The categories arestrict divisions by genus, except for groups defined by am-biguous surveyor’s names.
This is really weird to think about, back in the day before Linneus came through and made everyone get on board with one naming system, species like this popped up everywhere!! Such a pain to go back into the herbarium and find some weird species name for something as simple as a red oak...
Without true inde-pendence among sampling units, estimates of var-iance, and hence, the power to detect differences(or effects), are downwardly biased
This is why sampling over multiple seasons or years as well as other isolated or independent ecosystems is so important. You get a good grasp on year to year variation and how they might vary back in forth in some small traits.
This fi nding supports the null hypothe-sis of no relationship between suites of measured edaphic char-acters and sex distributions in D. virginiana .
I think that this is very interesting because on the glance it looks' to differ but the analyses shows other wise. I wonder if this data would have been different much earlier in our ecosystems like pre industrial, and how they would compare to now.
As for the land, oceanic inventories are likelyvery incomplete. For example, there are morethan 500 species of the lovely and medically im-portant genus of marine snail,Conus. Of the 316species ofConusfrom the Indo-Pacific region,Röckelet al.(1995)find that nearly 14% weredescribed in the 20 years before their publication.
Much of the ocean is undiscovered as we can read here, but think of the species we do not know about for the creatures we can't see. Virus and bacteria is so diverse and understanding them may lead to learning about new bio systems.
Figure 10.4
This is a great diagram but something that really concerns me is the fact that deforestation is the highest in some of the areas that are high in diversity. The biodiversity that was lost in the past 200 years is impossible to estimate due to the fact that we don't actually know all the species that are still in these spots. The rainforest is a treasure trove of research if anyone is looking to do field studies on morphological traits!
Even where they exist, the integrity of protectedareas is often threatened by encroachment andillegal extraction in areas that are undergoingwidespread deforestation
The amazon rainforest is one great example of protected land being exploited by the government. They pay people to clear areas of land to develop pasture or farm lands to then make crop for profit to pay the same government and the owners. This money is dirty and the land use is destroying biodiversity in one of the most important forests of all.
Inthe US at least, it must also extend to both publicand private lands.
One of the biggest issues may seem like private lands but with public lands we see the most mismanagement. Public lands comes down to politics and how the state government values the land. Most places will have regulations but no enforcement and this is why the ESA pushes to take control of a land.
. In practice, mostplants and animals have not been added to theUS endangered species list until they were closeto extinction. A study published in 1993 (Wilcoveet al.1993) showed that the median total popula-tion size of a vertebrate at time of listing was 1075individuals; the median number of surviving po-pulations was two. For invertebrate animals, themedian total population size was less than 1000individuals, and the number of surviving popu-lations was three.
Think of it, if we don't have the means to identify the at risk animals we may never be able to conserve an environment properly. The issue with conservation is the cost, we do not generate income from it. If we invest in conserving on species in an environment but don't identify the other at-risk ones around it we may end up driving another species to extinction.
angiosperms show significant differences in floral morphology(positions of the occupied areas in morphospace
They are very diverse and have lots of variance between species... how this may have happened we don't know but the fact of the matter is that they are highly advanced and show lots of ways of being successful.
with 74% of threatened marine tetrapodsrequiring broad scale conservation, and 38% infreshwater, and only 8% on land
This is a large number and really shows how grand of a scope of conservation we can actually do with aquatic wildlife. Blanket protection of a habitat generally costs less and requires less specific planning than with some species who require much more intricate protection.
biosynthetic pathway of noscap-ine inPapaver somniferumor the functional characteriza-tion of genes with roles in terpene biosynthesis inSolanum lycopersicumandLotus japonicushas suggestedthat metabolic gene clusters for the synthesis of special-ized metabolites are common in the genomic organizationof medicinal plants, providing advantages such as co-regu-lation and co-inheritance.
This basically is the proposition they make of how metabolites are actually stemmed from a cluster of genes which can be tracked to other species who share similar traits or gene expressions.
Indeed, for species that need verylarge areas tosurvive—wild dog and lion in Africa—such areas may hold the only hope for savingthese species in the long-term.
