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ESA Annual Meeting — Page 3

A lovely Augochlora pura extends part of its tongue. A. pura is a member of the relatively short-tongued Halictidae family, uprettily known as the sweat bees. The small, solitary bee is one of the most common bees of forests and forest edges in the eastern United States, and a promiscuous attendant to many flower species. Collected by Phillip Moore in Polk County, Tennessee. Photograph by Phillip Moore. Photo courtesy of the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab.

For bees (and flowers), tongue size matters

When it comes to bee tongues, length is proportional to the size of the bee, but heritage sets the proportion. Estimating this hard to measure trait helps scientists understand bee species’ resiliency to change. Ecologists will report on this and other pollination research news at the Ecological Society of America’s 2014 Annual Meeting in Sacramento, Cal., August 10-15.   For…

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Parachuting In: Writing that Drops Readers into the Field of Ecology

“Facts don’t have the power to change someone’s story… your goal is to introduce a new story that will let your facts in,” wrote Annette Simmons in her book, The Story Factor. The quote was a game-changer for me, professionally.

This guest post is by Clarisse Hart, a member of the “Eco Comm Crew” behind the upcoming “Beyond the Written Word” science communication workshop (#15) at ESA’s Annual Meeting in Sacramento.

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Butcher, baker, and brewer. This image illustrates the strikingly simple but powerful analogy between man-made and natural systems. By looking at the functional structure of coral reef fish communities through a human eye, we find butchers, bakers, and brewers, but also diligent, cranky farmerfish, visually pleasing but ecologically negligible aesthetes, or worthless aristocrats. Using this approach, we can begin to answer some of the most pressing questions in coral reef biology. What are the origins and future trajectories of coral reefs and their fishy inhabitants? How do humans affect this perfectly balanced market? And do more brewers really make a happier system? Simon J. Brandl.

Butcher, baker, brewer-fish

We asked science café aspirants for creativity and Simon Brandl brought it with his analogy of division of labor in a coral reef community, where butcher-sharks course among the brewers, bakers, and aristocrats of the reef. Brandl shares the 2014 ESA Science Café Prize with co-winner Madhusudan Katti. He is a PhD candidate at the ARC Centre of Excellence for…

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These are not your urban lawn flamingos! This pair dancing in the low tide in Mumbai’s busy harbor are Lesser Flamingos, considered near-threatened species due to declining populations in Africa and India. Yet, over the past decade, some 10-25 thousand of them have been turning up in Mumbai’s Thane Creek to spend the winter right in the middle of a megacity of over 20 million people. I photographed this pair just a year ago at Sewri Port, an industrial dockyard area known more for repairing boats than harboring such wildlife which now teems in the creek’s recovering mangroves. Credit, Madhusudan Katti.

These are not your urban lawn flamingos!

Madhusudan Katti won this year’s ESA Science Café Prize with his lyric contemplation of the wildlife living alongside us in urban spaces, and the necessary participation of cities in the future of biodiversity on planet earth. Katti is a professor at California State University Fresno and records occasional radio essays for Valley Public Radio. He tweets prolifically as @leafwarbler and…

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Just 25 miles south of Sacramento in California Central Valley, the Comsumnes River Preserve is a critical stop on the Pacific Flyway for migrating and wintering waterfowl. Credit, Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management.

Call for nominations: ESA2014 Opening Plenary speaker

Do you have ideas for next year’s 2014 Ecological Society of America Opening Plenary? If you’ve been to an ESA meeting, you probably know that it officially kicks  off with the Opening Plenary on Sunday evening. We’ve had  some great Opening Plenary speakers over the years including Jane Lubchenco, David Suzuki, Don Kennedy, Sandra Postel, Cristian Samper and many others…

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volunteer replanting with Great River Greening

ESA donates $16,615 in carbon offsets to Minnesota re-forestation project

Two years ago, Lee Frelich was sitting in a committee meeting when the idea came to him: the Ecological Society should plant a forest. ESA sets aside $5 for every person attending the Annual Meeting to offset the environmental costs of travel to the meeting location. This year, on Frelich’s advice, the Society wrote a check to a Minnesota non-profit devoted to restoration of local lands and waters.

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What’s the Future of Ecologist-Communicators?

This guest post is by Holly Menninger, Director of Public Science for Your Wild Life at NC State University. Engage. Communicate. Reach out. Engage. Communicate. Reach out. These words echoed throughout the hallways of the Minneapolis Convention Center last week like a mantra. From organized symposia to high-energy Ignite sessions, ecologists both urged for and heard a rallying call to…

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Call for nominations! Joan Ehrenfeld Award for Best Student Presentation in Urban Ecology

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Same Data, Different Century. Sometimes I believe I was born to be a 19th century naturalist. Compiling long term records of flowering phenology involves stitching together old data (for example, this herbarium specimen from 1895) with new data (a phenology observation collected on a smartphone app in 2013). As I trek across Mount Desert Island in the 21st century, I am keenly aware of the naturalists who came before me; in my mind, I insert myself into the troupe of Harvard boys whose field notes and camp logs have become my baseline data. I really love S. A. Eliot's sweater. Caption, Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie. Image, Designed by Michael MacKenzie Herbarium Specimen courtesy of the College of the Atlantic Herbarium Smartphone Screenshot of original data courtesy of fulcrum app Photograph of the Harvard boys in 1880 courtesy of the Northeast Harbor Library Photograph of Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie by Lisa McDonough

In phenology, timing is everything

If you’ve ever thought that botany doesn’t involve enough time travel, you are not alone. Plant ecologists studying climate change and and the timing of flowering are constantly wondering ‘is this happening when it used to happen?’ My job would be infinitely easier if I had access to a time machine.

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Aster, 125 Southeast Main Street, Minneapolis, MN 55414

ESA2013 Science Cafe Prize — call for submissions!

Have you ever wanted to escape the conference center during the ESA Annual Meeting and talk science with the locals? This August at the 98th Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, we are launching a Science Café – a chance to tell local pub-goers about your ecological passions in a casual environment.

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ESA donates to PNW conservation orgs to offset envr costs of its meeting

By Nadine Lymn, ESA director of public affairs When 5,000 individuals from across the United States and around the globe convene for a scientific conference such as the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) recent meeting in Portland, Oregon it takes an environmental toll: The energy required to power the planes, trains and automobiles people use to travel to and from…

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