Behold the Japanese white-eye, considered an invasive species in its new home in Hawaii. Yet the bird does something that conservation biologists might considered useful for sustaining ecosystems: it spreads the seeds of native Hawaiian plants. Get rid of the Japanese white-eye, and you get rid of its service.
Yale Environment 360, Feburary 24, 2011
The tale of the honeybee is a sadly familiar one: a once-thriving species is on the ropes. After brutal bouts with mites and fungi, honeybees are now facing their most dangerous threat yet: a mysterious disease called colony collapse disorder. In the winter of 2010 alone, U.S. beekeepers reported losing 34 percent of their hives to CCD, which may be caused by viruses, pesticides, or some diabolical combination of factors. Researchers are working hard to figure out exactly why the honeybees are dying and how to save them because of their ecological importance. Honeybees pollinate many of the country’s fruit and vegetable crops, and they also carry out the same service for many species of wild plants. In Brazil, honeybees help keep isolated rain forest fragments from dying out by moving their pollen from tree to tree.
Continue reading “Alien Species Reconsidered: Finding a Value in Non-Natives”
Yale Environment 360, February 21, 2011
For the last two decades, strange things have been happening to frogs. Some frog populations have high rates of limb deformities, while others have high incidences of what is known as “intersex” — traits associated with both males and females, such as male frogs whose testes contain eggs. Continue reading “Unraveling the Mystery Of The Bizarre Deformed Frogs”
I sat down recently with ecologist David Skelly to talk about the strange things happening to frogs these days. A few years back, scientists found evidence suggesting that pesticides were causing sexual deformities in frogs that lived near farms. Now Skelly is finding that the situation is actually a lot more dire for frogs in suburbs and cities. Over at Yale Environment 360, you can read our Q & A about what sort of chemical cocktail may be making eggs grow in the testes of male frogs–and what it may all mean for us fellow vertebrates.
[Image: Telemudcat at Flickr, Creative Commons License]
Originally published February 21, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Here’s the video of the lecture I gave last week at Stony Brook University, which was the basis of my recent blog post. I’ve uploaded the slides as a pdf here. (You can read the slides online or download them by going to the File drop-down menu.) I’m not sure what the ideal combination of video and slides would be…if anyone has any suggestions, let me know.
[Update–the video url got switched around. This should work now…]
Originally published February 17, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.