Cold-blooded animals don’t produce their own heat, and thus they must sunbathe, basking in the sun’s rays to raise their body temperatures so they have eonugh energy to go about their business. But for some ectotherms, the sun isn’t just a source of heat. A new study shows that in the panther chameleon, native to Madagascar, basking behavior also controls…
“We have been replanting forests for 4,000 years, but we are only just now learning how to revive a coral reef.” Mineo Okamoto is a marine biologist at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. He’s one of the researchers leading the charge to restore Japan’s coral reefs, which have suffered a reported 90 percent dieback in the last…
Many trees with large seeds rely on vertebrate seed predators to disperse their seeds. The whitebark pine, a key subalpine species, has coevolved with the Clark’s nutcracker into a tight mutualism. In their paper in the April Ecological Applications, Shawn McKinney, a post-doc at the University of Montana, and his colleagues studied a natural disruption to this mutualism: an invasive…
PBS gave a sneak preview of its Frontline documentary, Poisoned Waters, today at the National Press Club. The featured speakers included EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and the founding EPA Administrator, Bill Ruckelshaus, who served under Richard Nixon. Both agreed that to really clean up our nation’s waterways, we need one thing: new legislation. “There is murkiness about the jurisdiction that…
This just in: Omega-3 fatty acids are healthy not just for you, but may also be good for the environment. We all read about the beneficial effects of omega-3 fatty acids, found most commonly in fish oils in our diets. They buffer against cancer, reduce the risk of cardiac disease and may also improve brain and immune function. But in…
The international World Water Week meeting has attempted to raise awareness in developed countries of the growing water sanitation crisis in developing nations. According to the Huffington Post, more than 3 million people are killed each year from water-related diseases, and 98 percent of water-related deaths occur in the developing world. A large part of the world’s water crisis is…
In mid-February, George Will, resident Washington Post conservative and climate-skeptic, wrote an editorial denouncing “Dark Green Doomsayers.” The editorial was filled with anecdotal references of news articles from the 1970’s that declare widespread climate cooling and exclaim that the world will soon find itself in the next ice age. The piece outraged the environmental community and sparked a flurry of…
The EPA sent a finding to the White House on Friday that should surprise no ecologists: that greenhouse gases are pollutants that endanger the public welfare. What might surprise ecologists is that it was sent at all. Until the final days of the Bush administration, the executive branch dragged its feet on a 2007 edict by the Supreme Court that…
Yesterday marked the 16th annual United Nations World Water Day, a day of advocacy for sustainable and careful management of clean freshwater supplies worldwide. This year’s theme was “Shared Water – Shared Opportunities.” The goal of the theme is foster goodwill and collaboration among neighboring nations to promote working together to preserve their waterways. More than 45 percent of the…
A comprehensive analysis of the current condition of birds in the U.S. was released yesterday by The Nature Conservancy, USGS, the Audubon Society, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and many other non-profit groups. Dubbed The State of the Birds, the document reports that of the nation’s approximately 800 bird species, 67 are federally listed as endangered, 184 are of conservation…
This is to invite you to attend an Arthur M. Sackler colloquium, In the Light of Evolution II: Biodiversity and Extinction, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. The Colloquium will be December 6-8, 2007, at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, California. A preliminary program can be viewed at www.nasonline.or.
Think ecology and economy don’t mix? Think again. Most of us are used to relate money with industrial technology, bulldozing properties to construct condos, hotels, expensive living complexes, malls, to summarize: everything that has to do with harming the environment.