despite the diminution of original habitat but not without continuing costs.
Shrinking habitat space must be more and more heavily managed and maintained the smaller it is, as it becomes less and less self-sustaining, and is cut off more and more to become (in some cases) a sort of 'inland island". Consider also the ongoing cost of defending these spaces in public policy.
only a tiny fraction of SSPCercopithecines is kept in appropriately composed ‘‘breeding’’ populations. Innature, most live in groups. In zoos, they are commonly exhibited in pairs where theyrarely breed
Takeaway: just because you have a male and a female of a species does not mean you have a shot in hell of successful propagation. Breeding behavior is socially and environmentally contextual
Multiply by a viable tiger population, perhaps 25according to Karanth, which few geneticists would consider viable (see note), and then byas many as the 500 prey necessary to annually produce a 10% edible surplus for each tigerand, finally, the habitat essential for this herbivore population of 12,500. Thus, apotentially viable tiger population of 250 might require a larder of 125,000 sizableherbivores. No wonder some see zoos, with their access to humanity’s kitchen, as lifeboats.
What to remember from this? Conservation of large predators is very complicated. The actual territory size of the animal is almost irrelevant in comparison to the range requirements of the other species it relies on.
or politics
oof
testing more gradual species’ responses,such as adaptation, requires other approaches
more future study shit
alpine plant performance
2000m elevation plants
Focal species under current climate
We look at 2000m elevation communities, intracommunity competition vs competition with novel 2600m elevation communities transplanted 600m down.
Focal species under warmer climate
We transplant a 2000m elevation community to the 1400m elevation and compare intracommunity competition effects on our focal species, vs the effects of novel ("home team") 1400m elevation community competitors
Survival over 2 years(a, b)
In the shortterm, home games tend to go to the home team when competing with novel community from uphill.
Warmer climate, current competitors
When these alpine plants experience warmer temperatures but the usual competitors, the effect of competition increases. (Lower log response ratio of response of competition.) This is exacerbated when novel competitors are introduced. BUT overall these effects are weak and insignificant because it's a short term study and competition is a long term game
Different letters below the bars for eachspecies indicate significantly different contrasts
So A. alpestris and P. vernalis don't have significant differences in their contrast, but P. atrata does in the case of novel competitors and lower elevation (higher temp), and S. lucida does in all cases
allowed us to compare the effect ofwarming on our focal species’ interactions with current competitorswith the effect of community changes that will arise from competitormigration and local extinction
so. the theory is, species are gonna creep up to higher elevations as climate change wears on. they're kinda already doing that. so what we're looking at is, hey, what happen then
The greater functionalsimilarity of the two higher-elevation communities was caused byshared functional traits, particularly leaf size, leaf mass and plantheight, not shared species
OK so figure 3a is Like That because, despite species differences, communities from 2,000 and 2,600 m elevations are more similar in terms of leaf size, mass, and plant height, than the 1,400 and 2000 m elevation communities, by a lot
Figure 3 | Functional and floristic community composition
Jesus this is dense. So the orange -> yellow -> blue is in order of increasing elevation of source for the communities represented by the dots. Fig 3a is about leaf functional traits, fig 3b is about floral traits. In fig3a the latter two elevations' communities are fairly similar, while in fig3b everyone is fairly distinct?
Extended Data Figure 5
In both years, the locally adapted community always "outdid" transplants, but transplants' above-ground biomass was only slightly larger than or not changed from their biomass in the elevation where they were locally adapted.
we did not find differencesin the incidence of herbivory across the two community types at thelow-elevation site
Herbivory was not a major distinguishing factor. There are two exceptions, BUT the herbivory did not have longlasting effects into the end of the 1st and 2nd years when data was collected on biomass/flowers/etc
Results suggest that soil biotafrom the different elevations did not affect the relative performanceof alpine versus sub-alpine plant competitors
Everyone kinda did better on soil biota from a lower elevation (sub-alpine). for the most part
Extended Data Figure 4 | Effect of soil biota on plant biomass.
This is about that follow-up greenhouse study briefly described at the very end of the methods section.
Statistical analysis of field experiment
skim this because aaaaaa stats
after the plants had already begunto senesce
senesce = baaaaasically die of "old age". expected, temporally controlled degradation. kinda
enced to exclude cattle,
ah, mitigating the impacts of domestic livestock. OK.
A. vulneraria ssp. alpestris, P. atrata, P.vernalis and S. lucida
Kidney vetch (european mountains ssp), black plaintain, ozard witchhazel, and shining willow.
To implement the design in Table 1, the site at 1,400 m received tentransplanted communities from the 2,000 m site and ten communities trans-planted from other locations at the 1,400 m site. Meanwhile the site at 2,000 mreceived ten transplanted communities from the 2,600 m site and ten from otherlocations at the 2,000 m sit
So the 2,600 m elevation site recieved no transplants?
