The Eno River Hydrilla Management Task Force has recently reported on its use of an aquatic herbicide to control hydrilla verticillata, an invasive species. - Link
The Eno River Hydrilla Management Task Force has recently reported on its use of an aquatic herbicide to control hydrilla verticillata, an invasive species. - Link Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal brings up an interesting point - there are lots of parasites that alter the behavior of their hosts, in many cases making their hosts more prone to predation, which ensures the parasite a new host. The Toxoplasma gondii protozoa is a brain parasite that likes to be in the gut of cats. So what happens when it gets eaten by a rat? It moves into the rat's brain, then "erases" the rat's fear of cats. Once the rat is no longer afraid of cats (though still afraid of everything else), it won't run away when a cat attacks it and eats it. Thereby eating the Toxo parasite. Thereby putting the parasite right where it wants to be: in the cat's intestines.
Funny thing is, the Toxo parasite has also infected a certain percentage of human brains (and hides pretty well). Infection varies by country - France and Germany, for example, have a high rate of infection while South Korea has a very low rate of infection. What is to stop these parasites from changing human brains like they do to rats? Do they perhaps make people more prone to loving the primary host, the cat? Do they turn people into crazy cat ladies? If one parasite can do this, what other parasites are in our bodies altering our behavior? And finally, if they vary by country, are they to some extent influential on the culture of a people? Speaking of Duke professors, Frank Stasio recently interviewed Duke University Professor of Conservation Ecology on WUNC's The State of Things. Pimm's book, The World According to Pimm, has long been on my AP Environmental book list. If you are thinking of reading the book, or have read it in the past, it's a good interview to listen to. Then go to Flyleaf and buy the book! - LINK
While I drove my kids to their summer camps today, I listened to Frank Stasio's The State of Things on WUNC radio. His guest was NC State ecologist/evolutionary biologist Robert Dunn, whose book is entitled The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today. Amid the discussion of bellybutton bacteria and forehead mites is an interesting look at the coevolutionary relationships we have with the ecosystems that thrive on and in the human body. I'm definitely putting it on my reading list for my AP students. - Link
Some Pacific Ocean species are crossing the Arctic now that the ice has dwindled. A gray whale was found in the Mediterranean, and a Pacific algae called Neodenticula seminae has been found as far south as New York. With fisheries declining, the species competition adds another variable to the mix. - Link
David McCandless, blogger at InformationIsBeautiful.net, created this wonderful graphic based on a study of the disappearance of Atlantic Ocean fish over the past 100 years done by the Fisheries Centre in Vancouver, Canada. The article at guardian.co.uk touches on our collective amnesia about the "way things were," and how the environmental baseline continues to shift closer and closer to collapse. - Link
Grading the last remaining papers for the year is so much fun, especially when students are trickling in with their late work (some handing in assignments that were due in October). As I perform this wonderful task, I'm listening to WUNC's Dick Gordon interview Cary Fowler, who is storing seeds inside a mountain. This massive biodiversity project is located above the Arctic Circle, and is apparently designed to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis, and climate change. Safer than a nuclear reactor? We touch on the topic in APES. Scroll to the bottom at the link to play the audio. - Link
|
Who is Riss?
Alan Rissberger "No one warned me that life would involve science, except my science teacher. But, of course, he's going to say that. He's got a job to protect."
- Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You) Wish List
Paper towels!
Tissues! BandAids! Archives
September 2017
News/BlogsAll-Geo
Business Week Discover Magazine Ecologist.org E - The Environmental Magazine Environmental News Network Environment News Service Geek.com Green Magazine The Guardian Highly Allochthonous Information is Beautiful NASA Goddard Institute NASA News National Geographic National Science Foundation OnEarth Reuters Science Science Daily Scientific American Smithsonian Magazine WUNC NPR News WUNC The State of Things xkcd Categories
All
|