Browsed by
Category: Ecology

The wisdom of pandemics

The wisdom of pandemics

David Waltner-Toews writes: Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and subtle relationships, then translate them into what others recognise as good judgment. If it comes to us at all, wisdom is the product of reflection, time and experience. A person might achieve wisdom after decades; a community after centuries; a culture after millennia. Modern human beings as a species? We’re getting there, and pandemics can help. If we persist in our curiosity and reflect on what we find,…

Read More Read More

Trump to strip protections from Tongass National Forest, one of the biggest intact temperate rainforests

Trump to strip protections from Tongass National Forest, one of the biggest intact temperate rainforests

The Washington Post reports: President Trump will open up more than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development, according to a notice posted Wednesday, stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades. As of Thursday, it will be legal for logging companies to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest — featuring old-growth stands of red and…

Read More Read More

The fear of being eaten shapes brains, behavior, and entire ecosystems

The fear of being eaten shapes brains, behavior, and entire ecosystems

Lesley Evans Ogden writes: As high tide inundates the muddy shallows of the Fraser river delta in British Columbia, what looks like a swarm of mosquitoes quivers in the air above. Upon closer inspection, the flitting mass turns out to be a flock of small shorebirds. The grey-brown wings and white chests of several thousand Pacific dunlins move in synchrony, undulating low over the water, then rising up like a rippling wave, sometimes for hours on end. Staying aloft like…

Read More Read More

Mysterious circles in the desert explained by the Turing pattern

Mysterious circles in the desert explained by the Turing pattern

Science Alert reports: It was 1952, and Alan Turing was about to reshape humanity’s understanding of biology. In a landmark paper, the English mathematician introduced what became known as the Turing pattern – the notion that the dynamics of certain uniform systems could give rise to stable patterns when disturbed. Such ‘order from disturbance’ has become the theoretical basis for all sorts of strange, repeated motifs seen in the natural world. It was a good theory. So good, in fact,…

Read More Read More

The links between ecological degradation and emerging infectious diseases

The links between ecological degradation and emerging infectious diseases

Wildlife Conservation Society: A WCS special report shows how degradation of ecological systems has significantly increased the overall risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks and has other complex effects on human health. You can read the full report here. The authors are WCS’s Tom Evans, Sarah Olson, James Watson, Kim Gruetzmacher, Mathieu Pruvot, Stacy Jupiter, Stephanie Wang, Tom Clements, and Katie Jung. The report, which draws on detailed case studies, global analyses, modelling, and broad expert consensus, notes that the majority…

Read More Read More

Bats aren’t our enemies

Bats aren’t our enemies

Timothy Treuer, Ricardo Rocha, and Cara Brook write: Bats get a bad rap. From horror films to tabloid pages to Halloween, media and cultural depictions of our planet’s only volant, or flying, mammals have long generated and reinforced unfounded fear. Their evident role as original source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that produced the COVID-19 epidemic has exacerbated their unfortunate public image and even led to calls and active measures to cull or harass bat populations. Such hostile attitudes make it…

Read More Read More

Psychobiome: The gut bacteria that may alter how you think, feel, and act

Psychobiome: The gut bacteria that may alter how you think, feel, and act

Science reports: Katya Gavrish is searching for new brain drugs in a seemingly unlikely place: human stool samples. An earnest and focused microbiologist who trained in Russia and loves classical music, she’s standing in front of a large anaerobic chamber in a lab at Holobiome, a small startup company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She reaches into the glass-fronted chamber through Michelin Man–like sleeves to begin to dilute the sample inside. That’s the first step toward isolating and culturing bacteria that Gavrish…

Read More Read More

Wuhan virologist identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves and warns more are out there

Wuhan virologist identified dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves and warns more are out there

Scientific American reports: Before SARS, the world had only an inkling of coronaviruses—so named because their spiky surface resembles a crown when seen under a microscope, says Linfa Wang, who directs the emerging infectious diseases program at Singapore’s Duke-NUS Medical School. Coronaviruses were mostly known for causing common colds. “The SARS outbreak [in 2003] was a game changer,” Wang says. It was the first emergence of a deadly coronavirus with pandemic potential. The incident helped to jump-start a global search…

