Author: Seth Inman

Hypothetical Biology: Part Three

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This post continues the hypothetical situation described in my previous posts, the first of which you can find here.

What if the turaco barring and display were a different sort of quality indicator? They could be amplifiers that emphasize a trait perceived by other turacos as directly related to high fitness. For example, some birds’ feathers, such as those of the European jay, are colored in stripes that develop similarly to, or perhaps accentuate, growth bars. As the turaco’s barring correlates directly to its age, the bars must have typical widths at certain ages. These widths, along with the display, probably serve as a standard by which females can compare males, and males assess competitors. The bars are likely indicators similar to the stripes on jays and other birds—that is, they may portray the bird’s growth regularity, or accentuate flight behavior, body size, feather wear, symmetry, and other potential quality indicators. Should the turaco barring amplify any of these possible traits, then displaying the bars is not a deceptive signal, because it genuinely reflects quality. For instance, if a three-year-old male turaco has successfully avoided predators and found the best food throughout his life, his barring should reflect such facts, and portray his success through low feather wear, larger body size, or more regular bars; a one-year-old male with similar traits but different barring would presumably be less preferable to females. Continue reading →

Hypothetical Biology: Part Two

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This post continues the hypothetical situation described in my previous post, which you can find here. I left off claiming that the most likely explanation for the barring and display of the male turacos was sexual selection; below I try to support this hypothesis in greater detail:

We know that the male turacos limit themselves to intraspecific displays, so the pigmentation and display must be signals for other turacos. It also seems likely that some element of the barring is, or is at least perceived as, evidence of quality. Depending on how elaborate and visible the display is, it may create a handicap for male turacos. The handicap theory posits that sexually attractive traits are frequently impediments to an organism’s ability to survive, and thus that an organism’s continued survival despite such a hindrance portrays its higher quality. For example, some male birds, peacocks being an immediate example, have displays of quality reflected by an honest handicap: their conspicuous and unwieldy tail feathers. Although the turaco’s ultraviolet pigment is inexpensive to produce and invisible to mammalian predators, it may be noticeable to some reptilian predators and is probably visible to avian predators, making it possible that the turaco barring display is an honest handicap signal.

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Hypothetical Biology

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Let’s say you’ve just found out something new about a species of bird, a certain turaco that is a very dark cryptic green, in the forests of the Congo. The species hasn’t been studied much, and you’ve discovered that the male birds have a special pigmentation only visible in the ultraviolet spectrum, and this pigment is found in a barred pattern across their undersides, which they display to females and other males in their dense colonies. Based on certain test results, you can positively claim that the pigment is easy and inexpensive to produce, and you’ve also ascertained that the bars of ultravioletly-pigmented feathers are closely correlated with the bird’s growth—that is, older birds have wider bars. But apart from these few facts, you know very little about the turaco species, and your job is to wonder how and why the ultraviolet barring and its display evolved.

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Imposing Birds

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Paula Swisher, a Pennsylvania artist, creatively superimposes birds onto textbook pages through colored pencil and other media. These mixed images are great juxtapositions of wild beauty and careful order; colorful flight and monochrome data.

While visiting the state of Karnataka recently, in the Rajiv Gandhi National Park, I saw many birds (as well as countless deer, about a dozen elephants, and a couple mongooses–but these mammals are for another post). Several pieces of Swisher’s art reminded me of some of these birds:

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God in Goa

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Goa, India’s smallest state, is a former Portuguese colony bordering the Arabian Sea. Once a key trading enclave for spices, Goa is now a significant tourist attraction due to its beaches and festivals. It is also known for its considerable Catholic history and architecture; St Francis Xavier arrived in 1542 with Jesuit missionaries (he was a pupil of St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order) and there are many impressive churches throughout Goa’s capital, Panaji, and its former capital, Old Goa.

Perhaps one of the most awe-inspiring of these is the Church of St Augustine. Augustinian friars completed its construction in 1602, and it has been in different states of disrepair since 1835, when the Portuguese government began evicting many religious orders from Goa. The 46 meter tower (half of which collapsed in 1931), in varying stages of illumination, is perhaps the most easily appreciated element of grandeur remaining. But close examination of the vault floor reveals dozens of tombstones in relief, mostly for men who seem to have been knights, or at least who had knightly coat of arms. Some of these sigils are surprising, such as the skull and crossbones motifs. This is the church that I spent the most time at; most of what is left is eroded, overgrown, cracked, or otherwise dilapidated, without detracting from the ruins’ beauty or impressiveness, however. Continue reading →

To The Past

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In 2004, my family visited a completed Morgan’s Rock after having camped on the undeveloped property several years earlier. The camping trip had helped establish the best potential locations for bungalows–the bungalows that you can now only reach by the pictured bridge.

