It has taken me a long time to decide to do this, but with role models like Claire Wordley, Alejandro Frid, and James Hansen out there, I couldn’t really find any more excuses.
Yes, I’ve been a strong advocate for action on biodiversity, environment and climate-change issues for a long time, and I’ve even had a few political wins in that regard with my writing and representation. I’ve even called out more than once for universities to embrace divestment from fossil fuels (to my knowledge, even my own university still has not).
While I still think these avenues are important, my ongoing observation is that things are getting worse politically, not better. That means that the normal armchair advocacy embraced by even the most outspoken academics is probably not going to be enough to elicit real political change that we — no, the planet — desperately needs.
It’s no secret that to be successful in academia, it’s not enough just to be a good scientist — being able to formulate and test hypotheses. You also need to be able to communicate that science effectively.
This implies a good command of the English language for anyone who wants a career in science. Mastering English (or not) will directly affect your work opportunities such as publishing, establishing networks at conferences, taking leadership of working groups, contributing to lab meetings (there is nothing worse than feeling left out of a conversation because of language limitations), and so forth.
But when it comes to language skills, not everyone is created equal because those skills mostly depend on a person’s background (e.g., learning English as a child or later in life), cultural reluctance, fear of making mistakes, lack of confidence, or simply brain design — this last component might offend some, but it appears that some people just happen to have the specific neuronal pathways to learn languages better than others. Whatever the reason, the process of becoming a good scientist is made more difficult if you happen not to have that specific set of neuronal pathways, even though not being a native English speaker does not prevent from being academically successful.
The island of Mauritius is known, particularly in conservation circles, for the ill-fated extinction of the dodo, but also for its many conservation success stories. These include the recovery of emblematic birds such as the Mauritius kestrel (Falco punctatus) and the pink pigeon (Nesoenas mayeri) that narrowly avoided extinction several decades ago.
Mauritius (greater Mascarene) flying fox Pteropus niger
Behind this veil of achievements, however, local political realities are increasingly making the protection and management of Mauritian biodiversity more complex and challenging as new conservation issues emerge.
Emergence of human-wildlife conflict
In the midst of the third government-led mass cull of the Endangered Mauritian flying fox (Pteropus niger) in 2018, a paper published in the Journal for Nature Conservation shed light on the events that led to the government’s choice to do the first two mass culls of the Mauritian flying fox in 2015 and 2016. Documentation of human-wildlife conflict in Mauritius is relatively new, as noted by the authors, but provides a unique case study.
Given that the mass-culling opted for did not increase fruit growers’ profits (in fact, fruit production dropped substantially after the mass-culls) and that the flying fox, a keystone species for the native biodiversity, became more threatened with extinction following the mass culls, it appears that Mauritius provides a rare opportunity to study what precisely should be avoided when trying to resolve such a HWC [Human-wildlife conflict],
Indeed, to mitigate rising conflicts between fruit farmers and the Mauritian flying fox, the Mauritian government opted in 2006 to cull this threatened species (only six individuals were culled at the time). Despite disputes over the population size of the Mauritian flying fox and the extent of damage it caused to commercial fruit growers, as well as scientific arguments against the cull, culling continues to be the preferred approach.
Climate change is one ingredient of a cocktail of factors driving the ongoing destruction of pristine forests on Earth. We here highlight the main physiological challenges trees must face to deal with increasing drought and heat.
Forests experiencing embolism after a hot drought. The upper-left pic shows Scots (Pinus sylvestris) and black (P. nigra) pines in Montaña de Salvador (Espuñola, Barcelona, Spain) during a hot Autumn in 2015 favouring a massive infestation by pine processionary caterpillars (Thaumetopoea pityocampa) and tree mortality the following year (Lluís Brotons/CSIC in InForest-CREAF-CTFC). To the right, an individual holm oak (Quercus ilex) bearing necrotic branches in Plasencia (Extremadura, Spain) during extreme climates from 2016 to 2017, impacting more than a third of the local oak forests (Alicia Forner/CSIC). The lower-left pic shows widespread die-off of trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides) from ‘Aspen Parkland’ (Saskatchewan, Canada) in 2004 following extreme climates in western North America from 2001 to 2002 (Mike Michaelian/Canadian Forest Service). To the right, several dead aspens near Mancos (Colorado, USA) where the same events hit forests up to one-century old (William Anderegg).