Read More Read More

Even the Anthropocene is nature at work transforming itself

Even the Anthropocene is nature at work transforming itself

Beth Lord writes: In his book Novacene (2019), James Lovelock writes: ‘We must abandon the politically and psychologically loaded idea that the Anthropocene is a great crime against nature … The Anthropocene is a consequence of life on Earth; … an expression of nature.’ This insight resonates with the 17th-century philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Lovelock is the inventor of Gaia theory, the idea that the Earth is one living organism that regulates and strives to preserve itself. Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ is…

Read More Read More

The ‘murder hornet’ has arrived in North America

The ‘murder hornet’ has arrived in North America

The New York Times reports: In his decades of beekeeping, Ted McFall had never seen anything like it. As he pulled his truck up to check on a group of hives near Custer, Wash., in November, he could spot from the window a mess of bee carcasses on the ground. As he looked closer, he saw a pile of dead members of the colony in front of a hive and more carnage inside — thousands and thousands of bees with…

Read More Read More

Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists

Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists

The Guardian reports: The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted, the world’s leading biodiversity experts have warned. “There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us,” they said. “Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost. We…

Read More Read More

When confronting a pandemic, we must save nature to save ourselves

When confronting a pandemic, we must save nature to save ourselves

Sahir Doshi and Nicole Gentile write: The COVID-19 pandemic has brutally and tragically exposed the extent to which the health and well-being of every family in America depends on the health and well-being of nature—both here at home and around the world. Nature is connected to human health, from the inherent mechanisms through which ecosystems regulate the emergence of new pathogens to the health benefits of spending time outdoors. But in our destruction of earth’s natural resources, we are losing…

Read More Read More

How viruses are a hidden driving force controlling the planet

How viruses are a hidden driving force controlling the planet

A re-post of an article that appeared in January at Inside Science: Viruses control their hosts like puppets — and in the process, they may play important roles in Earth’s climate. The hosts in this case aren’t people or animals: They are bacteria. A growing body of research is revealing how viruses manipulate what bacteria eat and how they guide the chemical reactions that sustain life. When those changes happen to a lot of bacteria, the cumulative effects could potentially…

Read More Read More

As humanity isolates, wild animals start coming out of exile

As humanity isolates, wild animals start coming out of exile

  The coronavirus pandemic has rightly been compared to wartime. At the same time, it is reminiscent of the First World War armistice as gunfire gave way to birdsong, and offers glimpses of what might happen if we were to end our war against this planet and impose our presence here less harshly, by allowing wild habitats to grow, by reducing how much we foul up the air, land, water, and oceans, and by simply learning how to become a…

Read More Read More

The new coronavirus emerged from the global wildlife trade – and may be devastating enough to end it

The new coronavirus emerged from the global wildlife trade – and may be devastating enough to end it

Government officers seize civets in a wildlife market in Guangzhou, China to prevent the spread of SARS in 2004. Dustin Shum/South China Morning Post via Getty Images By George Wittemyer, Colorado State University COVID-19 is one of countless emerging infectious diseases that are zoonotic, meaning they originate in animals. About 75% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, accounting for billions of illnesses and millions of deaths annually across the globe. When these diseases spill over to humans, the cause frequently…

Read More Read More

It’s wrong to blame bats for the coronavirus epidemic

It’s wrong to blame bats for the coronavirus epidemic

A small colony of Townsend’s big eared bats at Lava Beds National Monument, Calif. Shawn Thomas, NPS/Flickr By Peter Alagona, University of California, Santa Barbara Genomic research showing that the COVID-19 coronavirus likely originated in bats has produced heavy media coverage and widespread concern. There is now danger that frightened people and misguided officials will try to curb the epidemic by culling these remarkable creatures, even though this strategy has failed in the past. As an environmental historian focusing on…

Read More Read More