Last summer, Continue reading →

Fence Art?

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Cornell University and the City of Ithaca began fencing the bridges that run over several of Ithaca’s famous gorges some time in 2010, for safety purposes. Many have opposed these barriers, partly because the fences inhibit a full view of the famous natural beauty of Ithaca’s gorges, a huge part of Ithaca’s identity and college appeal. In fact, “Ithaca is GORGES” t-shirts or bumper stickers are a very common sight on campus, and parodies (Ithaca is SQUIRRELS) are becoming popular.

A common sight that is not quite a parody, however, is “Ithaca is FENCES” stickers. They can be seen on every bridge on campus, and on t-shirts. You can read about the messy details of the fence controversy here; the main reason I give this example of protest is its unconventional form: stickers placed on telephone poles or fence posts that play off a famous (at least locally) play on words. Continue reading →

Deep Ecology, American Roots: Part 4

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Here are some final thoughts following my discussion of the relationship between deep ecology and certain American figures:

Just as deep ecologists at heart may need to stay closeted to keep their public shallow ecology jobs, shallow ecology groups such as The Group of Ten must retain their traditional views in order to maintain government support and continue to receive public donations from massive bases.  In the early 1980s alone, Sierra Club membership grew by 90%; as the mainstream groups grow, it makes sense that more radical splinters will form.  Unlike traditional environmental groups, however, the fringe splinters are fairly flexible to fundamental changes in ideology.  David Foreman eventually left Earth First!, thinking it had become too concerned with social justice issues when the group opened alliances with labor unions; he believed wilderness preservation had lost priority as the group’s mission.  But was this shift in Earth First!’s goals one from deep to shallow ecology?  This query presents issues inherent in social justice, which are far too vast to discuss here; the simplest answer, it seems, would depend greatly on whom the group was serving, and to what ends. Continue reading →

Deep Ecology, American Roots: Part 3

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I left off my Part 2 post with the claim that environmental groups adopted a shallower ecology as they became more mainstream. I will continue to discuss this below, and focus on a more radical fringe environmental group.

With wider supporter bases, the largest and most influential organizations—The Group of Ten—tended toward demureness while working with the US government, which in many cases meant acceding to the demands of corporations; none of the Ten showed up to protest the controversial dumping of toxic PCBs in Afton, North Carolina.  When The Group of Ten began to cooperate with (or behave more pragmatically towards) extractive industries, generally the more lucrative variety, many activists found themselves looking for more adversarial policies, and abandoned their positions for more “active” ones.  Many of these people may have considered themselves liberal members of the environmental groups before, but given the dynamics of mainstream discourse, the splinter groups became much more radical.  Here are some examples of frustrated people leaving mainstream groups: David Brower was fired from the Sierra Club and ended up forming Friends of the Earth and two other grassroots organizations; David Foreman quit his job at the Wilderness Society and co-founded Earth First!; Rick Sutherland declared the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund independent of the Sierra Club to litigate more freely in the name of the environment.

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Deep Ecology, American Roots: Part 2

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My Part 1 post a couple days ago focused on George Perkins Marsh’s writings, and how they related to Arne Naess’ deep ecology. I closed with Marsh’s concluding comments in Man and Nature, which I’m including here:

In his final essay, “Nothing Small in Nature,” Marsh cautions that humans are never justified in assuming that their actions have no significant consequences just because they see no effects.  His advice—implicit in that the book ends after this point, with no structured summary or conclusion—is that people must look for, and then react properly (responsibly) to, the deleterious influence they can have on their environment.

But is this deep ecology?  Naess emphasizes the “equal right to live and blossom” of all organisms, allowing that in practice this principle of ecological egalitarianism cannot be fully carried out.  Marsh, when asked by his publisher whether or not man was a “part of nature,” replied that his beliefs could not be further from the idea that “man is a ‘part of nature’ or that his action is controlled by the laws of nature; in fact a leading spirit of the book is to enforce the opposite opinion, and to illustrate the fact that man… is a free moral agent working independently of nature.”   Continue reading →

Deep Ecology, American Roots: Part 1

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Part 1: George Perkins Marsh

In 1973, the Norwegian scholar and philosopher Arne Naess published the article “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary” in Inquiry, an interdisciplinary journal he established to promote discourse in the social sciences and humanities.  This brief article contained the base for what Naess termed the ‘deep ecology’ philosophy, which has since grown into a powerful—albeit fringe—branch of environmentalism with influence around the world.  The radical ideology that Naess sparked has an especially large following in the United States, where several environmental groups have been inspired by the proposed ‘ecosophy,’ or philosophy of ecological equilibrium surpassing shallow goals.

