decline

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.

“These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,’ ” said Dr. Josep-María Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.

A view of the RA’s research from Cultural Ecology

Published by Garry Peterson on July 3, 2008 in Ideas. 0 Comments

Lesley Head in her article Cultural ecology: the problematic human and the terms of engagement (Prog Hum Geogr 2007 31:837 DOI: 10.1177/0309132507080625) discusses the current ‘terms of engagement’ between the cultural and the ecological. She writes:

Although ecology would in theory claim a holistic remit that includes humans as part of earth’s biota, its usual practice has reinforced humans as different (Haila, 1999; 2000), with anthropologists more likely to consider humans within an explicitly biogeographical perspective (Terrell, 2006). A recent contents analysis of mainstream conservation biology journals shows a continued focus on relatively ‘intact’ habitats, with few studies ‘conducted entirely in areas under intense human pressure (agricultural landscapes, coastal and urban areas)’ (Fazey et al., 2005: 70).

Changes can be seen as part of the so-called ‘new ecology’, or ‘non-equilibrium’ ecology, in which change and contingency rather than stability is the norm, and ‘disturbances’ such as fire and human actions are understood as internal to the system rather than external.

She describes the Resilience Alliance as follows:

An integrative brand of ecology is practised by the Resilience Alliance, published mostly in their journal Ecology and Society. The Alliance works through interdisciplinary collaborations to explore the dynamics of social-ecological systems, using key concepts such as resilience, adaptability and transformability. The approach is avowedly integrative of ‘ecology’ and ‘society’ (eg, Gunderson et al., 2005) and acknowledges the pervasiveness of humans in ecosystems (Elmqvist et al., 2003; Folke et al., 2004; Trosper, 2005). Yet the assumption of separate systems remains curiously unexamined in this work. Further there is conceptual slippage between treating humans as different, and ultimately absorbing all human activities as part of ecosystems.