Marshes are dying off, and scientists are trying to figure out what’s killing them.In my new “Matter” column for the New York Times, I look at a new experiment that points to a surprising culprit.Check it out.
The New York Times, May 15, 2014
Mark D. Bertness, an ecologist at Brown University, began studying the salt marshes of New England in 1981. Twenty-six years later, in 2007, he started to watch them die. In one marsh after another, lush stretches of cordgrass disappeared, replaced by bare ground. The die-offs were wiping out salt marshes in just a few years.
“It’s unbelievable how quickly it’s moved in,” Dr. Bertness said.
Scientists have been witnessing a similar transformation in a number of plant species along coastlines in the United States and in other countries. And in many cases, it’s been hard to pinpoint the cause of the die-off, with fungal outbreaks, pollution, choking sediments stirred up by boats, and rising sea levels proposed as killers.
Continue reading “When Predators Vanish, So Does the Ecosystem”
My family and I were trapped once in our house by a terrorizing turtle. Last week, I told the saga of that day–and of my lifelong obsession with strange animals–at Story Collider, an evening of live story-telling about science. The recording is now online, and so you can listen to it here. May you have many peaceful encounters with turtles in your life.
There is a scientific picture waiting to be drawn. Someone has to do artistic justice to the evolutionary tree of life.
Back in 1837, Charles Darwin sketched out a tree of life in a notebook as a way to visualize his idea that different species share a common ancestor. In the generations since he published The Origin of Species, biologists have tried to draw trees that distill the actual relationships between living things.
Genomes are like books of life. But until recently, their covers were locked. Finally we can now open the books and page through them. But we only have a modest understanding of what we’re actually seeing. We are still not sure how much our genome encodes information that is important to our survival, and how much is just garbled padding.
Today is a good day to dip into the debate over what the genome is made of, thanks to the publication of an interesting commentary from Alex Palazzo and Ryan Gregory in PLOS Genetics. It’s called “The Case for Junk DNA.”