A common scene when we return from a long trip overseas is to find our indoor plants wilting if no one has watered them in our absence. But … what does a thirsty plant experience internally?
Like animals, plants have their own circulatory system and a kind of plant blood known as sap. Unlike the phloem (peripheral tissue underneath the bark of trunks and branches, and made up of arteries layered by live cells that transport sap laden with the products of photosynthesis, along with hormones and minerals — see videos here and here), the xylem is a network of conduits flanked by dead cells that transport water from the roots to the leaves through the core of the trunk of a tree (see animation here). They are like the pipes of a building within which small pressure differences make water move from a collective reservoir to every neighbours’ kitchen tap.
Water relations in tree physiology have been subject to a wealth of research in the last half a decade due to the ongoing die-off of trees in all continents in response to episodes of drought associated with temperature extremes, which are gradually becoming more frequent and lasting longer at a planetary scale (1).
Embolised trees
During a hot drought, trees must cope with a sequence of two major physiological challenges (2, 3, 4). More heat and less internal water increase sap tension within the xylem and force trees to close their stomata (5). Stomata are small holes scattered over the green parts of a plant through which gas and water exchanges take place. Closing stomata means that a tree is able to reduce water losses by transpiration by two to three orders of magnitude. However, this happens at the expense of halting photosynthesis, because the main photosynthetic substrate, carbon dioxide (CO2), uses the same path as water vapour to enter and leave the tissues of a tree.
If drought and heat persist, sap tension reaches a threshold leading to cavitation or formation of air bubbles (6). Those bubbles block the conduits of the xylem such that a severe cavitation will ultimately cause overall hydraulic failure. Under those conditions, the sap does not flow, many parts of the tree dry out gradually, structural tissues loose turgor and functionality, and their cells end up dying. Thus, the aerial photographs showing a leafy blanket of forest canopies profusely coloured with greys and yellows are in fact capturing a Dantesque situation: trees in photosynthetic arrest suffering from embolism (the plant counterpart of a blood clot leading to brain, heart or pulmonary infarction), which affects the peripheral parts of the trees in the first place (forest dieback).
Wildfires transform forests into mosaics of vegetation. What, where, and which plants thrive depends on when and how severely a fire affects different areas of a forest. Such heterogeneity in the landscape is essential for animal species that benefit from fire like woodpeckers. Anyone raised in rural areas will have vivid recollections of wildfires: the…
From time to time I turn my research hand to issues of invasive species control, for example, from manipulating pathogens to control rabbits, to island eradication of feral cats and pigs, to effective means to control feral deer. Not only do invasive species cost well over $1.7 trillion (yes, that’s trillion, with 12 zeros) each…
We’ve just published a paper in PLOS ONE showing high infant mortality rates are contributing to an incessant rise of the global human population, which supports arguments for greater access to contraception and family planning in low- and middle-income nations. In collaboration with Melinda Judge, Chitra Saraswati, Claire Perry, Jane Heyworth, and Peter Le Souëf…
It has taken me a long time to decide to do this, but with role models like Claire Wordley, Alejandro Frid, and James Hansen out there, I couldn’t really find any more excuses.
It is for this reason that I’ve joined the Extinction Rebellion (South Australia Chapter), especially after my friend and colleague, Dr Claire Wordley of the University of Cambridge, joined the UK Rebellion and wrote about her experiences on this very blog. That, coupled with my ongoing and mounting concern for the future Earth my daughter will inherit, requires me to take to the streets. Read the rest of this entry »
ConservationBytes.com 