The lower and middle sites are managed as summer pasture, and the upper site isgrazed by native ungulates.
Seems like this would constitute a very significant land use difference. Stereotypically, domestic livestock are much harder on the land.
Fig. 1
The pattern established before (erodium being the tortoise, plantago being the middle, and stylocline being the eager beaver) is very obvious here. It is notable that the mean/avg growth rate is consistently highest in high water, across all three species
A previous field study of two different species of desertwinter annuals at the Desert Laboratory found that competitiveeffects were equal and invariant with habitat, while competitiveresponses varied among species and habitats
Win for Tilman
The experiment continued until most reproductivestructures were mature for all species, but had not dropped seeds
This is a good thing to note. You don't want to lose data on seed production due to taking these measurements after the plants had already begun to drop seeds! They need to be developed, but not so developed that you lose them.
greater than 0 signifies facilitation
Facilitation = cooperation? in this case?
This isn't relevant to the results, clearly, as no measurements in figure 2 meet or exceed 0.
Log response ratios (lnRR) were calculated to providea measure of the strength of interactions ( Hedges et al., 1999 ) between speciesas follows
This relates back to Figure 2. In competition, all lnRR values are negative, so everyone is in competition, although some get dangerously close to the "edge".
Stylocline micropoides has high RGR andlow WUE, Erodium texanum has the lowest RGR of our study species and thehighest WUE, and Plantago insularis has intermediate RGR and WUE
So P. insularis is the monkey in the middle. The aster, S. micropoides, is the eager beaver. And the tiny geranium, E. texanum, is the tortoise. Gotcha.
Erodium texanum (Geraniaceae);Plantago insularis (Plantaginaceae); and Stylocline micropoides (Asteraceae)
E. texanum (little tiny geranium flower), P. insularis (a guy), and S. micropoides (an aster).
Just a bunch of common annual angiosperms in the desert, being guys together
we expected that the high-RGR species wouldhave the strongest competitive effects, particularly in high waterenvironments
If the "key results" on the first page are to be believed, this did not turn out to be the case. Instead it was intermediate RGR species, rather than high RGR species, who had the highest overall competitive effect on all of its neighbors
howdifferences among species in these traits influence the outcomeof competitive interactions in relation to soil moisture.
This is basically "why study"
high specific leaf area, lowleaf nitrogen concentration, and the ability to quickly respondto large precipitation pulses (
Traits associated here with high RGR, low WUE. (High SLA, low leaf N, quick response to water abundance.
low specific leaf area,high leaf nitrogen, and increased efficiency of photosyntheticprocesses related to light harvesting and performance in rela-tively cool conditions (
Traits associated here with high WUE, low RGR
(Low SLA, high leaf N, high photosynthetic efficiency in cool conditions)
For any mechanism that partitions the pollinator andprey communities of a carnivorous plant, a key question iswhat selective pressures shaped that mechanism.
Nutrients from prey are beneficial to individual organisms, but this species has been reported to be self-infertile (Roberts and Oosting 1958), so presumably the benefits of cross-pollination mediated by flying insects has selected for plants with traps that target ground-dwellers and flowers more easily accessible to flying insects.
while in Pinguicula vallisnerii-folia, the capture of thrips and small beetles depleted a lim-ited pollinator community in shaded habitats
This is a concerning aspect of sampling from small/threatened ecosystems.
hirsute bodies
Are you allergic to making sense, just say hairy bodies.
Except for one crab spider, the 10 most abun-dant flower-visiting taxa never occurred in traps.
HUH! Wild
Prey and flower visitor communities overlapped very little(fig. 2)
Fig 2 stuff
Within the pollen-carryingcommunity, the sweat bee Augochlorella gratiosa (Halicti-dae) and the longhorned beetle Typocerus sinuatus (Ceram-bycidae) had the highest relative abundance,
Looks like these are both NC natives but you know how it goes with hyper specific species of insect being classified as native, naturalized, and introduced in North America
Arthropods that carried D. muscipula pollenincluded 64 taxa (61 of which were identified to our targettaxonomic resolution). Hymenoptera (principally bees) andColeoptera were the most abundant orders on flowers andwere the most likely to carry D. muscipula pollen (fig. 1A).
And the award for the most enthusiastic flower visitors goes to....
69% of individual flower visitors carried pollen
AH
The sex number. (Respectfully and professionally.)
suggestingthat continued sampling would detect more flower visitortaxa
Basically: this was a lot of work, but future studies would unveil more diversity in VFT flower visitors than the 98 taxa classified here.