The relative popularity of deep ecology may have a foundation in United States environmental literature, where the writings of George Perkins Marsh and Aldo Leopold, among others, have distinct similarities to Naess’ claims and proposals.

What, exactly, was ‘deep ecology’ when Naess first wrote of it?  In his original seven-point survey, he described it as a belief in ecologically responsible practices that include such varied principles as complexity, diversity, and egalitarianism; a normative priority system—a life-style—that supports an ethical and humble view toward the environment.   Continue reading →

The Heavy Hand’s Awesome Grip

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What can be done to reduce hypoxia?

Although reducing fertilizer use is the most cost effective method of ameliorating hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, the reductions necessary are too difficult and expensive to implement; the massive agribusiness establishment of wheat, soy, and especially corn is not easily confronted. So conservation and restoration of wetlands, or creation of any other form of buffer zone, is one of the better alternatives.

Buffer zones can filter between 50 and 90 percent of nitrogen and phosphorous from runoff; riparian buffers, filter strips, grassed waterways, and contour grass strips are practices eligible for the Conservation Reserve Program that also prevent nutrient runoff. The Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, is Continue reading →

Swampbuster

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My last post introduced the problem of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, and I promised to start trying to answer that question. Today I’ll shed some light on some subsidies and federal policies that could be altered and bolstered in the right ways to stop nutrient-rich runoff from reaching the Mississippi River. I’m going to point out right away that although the most obvious way of preventing hypoxia is by reducing fertilizer use, this is also the most difficult and expensive tactic to implement. My goal is to start laying out elements of a more cost effective, pragmatic plan for ameliorating hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico.

The agricultural subsidies that I discuss here are measures that can be implemented through various policy tools (e.g. direct payments, technical assistance, tax incentives) to reduce costs for producers and attempt to benefit the economy in doing so. One positive form of subsidy, known as a cross-compliance program, discourages creation of farmland from current wetlands or land that is highly erodible. Continue reading →

A Dead Zone

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This picture is of the hypoxic area in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest “dead zone” in the western Atlantic. Since the beginning of this site we have tried to accentuate the wonders of nature, creative and collaborative approaches to conservation, and other fun stuff.  Every now and then a dose of scientific explanation helps put this in perspective, even if it is a downer like hypoxia.

Hypoxia occurs when oxygen concentrations in the water are too low to sustain most life, and is created by a process known as eutrophication. This is the over-enrichment of water by nutrients, which cause dense growth of algae that consumes oxygen as it multiplies and decomposes. The resulting lack of oxygen can cause large die-offs of marine life, seriously threatening ecosystems in the Gulf.

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Lost Ladybugs

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Earlier this week, James posted about a crowd of ladybugs he spotted on a recycling bin at Emory. His account reminded me of a guest lecture in my entomology class earlier this year, when John Losey came to talk to us, in part, about the Lost Ladybug Project.

The Lost Ladybug Project, which is a citizen science similar to the ornithological projects I’ve written about previously, aims to educate participants on the values of biodiversity conservation and the importance of ladybugs as predators in ecosystems. Continue reading →

Using Small Mammal Remains for Environmental Archaeology

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Credit: Bresson Thomas

Archaeological remains of small mammals generally weighing under 1kg, or micromammals, are important as environmental indicators, partly because they tend to specialize in certain habitats and are sensitive to change. Many factors affect their ranges of distribution, including predators, food requirements, competition, fire, shifts in precipitation patterns, and shelter availability. Micromammals such as voles and mice also tend to live in dense populations and have evolved rapidly through high fecundity. Due to these diverse and interrelated factors, the interpretation of micromammal remains—bones and middens, mostly—requires a deep understanding of the rodents’ relationship with its environment. In other words, ecological information is imperative to accurate assessment of archaeological data on micromammals.

But sometimes micromammal remains have answered modern ecological questions. For example, packrat middens in arid North America offer relatively high temporal, spatial, and taxonomic resolution (i.e., small intervals with which to measure time, space, or species range), and contain what is possibly the “richest archive of dated, identified, and well-preserved plant and animal remains in the world” (Pearson & Betancourt 2002, p500). Continue reading →