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my thoughts on science

A new way to view alien species

1/22/2016

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Picture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_musselInvasive species are plants and animals that we are frequently told are a huge threat to nature. News reports and even lectures at university speak of the detrimental impact of alien species on native ecosystems. These foreign harbingers of doom come into our countries, displace our native species and reek untold environmental and economic damage.However, an interesting book Where Do Camels Belong? by Ken Thompson challenges these traditional ways of thinking.

The first question that the book asks is what is native? When should an animal or plant be considered native to an area. Thompson eloquently demonstrates this in two ways, first by using the books title character the camel. Camels first evolved in North America, but have since spread to South America, Asia and North Africa. So are they American, Asian or African? To complicate this further, the only place in the world where they are truly wild is Australia! So the concept of native is not an easy to define one. Another issue, especially prescient to the UK, is that animals/plants may have existed in an area the past but either due to lack of colonising after the most recent ice age or human induced extinction are no longer present in the wild. Are these species native? If so, how far back do you go before they are no longer native? 

​The book goes on to expound on niche theory and the relative lack of evidence to support it, with its impacts on ecology and conservation. The idea that all habitats are static and so 'full' is also taken to task, with the author explaining that what we currently think of as an ecosystem is just a snapshot in an ever changing combination of animals and plants. Far from reducing biodiversity, the addition of alien species typically increases local biodiversity. It's just that many of these species tend to be obvious, gaudy, and have the misfortune of doing very well in habitats disturbed by humans and so come quickly to our attention. Thompson goes to great pains to stress how well suited many of these species are to living with man and the environments that we create. In his discussion of Tamarisk he goes into detail about how well adapted this plant is to environments that we have denuded but that it rather than we get the blame. This kind of thinking will rarely solve a problem.

The impact of human opinion on what we think of invasive and bad, and thus in need of removal is brilliantly summed up in the tail of the Guadeloupe raccoon. This animal was once thought to be an endemic native, a separate species from those found in North and South America. So beloved was this animal that it was the emblem species for the Parc National de Guadeloupe. But after a study showed that they were just regular raccoons it went from endanger endemic to an invasive species and a control programme was set up! Another interesting one to think about is Zebra mussels, the scourge of the Great Lakes. In addition to clogging up pipes, these Russian immigrants also: clean the water to make it clearer, increase the amount of benthic  invertebrates, increase the amount of aquatic plants in the lakes and also are a really big source of food for many predators including migrating birds. So are they really that bad?

At no point does the book say that all Alien species are good and that no environmental problems are caused by them. In fact, one chapter actually concludes by saying that the Brown tree snake has had an awful impact on Guam. What the book does is point out that many of these species are thriving because of human impacts on local ecosystems. The species that we are spreading around the world and are successfully colonising new areas are ones that do well close to humans. Many of them only really occur in disturbed land, and are thus a symptom of environmental degradation not its cause. One part of the book even tells about how succession, which can take tens years, leads to old forest regrowing in areas previously riddled with invasives and then of the eventual exclusion of these species.

The final chapter, Five Myths About Invasions, is a great summation with sections on #1 Alien invasions reduce biodiversity and ecosystem function #2 Alien species cost us a fortune #3 Aliens are always to blame #4 Aliens are out to get us and finally #5 Aliens are bad, natives good.

Thompson is great writer and the book is really engaging and informative, helping to bust myths and dispel preconceptions. I thoroughly recommend it!

https://profilebooks.com/where-do-camels-belong.html 
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The science behind the documentary

1/16/2016

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So if you’ve read some of my previous blogs or follow me on Twitter (@alex_babbler), then you’ll probably be aware that some of my PhD research was recently shown as part of the BBC 2 documentary series World’s Sneakiest Animals. So I’m sorry if it feels like over kill to write about this again, but hey it’s not every day that your work appears on TV, let alone a BBC doco! Plus it will probably be the last time, so I’ll milk it for all I can!
 
But this post isn’t really just about my work; it’s about the other cool studies shown on camera. The thing that surprised me the most about the most about this series was the amount of the research that I had either seen presented at conferences or had been done by scientists that I personally know or that I had helped out with. This just goes to show how small a world the behavioural ecology field is, but also how many exciting young scientist there are currently picking apart the natural world (as all of the below research is by young academics). So below I will put a brief description of what is shown on the TV show, a comment on how I knew about it and then a link to the research (as it’s always far more exciting than the 5-10 mins of footage you’ll see on screen).
 
Firstly, the mimetic orchid mantis, whose mimicry is good that they actually attract more pollinators to them than the flowers they are mimicking. This work was done by James O’Hanlon, and I first saw it presented at ISBE in Lund 2012. He’s a great speaker, as shown by this YouTube video: LINK. Because the mantis is larger than and appears brighter than (to the insects they are predating on) than the flowers they are mimicking then they are a supernormal stimulus. It’s just a really cool bit of nature and very elegant research.
 
It appears at 4:09 in Episode 2 (The Hunger Game).
 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673858?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673858?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
 
Secondly, drongos stealing food from unsuspecting host species. This bit of storytelling was really a combination of a couple of papers. The first is a paper that I helped with and whose first author is Bruce Baigrie, investigated how drongos use sentinel calls to manipulate sociable weavers in a fascinating mutualism. The second paper and third papers, by Tom Flower, delves into the mimetic alarm calls that drongos use to steal food from their host species. Every time the drongos have appeared on TV it has always been with them shown as stealing food from meerkats, but the species that they hammer the most are the sociable weavers and then possibly the pied babblers. In fact, much of the early work was done looking at the dynamics of how drongos and babblers interacted.
 
It appears at 49:12 in Episode 2 (The Hunger Game).
 
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1791/20141232.short
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/278/1711/1548.short
https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=W6TB-BUAAAAJ&citation_for_view=W6TB-BUAAAAJ:ufrVoPGSRksC
 
Thirdly, the show describes how honeyguides parasitise other species to have them raise their own offspring. This is based on the work of Claire Spottiswoode, an amazing field researcher who splits her time between Cambridge, Cape Town and Zambia. Honeyguides lay their eggs in the underground nests of bee-eaters and when their young hatch they hatch early and then grow a sharp hook at the end of their beak that they use to kill their unrelated brood mates - very deadly. By doing this they can monopolise the provisioning of their host offspring. This section of the show also goes into the natural history of cuckoos, and who is a better expert on the subject than Nick Davies. So for the cuckoos I will recommend a great book that goes through not only Prof Davies’ work but that of his forbears and contemporaries.
 
It appears at 43:47 in Episode 3 (Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks).
 
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2011/09/06/rsbl.2011.0739.short
http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/4/792.short
Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature – Nick Davies
 
Lastly, as it was actually the final part of the series, my work on fledgling provisioning in pied babblers. My work shows that young fledgling babblers, who are amazingly incompetent fliers who are very slow to respond to alarm calls can get fed up to 9 times as much food by moving to areas of danger when predators have been spotted in the local environment. Adults feed the chicks to shut them up and move them to safety.
 
It appears at 51:46 in Episode 3 (Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks).
 
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1760/20130558.short
 
Other notable studies in the final episode of the series are on Kangeroos (that I think an ex-Cambridg classmate Emily Best) and bowerbirds (which is similar to the work of an ex-colleague Jess Isden), and fiddler crabs that I have blogged about before. It’s a very small world.
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    I am a behavioural ecologist, my main interests revolve around familial conflicts and their resolutions. However, my scientific interests are fairly broad.

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