This really brings up the question about how could we go about helping without sticking our hands too far into the mess. The reserves on the surface are indeed protecting those within but it may restrict evolution and make them prone to competition that they wouldn't normally have otherwise. This has to be done with great care and planning or else we may cause more harm by restricting their freedom.
Figure 2.
I though this was interesting to see, The dicots really are the most tailored to bees.
Approximately 15% of northeastern native bees were pollen specialists. I cata-logued 6 families, 15 genera, and 61 species of northeastern native specialist-bees and 23 families, 33 genera, and 201 possible species of northeastern native host-plants
So do the other 85% just not specialize in pollination? If so how do they eat and do they form any threat to species who are specialists? I wonder if they really are important roles but how does it get defined as specialist or not?
thereby providing additionalinsights into the role past evolution plays in determiningcontemporary ecological associations
So essentially what they are getting at is that you can see just how species co evolved to be more selective and tailored to one another,
Populations in the glaciated part of the species range stem fromrelatively recent colonization events, probably within the past 6000years, when mixed forests became established in northern NewEngland (Jacobsonet al., 1986). I
It is crazy to think just how young our forests are in regards to human history, 6000 years is really not very long ago relative to the earths age.
How savanna vegetation evolved is unclear.Some authors suggest that falling atmospheric car-bon dioxide (CO2) concentrations may have stimu-lated the development of grasses that nowdominate tropical savannas
This part was very interesting to me, I really enjoy thinking about environmental pressures and this is not one I have ever thought about. C4 plants are wicked resilient and this would make sense on why they may have taken over in savannah lands. I wonder what would have evolved out there had there been more CO2.
A bit less obvious is the realization that ecosys-tems have adjusted to that stable climate also sothey–as well as the benefits society receives inecosystem goods and services (see Chapter 3)–are vulnerable to climate change as well.
We forget just how sensitive plants and animals are, birds live on a tottering line of life and death during winters, any colder well see death, any warmer and they will be awake with higher rates of metabolic processes but not enough food.
ely promoting the spread of this species, and the highmountain ranges extending from the QTP provided corridors forthe spread outward: (1) to the west,S. procumbenss.l. dispersedalong the Himalayas to the West Pamir Mountains (Tajikistan),across the northern Iranian Plateau to the Caucasus, continued tospread westward to the Balkan and Carpathian Mountains, thenalong the Alpine Mountains to the Scandinavian Mountains,finally arriving to lands and islands in the North Atlantic Ocean,and even to eastern North America and (2) to the east, thespecies likely first spread to the mountain ranges north of QTP(e.g., the Qilian Mountains and Kunlun Mountains), and movedfurther along the mountain range to the Tian Shan and AltaiMountains, then extended south and east to Siberia, finallyreaching western North America via the Bering Strait.
I think it is super interesting we can make a map like this from finding fossil record and organizing the DNA relationships to visualize the splitting species that pop up along these paths of spreading. I wonder how many clades haven't been mapped and how this may help us better understand the evolution over time.
Winds in excess of 100 mph have occurred in every month with an absolute maxi- mum of 231 mph, the highest wind velocity yet recorded in the world. The mean monthly ve- locity is 35.9 miph with somewhat lower speeds in siummer (25 to 28 mph)
The plants on top of this mountain must be absolutely JACKED, I feel like any plant not accustomed to this wind speeds would be uprooted in a second. I wonder what adaptations they have in their root system to stay in the ground.
The Brazilian sardine (Sardinella brasiliensis)isaclassic case of an overexploited marinefishery.In the 1970s hey-day of this industry, 200 000tons were captured in southeast Brazil aloneevery year, but landings suddenly plummeted to<20 000 tons by 2001
The affects of over harvesting aren't always immediate and this situation really opened our eyes. The system never looks like its failing until it crashes due to fluctuations in populations being quite normal. Just because you can pull 10 pounds of crap out of the ground every day does not mean that it comes back at that rate from the animal who is going there. We need to understand the populations counts of juveniles and sexually active adults to make sure we are leaving enough to reproduce the next year or the year after depending on maturing rate.
ntroduced species are sufficiently closelyrelated to native species, they may be able tomate and exchange genes with them, and a suffi-cient amount of genetic exchange (introgression)can so change the genetic constitution of the na-tive population that we consider the original spe-cies to have disappeared—a sort of geneticextinction. This process is especially to be fearedwhen the invading species so outnumbers thenative that a native individual is far more likelyto encounter the introduced species than a nativeas a prospective mate.