409 specimens (96%) wereidentified to target taxonomic resolution (family for spidersand Orthoptera, species/morphospecies for all other groups),
Explanation for decisions made classifying taxa
To visualize overlap between prey and potential pollina-tors
This is why Figure 2 exists
Torepresent the likely relative importance of the 10 most abun-dant pollen-carrying taxa in this study, we modified meth-ods of Lindsey (1984) and Gibson et al. (2006) to summa-rize aspects of pollinator quantity and quality into a singlepollinator importance (PI) index.
As you can see, in Figure 1(B) and Table 1, the 10 taxon are listed in order from greatest to least importance (in terms of PI value).
One sample count of 343 pollen grainsfrom one Trichiotinus piger beetle was a statistical outlierand was excluded from the analysis.
Pollens georg is a statistical outlier and should not be counted
For the subset of flower visitors that carried D. muscipulapollen, we subjected pollen slides from the 10 most abun-dant taxa to more detailed analysis
Fig. 1(B)
heterospecific pollen
In this case, pollen originating from organisms belonging to different species.
Hereafter, we refer to the pol-len swabbed off the insects as the pollen load
Pollen load definition
Summarizing relative abundance, load size, and load com-position into a single index suggested that A. gratiosa wasthe most important pollinator of D. muscipula during thestudy (PI p 3:68), with the beetles T. apivorus (PI p 0:82)and T. sinuatus (PI p 0:72) in distant second and thirdplaces because of their lower abundance, more heavily mixedloads, and smaller mean load size.
Proposed answer to question #2 highlighted at the end of the introduction.
we asked thefollowing: (1) Which invertebrate species visit D. muscipulaflowers? (2) Which of these are the most important poten-tial pollinators? (3) To what extent do flowers and traps in-teract with the same suite of invertebrates?
Central questions of this study.
(A)
In order of appearance in figure: ants bees and wasps, beetles, flies, spiders.
From this analysis, we excluded the orders Odonataand Neuroptera because of low sample sizes (two specimensand one specimen, respectively)
I wouldn't expect Odonata insects to be prey items (too big), and certainly not pollinators (too predatory). Neuroptera are weirder.. they're like, lacewings and stuff. I think they can be pollinators. And they can be smaller than a lot of damselflies and dragonflies tend to be. Maybe they're just not super into venus flytraps, because lacewings at least are fairly abundant here
87% of individualflower visitors (but only 20% of prey) were capable of flight
see prev. annotation
We speculate that spatialseparation has some role in partitioning flower visitors andprey: flowers are elevated 15–35 cm above traps, and mostflower visitors arrived through flight, while most prey walkedinto traps from the ground.
This generally lines up with my experience of venus flytraps, but I wouldn't have expected such a significant difference between the modes of transport for prey items!
Left, Dionaea muscipula in bloom, illustrating the spatial separation between traps and flowers. Photo credit: Clyde E. Sorenson. Right, twoof the most important potential pollinators of D. muscipula: Augochlorella gratiosa (top) and Typocerus sinuatus (bottom). Photo credits: ElsaYoungsteadt (top), Clyde E. Sorenson (bottom).
Good "placeholder" image for discussion on Thursday.
The low host-specificity of many large herbivores 56may explain why they do not appear to contribute to densitydependence in our experiment. Alternatively, the low number ofreplicate exclosure plots (three pairs of fenced and unfencedplots) may limit our ability to detect impacts of large herbivoreson plant communities. Further, better replicated experiments thatexclude large herbivores may be necessary to determine their rolein shaping plant communities in these ecosystems. Althoughfurther work is necessary to determine the identity and host-specificity of insect herbivores and plant-associated fungi, per-haps using molecular techniques (e.g. refs. 57,58 ), on the basis ofthe evidence presented here, insects and plant-associated fungiappear to play a greater role in mediating conspecific densitydependence than large herbivores
Why even include large herbivores in the study if what you are focused on is specialized plant enemies? We already know that large herbivores tend to generalize and target a pretty predictable range of plant-chow.
Fig. 4
(A) Between the two treatments, garlic mustard does not significantly differ in population increase at the start of the study, but the average over the course of the study demonstrates significant population decline in the deer-excluded plots. (B) Adult plant density of garlic mustard significantly and consistently declines in deer-excluded plots over the study period, accounting for the biennial life cycle of the species by sampling this data every 2 years.
Fig. 3
I genuinely can't think of a way to improve on the way the existing caption explains the figure. Yes, queen. That is already accessible.
Fig. 2
i dont like this guy at all
Fig. 1
(A) Average annual % of the three native plant species browsed in the deer access treatments, shown with standard error bars. (B) The % of individuals of these 3 species between the two treatments which survived to reproduce (shown in white) did not significantly differ at the start, but showed significant positive impact of deer exclusion on native reproduction by the end.