Mar | 2017 | ConservationBytes.com

Limited nursery replenishment in coral reefs

27 03 2017

blue-striped grunt (Haemulon sciurus)

Coral reef fishes are wonderfully diverse in size, form, and function, as well as their need for different habitats throughout the life cycle. Some species spend all of their life in the same kind of coral habitat, while others need different places to breed and feed.

Fishes requiring different habitats as they progress through life often have what we call ‘nurseries’ in which adults lay eggs and the subsequent juveniles remain, and these places are often dominated by mangroves or seagrasses (i.e., they are not part of the coral reef).

While we’ve known for quite some time that when these nursery habitats are not around, adjacent coral reefs have few, if any, of these nursery-dependent species. What we haven’t known until now is just how far the influence of nurseries extends along a coral reef.

In other words, if a nursery is present, just how many new recruits do different areas of a reef receive from it? Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: connectivity, coral reefs, coral-reef fishes, Fish, mangroves, nurseries, replenishment
Categories : biodiversity, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, coral reefs, demography, ecology, ecosystem function, exploitation, fish, fisheries, fragmentation, management, marine, marine protected area, seagrass, tropical

Credit for reviewing & editing — it’s about bloody time

15 03 2017

clapping-hands-300x225 As have many other scientists, I’ve whinged before about the exploitative nature of scientific publishing. What other industry obtains its primary material for free (submitted articles), has its construction and quality control done for free (reviewing & editing), and then sells its final products for immense profit back to the very people who started the process? It’s a fantastic recipe for making oodles of cash; had I been financially cleverer and more ethically bereft in my youth, I would have bought shares in publicly listed publishing companies.

How much time do we spend reviewing and editing each other’s manuscripts? Some have tried to work out these figures and prescribe ideal writing-to-reviewing/editing ratios, but it suffices to say that we spend a mind-bending amount of our time doing these tasks. While we might never reap the financial rewards of reviewing, we can now at least get some nominal credit for the effort.

While it has been around for nearly five years now, the company Publons¹ has only recently come to my attention. At first I wondered about the company’s modus operandi, but after discovering that academics can use their services completely free of charge, and that the company funds itself by “… partnering with publishers” (at least someone is getting something out of them), I believe it’s as about as legitimate and above-board as it gets.

So what does Publons do? They basically list the journals for which you have reviewed and/or edited. Whoah! (I can almost hear you say). How do I protect my anonymity? Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: acknowledgemeent, credit, editing, publishing, publons, reviewing
Categories : science, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing

Singin’ in the heat

9 03 2017

Common coqui frog male (Eleutherodactylus coqui, snout-to vent length average ~ 3 cm) camouflaged in the fronds of an epiphyte in the El Yunque National Forest (Puerto Rico), along with an image of the enchanted forest of the Sierra de Luquillo where Narins & Meenderink did their study (4) – photos courtesy of Thomas Fletcher. This species can be found from sea level to the top of the highest peak in Puerto Rico (Cerro Punta = 1338 m). Native to mesic ecosystems, common coquis are well adapted to a terrestrial life, e.g., they lack interdigital webbing that support swimming propulsion in many amphibians, and youngsters hatch directly from the egg without transiting a tadpole stage. The IUCN catalogues the species as ‘Least Concern’ though alerts recent declines in high-altitude populations caused by chytrid fungus – lethal to amphibians at a planetary scale (9). Remarkably, the species has been introduced to Florida, Hawaii, the Dominican Republic and the Virgin Islands where it can become a pest due to high fertility rates (several >20 egg clutches/female/year).

Frog songs are species-specific and highly useful for the study of tropical communities, which host the highest amphibian diversities globally. The auditory system of females and the vocal system of males have co-evolved to facilitate reproductive encounters, but global warming might be disrupting the frequency of sound-based encounters in some species..

It is a rainy night, and Don (Gene Kelly) has just left his love, Kathy (Debbie Reynolds), at home, starting one of the most famous musical movie scenes ever: Singin’ in the rain …

Amphibians (see Amphibians for kids by National Geographic) also love to sing in rainy nights when males call for a partner, but now they have to do it in hotter conditions as local climates become warmer. Vocal behaviour is a critical trait in the life history of many frog species because it mediates recognition between individuals, including sexual selection by females (1).

With few exceptions, every species has a different and unique call, so scientists can use call features to identify species, and this trait is particularly useful in the inventory of diverse tropical communities (2). Differences in call frequency, duration and pitch, and in note, number, and repetition pattern, occur from one species to another. And even within species, songs can vary from individual to individual (as much as there are not two people with the same voice), and be tuned according to body size and environmental temperature (3). Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: amphibians, behavioural shift, calls, climate change, Global warming, vocalisation
Categories : amphibian, behaviour, bioclimatic envelope, biodiversity, climate change, climate shift, decline, extinction, function, rain forests, research, South America, tropical

Job: Koala Data Research Technician

6 03 2017

koala If you live in South Australia, and in Adelaide especially, you would have had to be living under a rock not to have heard of the Great Koala Counts 1 and 2. So I’m not really writing this for those sotto pietra types. If you are a regular reader of CB.com, you’ll also know that I’ve been involved in helping analyse the data from GKC1, as well as improving the design of the GKC2.

Well, the data are in for GKC2 and we need help to analyse them. Just as a little reminder, the GKCs are designed to provide better data to estimate the distribution and density of koalas in South Australia (especially in the Mount Lofty Ranges). We’ve already written one scientific article from GKC1, but we now have a more expansive and quality-controlled dataset, so it’s now time to write the second. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: data, employment, job, koala, marsupial, part-time, research assistant, technician
Categories : conservation, niche model, South Australia, southern Australia, species distribution model

Job: Research Associate in Eco-epidemiological modelling

3 03 2017

European rabbit infected with myxomatosis

Earlier this week I advertised two new PhD scholarships in palaeo-ecological modelling. Now we are pleased to advertise a six-month Research Associate position in eco-epidemiological modelling.

The position will be based in the School of Biological Sciences at Flinders University. Flinders University offers a dynamic research environment that explores the continuum of environmental and evolutionary research from the ancient to modern ecology. The School of Biological Sciences is an integrated community researching and teaching biology, and has a long history of science innovation.

Project background

Since 1996, Biosecurity South Australia has been running a capture-mark-recapture study on a European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) population located at Turretfield (~ 50 km north of Adelaide). Now into the 21^st year, this is one of the world’s longest studies of its kind. Approximately every 8 weeks cage traps are reset and the population trapped over five days, with the captured rabbits weighed, sexed, tagged and blood-sampled. The study was established to investigate the epidemiology and efficacy of the two imported rabbit biocontrol agents, rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) and myxomatosis. To date, from 119 formal trapping events and RHDV-outbreak carcass-sampling trips, > 4500 rabbits have been monitored with > 8700 cELISA RHDV antibody tests and 7500 IgG, IgM and IgA RHDV antibody tests on sera (similarly for myxomatosis), and 111 RHDV-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analyses run on tissue samples of the sampled rabbits. This represents an unparalleled dataset on rabbit survival, population fluctuations and disease dynamics. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biocontrol, biosecurity, employment, invasive species, job, modelling, myxomatosis, population dynamics, rabbits, Research associate, rhdv
Categories : conservation, invasive species, jobs, modelling, restoration

Palaeo-ecology PhD scholarships

1 03 2017

With my new position as Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology at Flinders University, I am in the agreeable position to be able to offer two PhD scholarships to the best candidates from around the world. If you feel that you’re up to the challenge, I look forward to hearing from you.