This is a very important point on the real threat of species invading. The first thought many people have is that competition can be the extinction but I feel like with plants that is not always the issue. Genetic extinction is what is really scary because many plants have species with different DNA that can breed with themselves, which in turn makes hybrids. Think of Neanderthals and how DNA has told us how they may have gone extinct, it doesn't happen all at once rather the DNA gets to watered down by the invading species and we lose the uniqueness of the native species.
he absorptive organs of arborescent lycopsids wererootlets that were a few millimeters to a centimeter in thickness andlacked root hairs entirely (Figs. 2C,3A). Some potential for fungalsymbiosis has recently been demonstrated (Krings et al., 2011), butappears to have been limited to middle cortical tissues lost to airspaceformation early in rootlet ontogeny. As a result, for a rootlet that is6 mm in overall diameter with a 4 mm-wide central air cavity, thesurface area for absorption relative to overall volume would be atmore than a 300-times disadvantage relative to a 10μ-wide root hairand more than a 1000-times disadvantage relative to a 3μ-widemycorrhizal hypha. To be sure, root hairs and mycorrhizal associationsare also less prevalent—although not absent—in modern wetland plants(Romberger et al., 1993; Smith and Read, 1997; Khan, 2004), but theanatomy of the arborescent lycopsids is consistent with this limitationrather than presenting any obvious anatomical solution. Thus, at leastas much as is the case for other stress-tolerant vascular plants living innutrient-poor wetland environments, carbonfixation likely wouldhave been secondary to other, much larger nutrient limitations ongrowth.
So what were seeing is that these archaic plants were really just scratching the surface with absorption through their root system. The refined system we see are roots with root hairs that improve quality of absorption any where from 300-1000 times in comparison to the lycopsids which had mm to cm thick roots with no hairs. Another source for CO2 in the root system could be linked to mushrooms which gets me very excited to see what early ancestors of decomposers were around then.. is there any fossil records of mushrooms? I would imagine spores would be the way to go.
Dysplasia is a more serious condition than hyperplasia. In dysplasia, there is also a buildup of extra cells. But the cells look abnormal and there are changes in how the tissue is organized. In general, the more abnormal the cells and tissue look, the greater the chance that cancer will form.
It is interesting to see the development of chaos within affected cells. I thought it was only healthy and cancerous, I was unaware of the two more stages in between.
n general, though, the primary goal of treatments for metastatic cancer is to control the growth of the cancer or to relieve symptoms caused by it. Metastatic tumors can cause severe damage to how the body functions, and most people who die of cancer die of metastatic disease.
I was not aware that there was a specific name for tumors that spread, I was also unaware taht it could only be treated, not cured.
n fact, at least ten genes each of which comes in several "flavors," contribute to eye color. It is the combination of these gene variants in a person's genome that produces the wonderful range of human eye colors. Other traits are even more complicated; for example, around 80 percent of a person's height is controlled by more than 700 genomic variants, each one having a very small influence.
I think it's crazy how some traits take so many genomic variants while others don't. Our body is a puzzle that is very hard to solve. It also brings me in to think of how long it took for all these traits to start getting bred into our DNA as we didn't start out this complex.
By looking at lots of people, researchers found that there are some individuals have unusual levels of cholesterol in their blood.
with expanding the pool of test subjects, better results and understanding can occur. With a more long and drawn out/ intimate approach it may yield some good specifics but won't capture larger trends.
Genomes are complicated, and while a small number of your traits are mainly controlled by one gene, most traits are influenced by multiple genes
This is a newer study, more recently we have realized that all genes affect all your traits.
Additionally, the passing of genetic variants from one generation to the next helps to explain why many diseases run in families, such as in sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, and Tay-Sachs disease.
I think it is crazy how easily genes can mutate but yet if the change is on the third or second codon it usually has no effect.
scientists continually draw inferences and makegeneralizations, finding patterns as their research proceeds
good prospect idea of how to get an experiment done but not get stuck in a tunnel vision state.
In deductive reasoning, the patternof thinking moves in the opposite direction as compared to inductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning turns your brain into a detective mode that moves you from broad to specific.